Education System in India is super-duper overdue for Disruptive Transformation from Relevance, Affordability, Employability, Adoptability, Manageability, Reach, Technology adoption, and other similar reasons. In last three to four decades, more so in last two decades, the World has changed as never before; not even as conceptualized and/or thought of by people. Everyone talks about obsolesce and related challenges, but hardly anything is being done by design.

What can be single most reason for this current continued situation!

It is still being persuaded and done by Academia with little checks & balances through Government interventions and Political tinkering. With all due respect to Academia, for two reasons (a) Academia is and continues to be supply side (b) there is a massive requirement of transformational transformation on Academia end in current times and context.

Also read: COVID Challenges to India Education System

Need for Transformation

In one sentence; in last two decades esp., Education System has called for change so significantly in terms of requirements, expectations, and delivery that it requires surgical strike and rebuild. It is time to holistically acknowledge and act strategically with BIG picture in mind. Revolutionary Transformation in Evolutionary manner over 5 to 10 years is possibly only the way forward, over next one decade.Among the key reasons:

• Digital disruptions have caused 360 degree impact on every aspect & element of Education
• New Businesses and New Business Model
• Need for all-round 360 degree Reskilling as never before, the single most critical success factors
• Current teaching system continues to be Supply ⇨ Demand
• Ever-growing Demand-Supply gap in terms of requirements from Education Vs availability of Education
• Current Assessment system continues to be focused on Grade sheet; not learning, not application, not understanding, not excellence, …
• Education Capacity Availability Vs Requirement
• Limited and less-integrated Industry role-play
• Skill gap and insufficient Industry readiness of fresh(ers) YoY, Industry invests 6 months +/- to make freshers productive
• Education Content, need for Content revision constantly & consistently, form of Content, and Content delivery
• Education for All, Reach the Un-reach, and Affordable Education
• Current focus on select streams and courses under multiple influence, both positive and negative
• Superiority of Education Institutions in terms of premier and/or prestigious
• Limited Responsibility and Accountability by stakeholders to traditional values/ system
• Counselling: currently, it is very limited, like an event/ activity, and more like ✔
• Students and Parents are mostly on receiving end, with very limited/ negligible role-play or influence in entire Education system
• Insufficient and inadequate Government policy alignment & interventions with fast changing times
• Research and Innovation needs to be closer to real-life scenarios

Transformational Strategy

The task-in-hand is marathon, possibly unimaginable, beyond visualization & comprehension for now, if Education System has to be set right. It will evolve, possibly over a decade; however, there has to be holistic start with right intent, honest willingness, absolute commitment, and the most important of all – led by Leadership in institutionalised manner.

The Education System needs Surgical Strike, re-write the storyline, go back to the drawing board. The Education System cannot continue to be Supply-side driven; Demand-side needs to be brought in middle of everything and Demand-side needs to play much more active role responsibly with commitment. Demand-side needs to make right interventions and investments to make Education System better conducive to current & future needs of Industry and Students.

Each and every stakeholders, including new & emerging ones needs to get out of comfort zone, be ready to challenge objectively anything & everything in Education System, be prepared to be challenged, acknowledge the role of new entrants and share the good old day’s position of power or strength, everyone needs to unlearn, understand-define-implement-rollout New Norms.

Education System needs attention to shift focus from ‘Teaching’ to ‘Learning’.

Broadly, the education system can be considered under three categories from transformation timeline perspective:

Some of the other disruptive, transformational, and critical factors to Re-write Education System can be:

• Digital Transformation (DT): DT has touched, impacted & influenced every aspect of Society, Education System is no exception. The role, influence, and impact of DT needs to be understood in wholistic manner and comprehend as ZERO-based start. It is practical, viable, and do(able); rather the only answer.

DT is the best platform and opportunity to achieve future-generation and future-proof Education System. New concepts like Live Streaming will be a reality.

