blog@Yantrajaal

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 Most of these have inadequate infrastructure, teachers who are barely competent or rarely in the classroom, outdated syllabi and an academic atmosphere vitiated by student politics and yet it ...

Students today are trapped in a strange dilemma precipitated by disturbing trends. One hand we have the devaluation of the college degree as more and more employers are demanding college degrees for jobs that essentially call for high schools ( see New York Times ) and on the other we have colleges rising exponentially and leading to a second debt crisis. ( See Time ) This may be a new phenomenon affecting the United States but has been a well known problem in the dismal economic scenario in poorer parts of the world. In India we have had the tragedy of graduate and even post graduate students fighting over janitorial opportunities in the arid job market while thousands of students never have the wherewithal to continue their studies beyond high school ( Class XII) or even middle school (Class X) In the gloom that is gathering over the global economy it is the student and the education system that is finding itself trapped in a cul-de-sac that seems to be leading nowhere in general ...

Distance learning is a very seductive idea. If we go back to the era of the Mahabharata, we learn about Ekalavya, the tribal boy, who on being denied access to Dronacharya's classes on warfare on account of his caste, taught himself archery simply by observing the teacher from a distance ! The tragic consequences of his effort are well known and should perhaps serve as a warning to societies in general and teachers in particular. In a more realistic timeframe, approximately a hundred  years ago, correspondence courses appeared and over a period of time these courses became an integral part of various Open Universities. Unfortunately degree granting programs based on correspondence courses never acquired the popularity or employer acceptability of their classroom counterparts for a variety of reasons. With the advent of computing technology, computer based training (CBT) programs appeared and while these never quite made it to the level of university courses, a lot of voc...

"No army can stop an idea whose time has come." This quotation from Victor Hugo  has often been used in defence of many new but unpopular ideas and I will invoke it here to justify the usage of distance learning techniques, particularly in business schools that lead up to an MBA degree. Image "borrowed" from http://smude.edu.in/blog/tags/distance-education Whether we like it or not, many global trends are first set in the United States and then the rest of the world joins in and distance learning is one of them. Respected and well known schools like Stanford, Harvard and others are offering a large number of undergraduate and postgraduate programs that are based on a calibrated mixture of on-line and on-campus pedagogy. Despite criticisms of being less effective than face-to-face teaching, distance learning is here to stay and grow because of compelling economic reasons -- many students are simply not able to pay the kind of fees that big US schools charge...

image : getcareerkhabar.in Distance learning is a concept whose importance is growing by leaps and bounds everyday. We all know that there is nothing that can beat the physical presence of a teacher in the class but the exigencies of delivering educational services at an affordable price point is forcing everyone -- both students and teachers -- to accept the reality of this technology. In fact it boils down to the ROI, the return on investment : we all know that it would have been far better to have been at London and watch opening ceremony of the Olympics but the cost of the travel and tickets forced all of us to watch it on TV and I am sure that the Organising Committee earned more from TV rights than what they could have got through ticket sales. So it was a win-win for all to have the show broadcast in a virtual medium even though the experience was sort of degraded by the small screen. So is the case with distance learning. Most distance learning platforms use a combinat...

Google has a habit of coming out with extremely user-friendly and innovative products and I wonder if they could do something for distance learning. In the explosive growth of the knowledge economy, nothing -- bar nothing -- is more important than new and innovative ways of imparting knowledge. Google would do a significant service to humanity ( and perhaps to their shareholders as well ) if they could design a hosted, web-based tool to further this activity. The broad functionalities of my proposed system is as follows .. a] A hosted presentation server, that would allow a teacher to broadcast a set of educational slides over the internet. Streaming video is good, but we would need far higher broadband penetration before that can happen b] A white board ( or screen sharing ) application for the teacher to communicate to the students c] A way for students to join a particular session and a way to manage the interaction with students. A way for a student to "raise your ha...