True is the old adage that education and health care are two businesses that do not go out of fashion. India has certainly become a sought after destination for medical tourism, even while health care accessibility is still a challenge for the common man if India. Education – the industry we are focusing on – is also evolving at a rapid rate both in terms of government sponsored initiatives such as connecting institutes across the nation on high speed Internet links and in terms of the private sector and commercial education ventures.

Over the last couple of years, we have been closely involved with implementing the technology platform for one of the largest education providers in the private sector in India. This platform initially catered to their distance education offerings and is now being adopted to a variety of classroom oriented and campus based programs.  It has been an interesting journey so far with us having to solve a few technology problems and many more pedagogic problems of how to use technology to make learning more effective.

tech in education - tag cloud

The image above is a tag-cloud representation of technology usage within education institutes in India. Notice that the prominent technologies are infrastructural in nature – but more on this later.

I  recently chaired a session on technology making a paradigm shift in education institutes at the EDGE 2009 conference in Delhi between the 9th and 11th of February 2009. I quite enjoyed this session, it gave us an opportunity to discuss the impact technology was making on institutes – a welcome change from talking about the different pieces of technology and getting into the gory guts of learning management systems. This post is a distillation of my talk and the rather lengthy and involved Q&A session with the audience that followed.

Even until a few years ago, technology was fairly alien to education institutes in India. There were a progressive few who used technologies such as VSAT based video classrooms and even ran courses online. However even for these few institutes, technology was still an IT environment or more appropriately an IT “problem” and not something embraced by teachers. Then came the projector and presentation software such as PowerPoint, the computer started to work for the teacher and whiteboard and chalk was soon accompanied by slideware and projector. The use of presentations has grown to an extent where one of the senior professors we work with bemoans a phenomenon he calls “Death by PowerPoint”.

As social collaboration using the Internet and messaging using the cellphone has grown to become part of the very fabric of existence of the young people of today, teachers have for sometime found themselves in an unenviable position where the tools students use as part of their daily life were about as different from the whiteboard and chalk metaphor as anything could get. In essence the student lived in a digital world and the teaching was largely analog. This has been seen, felt and there is a large scale desire to change.

Enter technology into education.

The last few years however has seen a dramatic change in the adoption of technology. There are several schools today where the use of technology is an integral part of the classroom. Classrooms with smart boards, monitors connected to the Internet, use of multi-media in class and using the internet to research and submit homework is increasingly de-rigeur for even young kids. Higher education institutes have been a little slower in adoption, yet there are many online courses, several traditional campus based institutions such as the IITs have expanded their classrooms beyond the traditional four walls using the Internet and satellite networks as media – and our friend the professor runs a highly appreciated management class where his students use Google Apps to collaborate and submit assignments.

IT still plays a huge role in the roll out of education technology with a lot of investment going into systems to improve the operations of the institute, manage record keeping and improve efficiency. The pieces under “student services” and “institutional services” in the diagram below illustrate the various areas of technology usage. The Cisco’s and Oracle’s of the world as well as numerous other companies building ERP solutions for campuses are all actively involved in this space.

However, to me, it is the third piece that is making the true paradigm shift in education and in the very nature of education providers today. This piece is about using technology for learning – the evolution of poweful pedagogic models in which ICT is part of the fabric and not an option to be tagged on.
Teaching is now becoming digital. Let me explain what I mean by this seemingly incongruous statement. When a teacher moved from using transparencies and an OHP to a laptop, presentations and a projector, teaching did not become digital. The material was merely digitized – converted from a “paper” form to an electronic form. However as collaborative tools, repositories and work spaces become part of the teacher’s toolbox, as classrooms get recorded and then edited into material that is tagged and indexed and stored we begin to enter a digital world. Now  teachers and students have access to material that represents teaching material, presentations,  and student/teacher interactions; material that can be reused and re-purposed and material that can be retrieved using a variety of indexes.

We are at the early stages of such environments yet – the tools are not really in place and much of the ideas are still evolving, but even at this early stage as institutes adopt virtual learning environments, record their lectures, use tools like discussion groups and wikis to solve problems some remarkable changes are happening.

Firstly, even traditional education institutes have started to offer a variety of “products” today and more importantly are no longer shy about referring to their offerings as “products” (even as debates about the for-profit versus not-for-profit aspect of providing education continue).With product thinking in place, institutes are going beyond the traditional structures of programs to create a variety of offerings. Examples of such offerings include short term courses, exam preparation and tutoring and tailor made programs for corporate houses (IIMB conducts a retail certification program for TESCO HSC in India, Manipal Education runs a 9 month program for ICICI Bank). Technology plays a key part in helping record courses, in creating small modules that can be then stitched together to create newer offerings and in providing “virtual learning environments” where these programs can be delivered to audiences irrespective of their physical location.

Second is the realization – fundamental to the whole notion of SOA – that I do not need to own every part of the service I provide. In an earlier time, an institute would gamely struggle to offer a specialized course and would bend backwards to find the appropriate faculty rather than acknowledge that another institute could possibly deliver the same course better. Today, collaboration models are emerging where institutes are becoming centers of excellence in specific disciplines and courses offered by them are being used by other institutes who do not have the same level of in-house expertise. IIT Mumbai is a good example of such a COE with their CDEEP program sharing courses such as Computational Biology and students in institutes such as Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur connecting to these courses using Edusat terminals. In essence they are participating in a class conducted for students at the IIT Mumbai campus even though they are at a very different institute. The recent announcement to link institutes using a high speed network will no doubt enable this even further.

Third is the emergence of flexible program structures in which a student creates almost individualized program plans that combine courses in fields as diverse as computer science and fine arts (maybe they are not so divergent after all). Flexibility within campuses is now being extended to flexibility across campuses within an institute and even flexibility across institutes. Twinning programs have existed for a while, but some of the newer generation programs by one of the foremost technology institutes in the country combines engineering and humanities and requires students to take a good percentage of their courses from other institutes across the country. So a student may not enroll for a three year program at an institute but may instead enroll for a subject for a semester and thn move on. Integrated credit banks are of course key to this phenomenon

Last but possibly most important is the change technology is having on the teacher of today. Far from being techno-phobic a new generation of teachers (and many of them I know are on the better side of 50 – older that is) is emerging who use technology as effortlessly as their students. And these teachers are demanding a new kind of technology enabled learning paradigm – one that will work for them and not the other way round. In essence an environment similar to the open collaborative environments characterized by blogs, wikis and successful systems that work for groups of users. They do not want a straitjacketed process that dictates the pedagogic model they must follow but instead demand an environment where technology is a tool that they use as they feel appropriate.

May their tribe prosper!!