Gaurav Singh Chauhan
Manager (Managing Director’s Office),
Mahendra Educational Pvt Ltd

India, with its plurality and paradoxes, never ceases to fascinate. The growth of the Indian economy in the recent past and the compulsion to sustain such a growth, is now forcing the Indian government to accelerate the process of developing all the branches of Indian education system.

The present day education system has deviated from the traditional system that was prevalent in India. Many career alternatives, which were not formerly regarded as popular options, are now being pursued by students. Upcoming options like e-learning and distance education programmes are serving wonderfully by enabling the less advantaged segment of the society to access quality education.

The recent sling is that knowledge even at the elementary level is not acquired with the intention of extracting jobs, but to build a satisfying career. Lot of efforts are being put to make education easier and enjoyable. But one challenge still remains: We have not been able to cover the entire population under ambit of the literacy.

More than the 70 percent of the recruitment companies use aptitude test to evaluate candidates during the recruitment process, so it is advisable that Aptitude Education should be made compulsory at the school level. It is Aptitude Education that prepares students for the actual competition that they have to face right after the completion of their intermediate examination.

The private education sector suffers from drawbacks like quality, fee structure, governance model, affordability and so on. The private sector players in education space have to make many new efforts to rid our education system of the drawbacks.

Seema Parihar
Joint Director,
Developing Countries Research Centre,
University of Delhi

Higher education doesn’t simply mean generating employment; it is much more than that. It is about inspiring people with a new vision; it is about educating people to develop new skills; it is about enabling people to support themselves and take the mission forward.

Partnerships are not only about profit making. It is about building confidence in the education system. It is about enhancement of education. And this is the right time to achieve this target. This is the time when we are talking of advancements in the system. Administrators should have strong responsibility. They should be the ones to showcase data and that can be possible only by speeding up the process by which education is imparted.

People enter the education system as they consider it to be a place where they can think freely. They should be given that freedom to think.

Vivek Agarwal
CEO,
Liqvid

In the education sector, many companies have sold ICT solutions to various schools. Technology is seen as a hardware and software but what that software or hardware does to the learner, is completely missing. In e-Learning industry, we have these three balls metric. We call it: Content, Technology and Services. Services go toward making technology and content can work together to make learning effective and that is our ultimate objective.

The How do we make learners learn better? This is a big challenge for the private sector. We have a number of teachers but the quality of teachers is a problem. This problem can be addressed through technology. We need to innovate and figure out what works by broadening the definition of ICT. The missing pieces in the puzzle of ICT indicate that we do not focus enough on the faculty.

If we do not empower the faculty, then we cannot reach out to the students. We do not have infrastructure to reach the students directly yet. Even in U.S., much of the training and learning happens inside the classroom. Yet all the products and systems are designed for self study. The big challenge for us is to figure out how to make technology which helps the learner learn better.

Enough technology is available, but the application of technology is missing. We are talking about mobile and tablets but we have to see how it can affect the learning process. Technology does not have a limitation. Its limitation is only in the form of insufficient bandwidth or computing power. There are lots of products available in the market for the learner, but we have to figure out how they work for the learner.

So we have to focus on application of technology and figure out how to evaluate the quality. This is a big challenge.

Amit Gupta
CEO,
S Chand Group

An enormous amount of work has been done by private sector and the government sector in the field of education, but we are missing the common ground from where the achievements of one sector can be used by the other for further improving educational outcomes.

The government is trying to provide the infrastructure, but how to use that infrastructure is a problem. It is possible that we can make a much better use of the educational infrastructure once there is private sector participation. The Kendriya Vidyalaya and Navodaya Vidyalaya are great model schools, but the government cannot replicate these schools beyond a particular number. This is where private sector participation is necessary.

The other area where we face problems is when a university wants to connect all its colleges through e-learning and want  to have a good faculty development program. This cannot be achieved because they have to use content developed by national mission on ICT. The best faculty makes this content, but still the content might not be useful to students in other colleges. The fact is that any programme for creation of good educational content can only give  successful results if it has active participation from private sector.

Companies like Microsoft and Intel have done excellent work for bringing ICT into schools.

Unless people know how to use technology, it is useless to create new technological solutions for education

Dr Pankaj Mittal
Vice Chancellor,
BPS Mahila Vishwavidyalaya

Higher education system faces the problem of Expansion, Equity and Excellence. But the biggest problem of all is the  problem of awareness. Plethoras of technologies are available, but very few people know how to use it.

When we talk of Expansion, we talk about escalating the GER to 21 percent from the current 12 percent by end of the 12th Five Year Plan. The best way of increasing the ratio is by increasing the number of universities and colleges. We can also try to increase the intake capacity of the existing institutions. Public-Private Partnerships can be engineered. However, our government lacks the financial strength to increase the number of institutions or improve the quality of education being offered in the existing institutions.

Distance education is a viable option. There is a lot of divide in our country: divide between rich and poor; rural and urban; male-female divide and so on. Technology is a great equaliser. It brings together people from different sections of
the society.