DT will create an altogether new challenge & opportunity of ‘Reskilling’. Reskilling challenge from two perspective (a) every stakeholder in Education Ecosystem would need to undergo and reorient oneself to connect & engage with New Norms. This alone can be among key weak link in chain (b) all in employment would need to stay tuned and aligned.

In DT journey, care shall be take of ‘What Not to Do’, like ‘Hybrid model, Not alone either’, ‘Not just Digitisation’, ‘Education Platform, Not BAU Business Platform’, ‘Content Transformation, Not alone Content Digitisation’, ‘All-round Education Platform to serve specific needs to Education System’, ‘Re-orientation of Faculty’, ‘Student re-orientation’, ‘Digital Admission, On-boarding, Examination, Assessment, Coaching, Mentorship, Internship, Project work incl labs, …”.

Also read: DST: Creating Science and Technology Ecosystem in Education System

• Education System needs to unblock the current Education System from two perspective (a) breaking down each of the current monolithic course capsules/ semester-trimester/ … into smaller logical blocks (b) make more, varied, and logical blocks available to students to chose aligned with larger student interest.

The new Courses and its blocks shall be better aligned with New Businesses, New Roles, New Norms, …

Unblocking, embedded with appropriate technology and tools shall make each block easy to learn and more interesting to learn.

This shall certainly help re-energize students with new Education System made available interesting as never before.

• Content Lifecycle Management will be among the crucial ones in New Education System. First & foremost, content re-creation aligned with micro education blocks with simplicity, more learner-centric than teaching-led, loosely coupled-tightly integrated architecture to implement continuous changes consistently & constantly, the new World Content – significantly different & beyond just digitization, Content delivery wrt. Faculty-Content-Content Channel-Content Receiver-…

This has to be Transformational and Disruptive with appropriate exploitation of Emerging Technologies (ET) comprehensively. ET offers wide-range and disruptive technology options to conceive new all-round options. Most times, new business models, delivery channel, learning path, … can be envisaged by exploiting the power of ET meaningfully.

Crowdsource any element of Education System, including not limited to, content, faculty, student-groups, students, …

Traditionally, teaching any subject (esp. complex subjects) and chapter in complex way is not about superiority on demand/ supply side, it is more about contextualize to student profile. ET embedded DT based Education System shall address this well, make Education interesting, create PULL factor, help reduce dropout rate, …

• DT with ET shall help rebuild Assessment System with focus on learning, getting best out of people through offering right options to them, enhanced objectivity, and other relevant factors.

• Digital has a unique power that matches one of the major objectives of Education System, i.e. Education for All through ‘Reach the Unreach’ and ‘Affordable Education’.

• Counselling in current system is like a in system. With Digital platform and Emerging Technologies, Counselling shall become a continuous process.

Such a process shall help identify the capability, ability, capacity, interests, … of every person individually. With extended access to Social platforms & so on, it can be an opportunity to develop guided counselling for each & every person.

This shall help explore and map more career options available at any point of time.

Optimal embedding of DT strategy with ET can help create roadmap-led evolution of New Education System that shall serve all the stakeholders by addressing the current challenges. There will be new challenges, hence a roadmap-led Education System will always be in evolution mode like never ending journey.

• This may look quite bold, but no offence, to moderate the superiority concept of prestigious Education Institutions. New Education System shall allow appropriate access to such institutions to people @ large.

New Education System shall try bring enhanced collaboration and better access across the board.

• Last but NOT the least, parents need to be made better integral to entire system. Meaningfully engagement platform would need to be created to continually make the New Education System rich and value-adding. Parents would need to re-orient themselves, get out of good old day’s Education understanding, aligned with New Norms.

Some of the above-mentioned measures, if planned-designed-&-executed even close to well, shall address some of the larger challenges like ‘Freshers will be better Industry-ready’, ‘Demand-Supply in skill requirement Vs availability’, …

No rocket science, ET-embedded DT platform will bring new multi-fold challenges; hence, it has to be Revolutionary in nature and Evolutionary in nature with provision to course correction.

Nothing comes easy, but COST of NOT doing NOW is very HIGH.