Can India Become “The” Education Capital of the Post COVID19 Online Education World?
The national Lockdown in India and indeed near-total lockdowns in most parts of the world due the Corona virus risk has pushed online education from a good to have supplement to critical mainstream education / learning delivery role.
As schools, colleges, universities the world over shut down physical classes, asked students to stay home and moved to using Video conferencing, recorded lectures and audio recordings, educational institutions that had well-structured digital learning management systems have been able to cope better by offering 360-degree learning / engagements while those that had negligible cloud / digital workflows for classroom delivery, testing and engagement have felt disconnected from their students and their progress.
India has two strategic advantages that makes it ideally suited to become a leader in post COVID online education world — one of the largest student population and huge appetite from parents to see their wards get the best education possible; AND one of the largest and most mature digital education / edtech startup ecosystems in the world.
This paper looks at this unique once in a thousand years opening and explores both the opportunity and challenges that India must overcome to emerge as the leading online education provider of the new post COVID world.
Education in India
India has been known thru history for being a leader in knowledge traditions and learning. The world’s first university, Nalanda was started in India. The tradition of oral learning using Guru-Shishya (teacher-student) has been passed down to us for thousands of years.
Ancient India has given us Sanskrit texts which are yet to be deciphered. From the knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, medicine to philosophy, religion we have had a rich tradition and respect for learning and for teaching / teachers.
As India embraced modern learning / teaching methods first under British rule and then post-independence as the founding fathers desired to make the new nation an educated modern nation occupying its rightful place in the world pantheon, we saw rapid growth of primary and secondary school education created by the govt, colleges and institutes of higher learning and research. The IITs, IIMs, IISc, BARC etc are glowing examples of the vision and love for education in the early leadership.
Private Schools
Somewhere in the 1970s, the govt run education system failed to grow and deliver the excellence and results expected. With narrow political considerations dominating national politics, teachers agitating for benefits and crumbling budget spends, state run education across the nation, particularly the northern half went south and has been falling into decay virtually unstopped. The state of govt run schools in UP, Bihar, MP, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, even Delhi have been pathetic.
The void was filled by private education. Since 1970s, educators and visionaries saw an opportunity to create “public schools” as places for excellent education to meet the growing aspirations of the middle class. Modelled on the “boarding schools” and “branded schools” setup during British rule for princes and rich families, the public schools in last 50 years have become the mainstay of education in the nation. Even the poorest daily wage earner aspires to send their kids to a local “public school” for education.
Private Coaching Classes
Low capacity building in the 1970s in higher education meant that number of colleges / universities of excellence were soon in short supply and the competition to enter these colleges became extremely competitive. Enter private coaching classes, which started preparing students to “qualify” in the entrance exams conducted by the elite colleges and universities. JEE, the entrance exam for IITs; AIIMS exam, the common medical entrance exam, the exam for the top law colleges all became targets as dedicated campuses and indeed a full city dedicated to coaching (Kota) sprung up from 1990s.
Private Colleges
The next phase of privatisation of education has been the colleges / universities. Starting out as technical colleges started by the politicians and influential people with the purported objective to create education capacity, many quickly became money making machines in the guide of entrance fees / seat selling.
Private Universities
A few individuals, entrepreneurs and visionaries saw the potential to build private universities focusing on global quality education across all subjects (not just narrow technical, ie engg. / medical education) and the first wave of private universities led by Amity, Ashoka were created. There was talk of India becoming the “higher education hub” of the world, but somehow govt policy wasn’t aligned to this potential and the desired acceleration did not happen.
Online Education & EdTech Startups
Education segment has been one of the very early adopters / users of computing. It started from R&D organisations using advanced computing for modelling, compute tasks, visualisations and soon moved to programming, IT and development-oriented tasks.
Digital educational content as a supplement to school curriculum has been attempted since early 1980s (NCERT projects). As private coaching, teaching, exam preparation mushroomed, digital content to support these initiatives and delivered online has been growing. The birth of internet and startup ecosystem has led to thousands of startups targeting online education as a supplement — courses, videos, quizzes, tests, Q&A, 1:1 teaching, online exams, school management, university/college management, LMS, notes, un-bundled content marketplaces, alumni management, fun-raise platforms — all forms of educational workflows and processes have been attempted to varying degree of success. Of late, Byju’s has become one of the most valued educational startups with its massive funding and scale offering children supplementary content for their concepts and learning.
Impact of COVID-19 induced Lockdowns
On March 24, as the Indian Govt announced a stiff national lockdown for 21 days, the world changed for Education. Schools and colleges had been shut already for 2 weeks but the lockdown and the uncertainty of unlocking created a huge pressure on children, parents, teachers, administrators, govts, edtech startups and just about everyone connected to education — everything had to go online, and quickly.
