Sunday Posts

With EdX's announcement that they have finally decided to search for sustainability by limiting the access to their online courses, the much awaited moment of normalisation of MOOCs has arrived. The euphoria that accompanied the launch of Coursera and EdX - that these 'free' lectures from professors of world's best institutions would completely transform learning in mediocre institutions and particularly in developing countries - is finally and truly over.  Its contemporaries have long abandoned the road: Udacity turned itself into a paid platform of profitable ambition long time ago, and Coursera, the most popular, have limited graded assessment to paying students (along with verified certificates) almost three years ago. Futurelearn, the late-coming British counterpart, in keeping with 'shop-keeping' culture of British universities, never indulged much in world-changing rhetoric, but rather kept itself to the promotion of 'brand Britain' with...

This has been the best and worst of the times for Higher and Professional Education. While people pursuing Higher and Professional Education has attained a new peak globally, new questions about its relevance and cost have arisen too. The expansion of formal education has crowded out the ecosystems of informal learning, in effect depriving societies with one of the tried-and-tested coping mechanisms for social and technical change ( see my earlier post on this ), but it has offered little in its space. Its claims on the territory, in various avatars of Lifelong Learning or Massive Open Online Courses, have underachieved, being too structured, too bureaucratic, too content driven and too top-down. Finally, its claims of being able to assess everything overshot its capability, and created dissonance with employers as they struggled to work out hard measures of the 'soft' skills.  However, among all these debates and questions, one that attracts maximum attention is the one ...

I am at an interesting phase in my life. In the last 18 months or so, my life has completely changed. Old responsibilities and attachments have died, and new configurations have emerged. My plans for return, which I felt about so intensely at the time, have receded to the background; but I rediscovered my attachment to India. And, overall, after spending many a year in waiting, almost in hibernation, I feel ready to go out and try what I wanted to do all my life. I have indeed made no secrets about what I want to do: I wanted to set up an educational establishment which fuses creative spirit, technology savvy and enterprise thinking, in a truly global context. Also, I am an unashamed idealist, and therefore think that this institution should strive to engage with global problems, poverty, climate change, intolerance, inequality etc., and the learners should emerge with an urge and a commitment to make the world a better place. In a way, this is not new. All my life, almost all th...

First of all, who would want to be a global entrepreneur? Finding local opportunities and building business on that basis is what entrepreneurs usually do, leaving the international trade bit to the big and the bold. But at the heart of entrepreneurship today, lies the n=1, r=g equation, that near-romantic idea of finding the best ideas and solutions from around the globe for that one, the one at the front of the till, special customer. I shall argue even small enterprises need this; otherwise, in the copycat world, they can't go on surviving. Competitive advantage is not just for the big guys! For me, entrepreneurs are a different set of people. They are the new alchemists, if I can borrow an expression. What's important in that label is not the gold part, I am not sure alchemists ever made Gold, but the search part, the dream part, of an Alchemists' life. They are the people who believe in their own capability to turn an idea into gold, okay metaphorical one. And they ...

I am preparing to write the Open College idea down over the Christmas holidays and hence, doing some reading and review of ideas. There could not have been a better place to start the journey than Clayton Christensen's DISRUPTING CLASS [with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson], where the effect of disruptive innovation on how education is delivered has been examined. The book is full of concepts about disruptive innovation and how they are brought to market, and a connecting fable which lets us understand the possibilities and challenges of technology introduction to the market. There are some rather disconnected, but useful stand-alone sections, on Pre -school education and Educational Research for example, but overall the book is a good read and stimulating for anyone interested in the business of education. The point of this post, of course, is not the book, but an idea contained therein, which requires closer examination in the context of the open college project. This is the ...

Idealism does not get you far in life, my teachers advised me. This is an advice I have not heeded, to my peril. I get excited by ideas, and not often care to assess the benefits, of personal and material kind, before pursuing one. And, so I have done many times before. However, for all my day-dreaming habits and undying optimism, I have possibly not worked for anything even closely exciting as the one idea I am pursuing now: A global open college. A college, in short, that anyone can attend, anywhere in the world, and study a professional course in a wide range of subject areas. That's the idealism bit. The idea is that you can decide to educate yourself one morning, and without caring for what your background is, or having to wait for admission cycles and filling out lengthy forms, you can immediately get started. The education, in this format, should come to you instead of you going to it. The experience should be global, and you should be able to connect up to thousands of othe...