Distance Learning - Reloaded
Distance learning using the internet -- that allows students anywhere in the country to learn from the best teachers -- is old news! We have heard of Massively Open Online Courseware (MOOCs) popularised by Coursera and Udemy, applauded the good work done by the Khan Academy and proudly talk about the gigabytes of, rather boring, videos loaded into Youtube by IIT professors under the NPTEL program. But none of all this has had any impact on the critical skill gap that separates students who pass out of India’s colleges from the jobs that await them in a booming economy. Institutions like IITs, IIMs, NITs, Presidency and others, may be doing well, but there are another 600 degree granting institutions with more than 35,000 affiliated colleges that have lost the plot completely. Most of these have inadequate infrastructure, teachers who are barely competent or rarely in the classroom, outdated syllabi and an academic atmosphere vitiated by student politics and yet it ...