Schools rushed to Zoom and other video conferencing tools — to offer online lectures to its students. Since all students did not have good internet access, devices these lectures were recorded and uploaded to YouTube channels for asynchronous access. WhatsApp became the channel for Q&A; Google drive became the assignment submission platform and educators, administrators across the nation went into innovative ideas to continue education for their students — one enterprising teacher in Jharkhand strung loudspeakers across his village for 2 hour lectures via loudspeaker; Delhi govt used a private app to offer online lectures to 45000+ students and private youtube channels to another 1.2 lakh students across the capital. Teachers collaborated across schools like never before.
Colleges and universities also moved to online classes, online quizzes and online testing. All processes from onboarding, class roster management to class delivery and testing / reporting were gone online at the speed of many knots.
Coaching classes, which had been concentrated in some areas saw migration of students back to their homes but demand for online classes / offline lectures soar. Many were caught napping as they had not anticipated the need to go online — after all “more & quality face time” with the teacher was the model on which this industry was built.
Edtech startups saw rapid increases in adoption, usage and depth of usage as children, under-grads and even continuous learners took to online learning tools like never before. With not much to do outside their homes, entertainment (movies, games) and education (information, academics and professional skilling) became the top attention targets.
The age of online education as a primary medium of delivery had arrived. A young kid from a rural location told a leading reporter — if you don’t have a tablet, you cant be educated now.
Insights from 100 days on Online Education As Primary Medium
The insights and experiences shared by teachers, students, parents, administrators for the 100 odd days of lockdowns has been eye-opening.
Almost no one has complained about online education not working out. If we leave aspart the social interactions during learning and focus on the academic work, online (both synchronous and asynchronous) models have demonstrated that education can indeed be moved significantly to an online delivery medium.
Teachers have shared delight in being able to create new, interactive content, use multi-media in their lectures. Groups of teachers have collaborated to clear doubts and issues from very large set of online participants improving their collaborative skills. Students are more attentive and ask better questions as the whole group can see them and the responses. Administrators and Principals can track attendance, lecture viewership, quiz and assignment data and control the schedule better. The Delhi Edu minister joked that if he had known about COVID earlier, he would not have spent so much money on infrastructure upgrade but online platforms.
Globally, educators have declared “Online” as the future of education. Large school networks and premiere colleges have declared online only semesters. Some colleges have started new online courses, moving into territories where they were not present till before COVID time.
The World of Education has Changed. Perhaps Forever.
Opportunities For India As An Education Hub For The World
As the world recalibrates post COVID and evolves “hybrid” models for nearly all pre-COVID workflows — low contact, no contact economy; small human gatherings; minimal close space structures; social distancing, continuous testing (temperature) regimes, there are large disruptive opportunities building up the global education space.
100%, Pure Virtual Online Schools and Colleges / Universities
IIT Chennai has just announced India’s first online BSc degree course in data science. Students will get a regular degree rather than certificate or diploma. The experiment will be closely watched.
The experiment by Delhi Govt is showing us that its possible to put together the best teachers in any subject and run classes for lakhs of students. What prevents Delhi Govt from becoming the de-facto choice of learning for students across the country? If live classes, offline catch-up, doubt resolution, quiz, testing, home-work, submission, assessment, testing all move to digital platforms, can we split schooling into the academic (online models) and the social interaction part (hybrid models)?
Over the past 10–15 yers, Kota has become the hub for JEE training / coaching and draws students from all over India. Many of the top teachers are from Bihar. The success of Super30 in helping students crack the JEE exam is well known. If Super30 was to go online, could it serve 300k students from all over the world? Could Bihar emerge as the main centre of teaching talent in an online world?
Global Opportunities
One of the side-effects of a pandemic is that the whole world is impacted by the disease at the same time and experiences similar shifts in lifestyle together. The national lockdowns across the world have created exactly similar pressures, adaptations and experiments in education across the world as seen in India.
Since Online world is truly border-less is there a new opportunity to build world class, world scale, for the global audience online virtual educational institutions out of India? Can India with its abundance of tech talent, English speaking educators, large student population, well developed higher education structure create the top 5 online universities of the “new world”?
When the private universities were first setup, one friend, a leading academic and thinker had remarked that in 10 years India could become the higher education campus to the world, offering a cheaper but as rich alternative to US-based higher education options available at that time. Somehow, the excitement of that phase petered out due to political interference, policy confusion, slowness of infra development, national security issues etc etc..
Govt / Policy Interventions Support Needed
Will our government now move fast to recognise the opportunity to create 100% virtual online schools and colleges/ universities? Will our testing / certification evolve to consider these new institutions? Will our entrepreneurs grab the opportunity and setup large global scale online institutions that will become world famous names in 10–20 years? Will investors come forward to provide the risk capital to create the next-generation education models for the world, out of India?
I would love to see a task force comprised of top educators, policy makers, investors, edtech founders get together to work out the policy framework, the roadmap and publish a deep white-paper that helps entrepreneurs at all levels take advantage of the emergent opportunities.
It is said that the balance of power in the world shifts every 200 years. Is it the time for India to shine and take its place in the educational pantheon? The jury is out on this.
