Sunday Posts

Project-based Learning (PBL), in its various forms, has many benefits, not least that it puts application at the heart of learning and allows learners to connect their knowledge more effectively to their lives. But I came to appreciate it from another angle altogether: sitting in the classrooms of a top university, as a mature immigrant who spoke English as a second language, I have come to see how much one takes for granted in traditional university education and how subtle, unintentional exclusion can work. Projects, particularly those that allowed me to work with my peers, enabled me to learn differently, with my eagerness and work ethic making up much of the cultural deficit I initially faced. Thereafter, I have consistently been an advocate, dedicating my entire career to exploring and refining it. Because it does need perfecting! My work in PBL usually involves two kinds of negotiation: one with educators who think PBL results in poor learning, cannot be adequa...

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement. All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change: 1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority ba...

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

  Let’s start with a broad definition of education technology: When Jan Comenius was using vernacular medium and illustrations to teach a foreign language in the Seventeenth century (his Gate of the Tongue unlocked came out in 1631) , he was using the new technology of print and an educational idea (learning through illustrated textbooks) to create a new form of education.   However, such a definition of technology would also narrow down what we could call Education Technology (Edtech, as it is fashionably called). C ontemporary Edtech is a catch-all phrase for any technology used within the educational context. Duolingo, which employs an app to offer a new, gamified, approach to language learning , will be clubbed together with some boring classroom management software in the same   category. Instead, it makes more sense to define education technology to include such applications of scientific knowledge to further educational goals, rather than any piece of machinery or...

  The limits of experiential learning     Guilty as charged , we evangelised experiential learning as the most appropriate education format to meet the demands of rapidly changing workplaces.   Dismayed by over-reliance on uninteresting lectures with hundreds of slides, we emphasised practical enga gement. Our point was that the solitary content consumption, whether from books or from videos, does not allow anyone to prepare for rapid shifts in technology or workplace practices. Instead, the lear ners need to work with other people, as most work today is done in teams, and they should solve real-life problems, as only by application are thin gs really learnt.   But there must be more than this if one is  to create a learning experience in the twenty-first century. That application is a better way of learning than reading textbooks is rather well known. No one denies that experiential learning works better in preparing for practical work. Rather, it ...