New Ideas for Bengal in Higher Education

The new minister for  higher education in West Bengal is exploring new ways in which this sector could be improved. Here are some ideas.

image of Class XII girls borrowed from Indian Patrika

There could be many ways to improve the quality of higher education in Bengal. Curriculum can be redesigned, faculty can be trained or the administrative structure of universities and colleges can be changed. But without ignoring these traditional approaches, can we look for some radical, out-of-the-box ideas that could catapult Bengal to an eminent position of thought leadership ? To do so, let us begin by admitting that there is no dearth of colleges in Bengal but students do not perceive them to be very useful. This is because of (a) the poor quality of faculty and the educational services that they deliver that in turn leads to (b) the meagre job opportunities that that await students who pass out. This note explores low-cost, technology enabled approaches that can help mitigate these two specific problems.

1. Locating, Leveraging & Rewarding College Teachers through Social Networks

Good teachers are a rarity. Despite recent salary hikes, the money that a competent person can earn in the corporate sector is far higher than what a government college can ever offer but nevertheless we have people who because of their personal preferences choose to teach. But unfortunately, the services of these good teachers are available to a small group of students who attend the college where he or she teaches. Students in other colleges, that do not have such a teacher, suffer. This is where we need to step in and create a platform that allows a teacher to transcend the locational restrictions and make himself available to a large number of students and in the process increase his personal earnings.

Distance learning is not new but the approach suggested here is based on the social media -- as defined in public networks like Facebook, Linkedin or equivalent private networks built on, say, the Ning platform. With 600+ million members, the population of Facebook is exceeded only by that of China and India and almost every college student in urban India is a member. The incredible penetration of social media into the psyche of the global population is because it taps into the primordial desire for human being to reach out to -- and be reached by -- their peers.

The blog post “Distance Learning on A Social Network Platform” ( http://bit.ly/pmblog01 ) describes the contours of such a platform and also explains the explains the economics that will sustain it. The core idea is that if any college has the faculty to teach any one subject well then this capability must be made available to students of many other colleges that may not have the same. Hence colleges can tap into faculty and in turn faculty who are in great demand can see a substantial increase in their income which will be a win-win for all concerned.

The technology and infrastructure necessary to implement such a platform is quite simple and inexpensive and given the rapid proliferation of the wireless internet, accessibility is no more an issue. However the biggest challenge would be to convince teachers and administrators. Social media and social networks may be an integral part of today’s youth but people above the age of 45 have great difficulty in relating to, identifying with, accepting the ubiquity of and finally leveraging this explosive technology. Unfortunately, most teachers -- at least those in a administrative and decision making capacity -- fall this category and may dismiss this as  just another fad. But if we can break through this scepticism and actually create an initial  platform then there there will be young, entrepreneurial teachers who will happily come on board and through their activity will move it towards critical mass. A simple version of such a platform is the Kollaborative Klassroom used at Praxis Business School ( http://kk.praxis.ac.in )

2. Common Integreated Campus Placements for Colleges in Bengal

One of the most important reasons why students go to college is to improve their chances of getting a job and while imparting education is certainly the primary reason for the existence of a college, the ability to find a job for students -- the placement process -- is equally important. In fact, most people rank colleges -- IITs included -- not on the quality of the education but on the success of the placement process. Cynical as it may sound, everybody is interested less in the activity ( of imparting education ) and more in the result ( of placing students).  This means that the ability of a college -- the UG colleges, not research institutions --  to place its students is perhaps the best indicator of its ability to deliver relevant and appropriate education and so the placement process as a yardstick for evaluating the effectiveness of a college may have an important role to play in the education sector.

Most professional colleges -- especially the private engineering colleges -- have some kind of a placement department but the vast number of the under-graduate B.Sc / B.A. / B.Com colleges have no such facilities. But creating placement cells and executing the placement process in hundreds of colleges is an impossibly complex task. Instead, it may make sense to create a single technology enabled platform that may serve as a common mechanism to support the placement requirements of all colleges across the state.

The blog post “Campus Recruitment as a B2B Exchange” ( http://bit.ly/pmblog02 ) explains the philosophy, the architecture, the technology and the financial structure of such an enterprise. Current job portals like naukri.com are doing something similar but ideally, if this driven as a cross-campus initiative through the government then the likelihood of success could be far higher.

Creating this structure would serve two ends. First it will allow many more students to get jobs -- which is an any case a responsibility of the higher education system -- but more importantly it will create an important quality indicator for colleges in the state. By creating a level playing field for placements for all colleges and then measuring the success of the students from each college both students ( + parents) and administrators would create an automatic ranking of colleges. Colleges higher in the list can be honoured ( and suitably rewarded ) while those at the end should be scrutinised and where necessary, supported to help improve standards.

This note introduces two new ideas and they are elaborated to a certain extent in the blog posts that are referred to. However the devil is in the detail and more discussion may be necessary to address issues related to actual implementation.

Distance Learning on a Social Network Platform

Distance learning is a topic that excites all but remains a model that is yet to be cracked with any great degree of success. Mr Deepak Parekh, in his inaugural address at the CSI National Convention states that this market will be worth Rs 11 billion in 2012 but as of today will any company actually hire someone who has an MBA degree from an online program ?

