Indian Higher Education at the Cross roads of Technology Enabled Education | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

This is probably for the first time in the history of education, that all the institutions, almost all over the world, were closed down for around 6 months i.e. March to Aug 2020, due to Covid-19 pandemic. Online education was put to acid test in all higher education institutions during the locked down period. Unpreparedness and nonavailability of contingency plan in case of conventional system collapsed became biggest hurdle when switch over to online mode was done. In this crucial Covid period it was realized that there is need to do a lot, to restructure the current higher education system by introducing greater share of online education and skill development in the curriculum. It was also realized that online education is a different cup of tea and not simply converting notes in to pdf or uploading videos or making a slide show or replicating face to face format in to online system. A great deal of learning science and digital pedagogy in needed. Unfortunately, earlier, even for conventional system in initial stages no formal training of teachers was available, and it matured with time only, but now online education is coming to stay with bigger share, is a new system, so the need is stronger for formal training of faculty on online pedagogy, at national and regional level, by establishing academies/training institutes. The New Education Policy (NEP 20) has overlooked this critical need and left to normal FDP methodology which has not proved so successful in the past. The other weak areas are standardization of format, process and technology, time and resource management to overcome cost enhancement due to new norms of social distancing and expensive online systems and virtual labs. The most critical area needing attention in online system is also quality of online examination and assessment. This paper examines various aspects of higher education in pre Covid and post Covid period in India and provides an overview of what needs to be done.