Raj Mruthyunjayappa, President – India, Anthology Inc.
The
National Education Policy (NEP), aimed at the holistic development of Indian
education system, will need constant and vital interventions from the EdTech
industry to achieve its objective of ensuring high-quality and accessible
education across the country. For the policy to achieve desired results,
development of digital infrastructure will be essential, especially keeping in
mind the need to have a multi-disciplinary approach. Few key objectives as
defined include recognizing, identifying,and strengthening the
unique capabilities of each student andpromoting their holistic development
in both academic and non-academic spheres. Flexibility for learners to
choose their learning trajectories and programs, and thereby choose their paths
as per their talents and interests,life skills such as communication,
teamwork, cooperation, and resilience are few other significant objectives.
While these tend to be seen as process and pedagogy change, larger point of leveraging
technology to enable this transformation should not be missed out.
There is tremendous
scope of EdTech solutions to help schools, colleges and universities fast-track
digital learning and technology adoption across various functions such as teaching,
learning, assessments and overall operations. The NEP has been initiated at a
critical juncture with classes being conducted virtually or phygitally, a
combination of physical and digital, due to the pandemic, where teaching
methodologies and techniques need to be re-imagined. One of the central principles steering the
education system will be the extensive use of technology in teaching and
learning, removing language barriers, educational planning and management,
Higher education
institutions have been encouraged to set up start-up incubation centres along
with technology development cells to cultivate a culture of research.Significantly,
the policy talks about the creation of the National Education Technology Forum
(NETF), to enable exchange of ideas to enhance learning methods. Increased
usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools is also recommended. The policy further looks to create awareness
on various facets of disruptive technologies that address crucial issues like
data protection.
One major challenge
that the higher education institutions face today is lack of developmental and
scalable infrastructure. At present, India’s higher education enrolment,
calculated in terms of Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), stands at a dismal 26%. The
government is looking to revamp existing structures to meet the demand of
modern higher education facilities with the help of public-private
partnerships. The investments should be directed towards creating an adequate
technology infrastructure for higher education institutions which will result
in educational parity to students across geographies.
NEP has stated that
the plan is to bring every aspect of higher education, whether it is academic,
technical, or vocational, and every type of education out of silos. Attempts
are also being made to keep the administrative layers to a minimum and ensure
more coordination among them. However, over-centralization is leading to
certain challenges. In recent decades,
a form of policy discourse has developed in which the dominant opinion holds
that the state cannot be expected to pay for the education of all.
Correspondingly, there has been a lack of development of educational
infrastructure to meet the rapidly increasing demand for higher education. In
response to the widening gap between the demand and supply for education,
successive governments have pushed through measures that have largely allowed
for greater penetration of private capital in higher education, and its
corollary, the persistent decline in per-capita allocation of governments funds
towards education. Consequently, private colleges and universities have grown
in number and there has been a rapid expansion of the open and distance
learning (ODL) education options. This challenge is encouraging an increase in
the number of online education and pushing the universities to go online. Such
universities will have to adopt and rely on EdTech solutions by digitising
student enrolment, student services, career counselling, alumni etc.
Circumstances have
driven us to believe virtual classrooms are acceptable for of schooling for
those with access to technology. Hence
it is important the HEIs gear up towards digital and technology solutions to
continue uninterrupted classes and meet the demands of the student community.
Further, NEP encourages industry-academia collaboration to mitigate the skill
gap and to ensure employability by enabling the students to be industry-ready,
highlighting the importance and relevance of introducing EdTech solutions in
the Indian education space. When universities and industries work together, it often
leads to high quality research and innovative solutions and also reduces
costs.To facilitate all this, a common EdTechplatform may need to be created to
foster new relationships and forge new ties and alliances.
-x-