It is true that we have had correspondence courses from various open universities and of late many reputed universities like MIT and even our own IITs have come out with presentations and recorded videos that seek to distribute the wisdom of good teachers among students not enrolled with them. Video conferencing has also been tried but again, the fact that they are nowhere as popular as regular class room sessions means that there is something missing somewhere. But the fact remains that hunger for education – especially the kind of professional education that helps people get jobs – is immense. That is why private engineering and business schools are proliferating, even under the malevolent glare of the not-so-lily-white mandarins of India's higher education ! What is lacking though is the availability of good teachers to fill the ever expanding number of class rooms in India. Can we leverage the collaborative-participative model of Web 2.0 to plug this gap ? Before we try to answer this question let us understand two things :

What does current models of distance learning lack ? Obviously physical presence is very important. Watching 30 videos of pre-recorded one hour classes conducted by a professor ( which is the equivalent of a 3 credit college course ) is a very poor substitute for two reasons – it is very difficult to watch and there is no interactivity. Better alternatives can be found in either video lectures through Skype-style platforms or slideshows augmented with lectures delivered over VoIP and white-board software that allows the instructor to “write” on a screen that is shared with the students. In each case, student feedback can be taken through online chat. Net-net the technology exists but why is it not being widely used ? Because this model is difficult to scale up ! The number of people who are comfortable with juggling these multiple technologies – and I have the first hand experience to state that this is not easy even for a net-adept like me – are NOT the kind who have the deep knowledge of say, finance or thermodynamics or organisation behaviour that is essential if they were to be considered credible teachers in any college. Which leads us to the next important concept that we need to understand ...

Web 2.0 – best illustrated by products like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Orkut – consists of four distinct characteristics. User-generated content, a network of trust, rich media and the fact that it is under constant development or perpetual beta. Consider YouTube as a platform created by Google where individuals create and upload videos that are viewed and commented on (that is “consumed”) by the public at large. Can we do the same thing with college courseware ? But unlike free format YouTube videos, college courseware needs to be aligned to specific requirements and have a certain quality. This is where the other concepts like rich media and networks of trust can be brought to bear.

Let us begin with courses. A 3-credit subject would consist of 30 lectures of one hour each. Each lecture can consist of a 10 min video that explains the idea, followed by, or interspersed with 20 slides that highlights important concepts. The instructor would also have a shared whiteboard to write additional material, a chat-screen where he can receive questions and a Skype-style voice service through which he can broadcast his answers and clarifications. All this can be delivered from one  or preferably two computer screens with touch capability that will allow him to switch easily between video, slides and whiteboard.

Students can either be sitting alone at home with a 3G/broadband connection or could be in a group in a class where two computers would be projecting on two screens – one for video/slides and the other for the white board. Direct voice feedback from a dispersed audience is possible but not desirable because of cross-talk and so an online chat screen from each student's laptop will carry his questions and observations back to the instructor.

Creating teaching content like this is easier said than done. Good teachers must be helped, encouraged and financially motivated to create these modules and this process can be funded – just as text books are commissioned by publishers – by individual colleges. This can be a direct payment – of the kind that is paid to a teacher for teaching a subject  physically – or  some kind of a revenue sharing mechanism. A tech savvy person can also be appointed to help the teacher during the first few sessions. The revenue stream will be derived from subject registrants – either single students or other colleges that will use this subject as a part of their curriculum. This leads us to the next component of a standard Web 2.0 product, the network of trust.

Individual colleges can commission some subjects on their own and can source other subjects from other colleges and institutes and assemble a full blown course ( MBA, BE .. ) in a manner that ensures that all statutory credit requirements are met. Since each college is creating a subset of the entire course, upfront costs will be manageable. A very rough parallel will be YouTube channels – but with the added challenge of schedule management since all pedagogy is live and students cannot attend two lectures simultaneously. So a student who joins a college for say, an MBA course, is assured that he will be able to attend a full spectrum of finance, marketing, operations, behavioral and strategy subjects, over a period of two years ( or more, if we consider week end executive programs ) and will also have access to the all -important placement process – perhaps in conjunction with an online placement agency !

How will all this work in practice ? The core technology consisting of  video capture and display, streaming video, slideshows, white boards, online chat, VoIP, touch screens and broadband internet is all available at a price students are willing to pay for a management or engineering degree. We need a integrative and easy-to-use platform – what YouTube is for videos and Flickr for photos – to make  all this available in a  convenient manner. We need a couple of colleges that will commission content for certain subjects and are willing to use content commissioned by other colleges – and once we have some critical mass, market rules will take over. Student feedback – like the Facebook “like” --  will be used by other students as benchmarks, high quality content will increasingly command a premium and teachers who create them will earn more money if there is a revenue sharing mechanism in place. Orkut or LinkedIn style communities can be created around each subject where students spread across different colleges can interact with each other and with the teacher in asynchronous mode and links to additional material stored on Slideshare, Scribd, Docstoc and other Web 2.0 services can placed. Students can upload assignments into these groups and formal examinations can be conducted either online or with pen-and-paper on college premises with proper invigilation so as to ensure credibility of the degree or diploma that is being awarded.

All this is possible if we have a specialist social networking platform built on the framework of Web 2.0 concepts that will set standards, ensure uniformity and attract membership from both individual students as well as institutions offering management and engineering programs. The Kollaborative Klassroom ( http://kk.praxis.ac.in) is a very tentative step in this direction but a lot more needs to be done to realise the total vision articulated here. But without this totality of features, the project is a non-starter. Fortunately funding all this should be possible with an investment that is only a small percentage of Mr Parekh’s estimated size of this market !

Earlier attempts at distance learning have had limited success because they started out with the premise that we can extract information from a teacher and then exclude him from the equation by automating everything to the maximum extent possible. This is fallacious because teaching is inherently interactive. Social networks – which are the most dominant constructs emerging from the concept of Web 2.0 – are popular precisely because they recognise the centrality of the human being and his quixotic and unstructured interactivity as a key element around which a successful product or service can be built. A distance learning mechanism that can integrate itself into a Web 2.0 social network of the kind that is described here will stand a far better chance of being successful than anything else that has been tried so far.