Quality of teachers is the first and foremost thing that determines the quality of education. The issue of quality of teachers can be addressed by technology; we can have video lectures from the best teachers.

If we want to convert our demographic dividend to knowledge power, we have to market our education and technology to spread awareness. Unless people know how to use technology, it is useless to create new technological solutions for education.

Open access movement in higher education is the key for emergence of meta-university

Dr K K Dwivedi
Vice Chancellor,
Apeejay Stya University

During the last 15-20 years new developments on the technological front have brought about major changes in the way we approach education.

Campus infrastructure is not only about physical boundary. It consists of manpower, faculty, student and staff along with physical infrastructures like the buildings, labs, classrooms hostels, housings, and other technological tools embedded into the system. We have features like teaching learning platforms through video conferencing, virtual classrooms, and much else.

As far as the manpower is concerned, faculty shortage is the most challenging task that we are faced with. Faculty doesn’t
drop down to us from tree tops; it takes decades of training to create an effective teacher. A good teacher who can face the challenges of higher education must be imbued with the six Cs: Competence, Creativity, Confidence, Caring, Collaborations and Communication. Unfortunately, most of the PhDs and teachers that are available these days are not employable because of the poor quality.

Nowadays most university campuses are ICT enabled. They are equipped with, intranet and internet. With the emergence of the National Knowledge Network one GBPS connectivity is available. Online access to books, journals, periodicals, and the learning management system which make the campus  more efficient are coming up.

Meta-university will promote collaborative and multidisciplinary learning through the use of National Knowledge Network. The availability of open courseware and the emergence of open access movement in higher education is the key for emergence for meta-university.

With right use of ICT, education can become a much more enjoyable experience for the teachers as well as students

Prof Dilip K Bandyopadhyay
Vice Chancellor,
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

India faces a major deficiency of teachers, especially in the state universities, where 40 percent posts are lying vacant. The syllabus in these universities is not getting covered and the examinations are losing their value rapidly.

Today, we are on the brink of a revolution in the education technology. India has taken many bold steps in implementing the National Mission of Education through ICT by bringing technology to classroom teaching.

One important intervention has been in the area of creating digital content, providing the connectivity and the access devices. Such a system enables anyone from the university to access content through a range of net-connected devices. The major benefit of such learning methods is that students have an opportunity to learn 24 hours a day and all 365 days a week. The issues of place and time fade away.

Keeping content in the online space is one thing, and helping students understand it is something quite different. The teachers have to act as the mentors and facilitators. They must help the students understand the content thoroughly. With right use of ICT, education can become a much more enjoyable experience for the teachers as well as students.

Akshai Aggarwal,
Vice Chancellor, Gujarat Technological University

The number of universities is important, but even more important is the quality of education

In 1854, East India Company established three universities in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and today India is home to 600  universities”
Today youth in India want to study at premier institutions; even these institutions face a major drawback in their research facilities.  There has been a steep fall in the ranking of India’s educational institutions year after year, while the ranking of universities in other  countries keeps rising.
The students in India are quite capable, they are making a mark everywhere in the world. But the problem of  engineering students in India is that they have no practical knowledge due to poor facilities for research in the institutions where they are being trained. Indian students tend to shy away from the practical problems.
India has a rich tradition in education, but no new innovations in education have happened after the burning of Nalanda University in  12th century. In 1854, East India Company established three universities in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and today India is home to 600 universities.
The number of universities is important, but even more important is the quality of education that they provide. We need to look at the  structure of our universities and devise a system that is suitable for doing thorough research. We don’t have to blindly create more  replicas of the IITs, we can try to evolve some other models also.

Prof Sandeep Sancheti,
Director, NITK Surathkal

Children should be encouraged to develop skills

Vocational Education focuses on imparting some specific job related skills to the students. Vocational training is not part of higher education, it stands somewhere between schools and higher education depending upon the case and the need of the job.
In school education, we do not nurture and help the children, instead we kill the creativity of the child by setting rules for everything.  Right from Kindergarten, teachers take complete control of the child’s mind. Instead of allowing the child to develop his own brand of creativity, the teachers fill him up with their own ideas.
It should come as no surprise that after some amount of this kind of training, the child starts following a prescribed way of doing  things. Creativity is the fountainhead of any skill. Skills will not develop in children, if they are not allowed to showcase their talents  from childhood.
In India, our engineers do not get to open and rebuild things, so problem solving approach is never developed. The students are great  on paper, but hands on knowledge is missing and students don’t have the courage to join bits and pieces and learn in the process.
Another important change that needs to be implemented is that our system of education should focus more on enabling students to  develop right kind of skills, rather than on simply awarding degrees.
Diplomas should be given to students who have acquired a  specific  skill. Students who have higher skill set should be given degrees.  There should be a modular structure where entry is given to vocational education based skills. When a specific skill set is prescribed, then even 12th exams will not be necessary and people with skills will be given lateral entry.