Sunday Posts

Are we ready for Micro-degrees or not? The jury is still out.  On one hand, the combination of open courses taught by some of the best professors in the world and employer led Capstone project, all organised around a certain area of knowledge, looks irresistible. For a start, it bypasses the regulatory structures, which is the source of most problems in Higher Ed. It also addresses the problem of cost of education, and present a scalable solution. With right employers and projects, these can make education relevant in a way it is not in its current form. On the other, however, degrees are part of our furniture and it is difficult to get away from its allure. To become a global solution for the problems of Higher Ed, this new idea should be workable in developing countries. However, the employers in developing countries, where societies are organised around a certain division of power, mostly inherited from colonial days or pre-modern cultures (such as tribal hierarchi...

In my various conversations in India, I get to hear that business education is in crisis. The applications and enrollments are falling, and the MBAs from most institutions are not getting jobs that justify the effort, and investment, in an MBA. Several schools are up for sale, and everyone is generally pondering about the future. Most conversations are focused on the Quality Crisis - they point to the three or four top-ranking and extremely selective Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) still maintaining their value proposition - and most new institutions are desperately trying to replicate their strategies around them, often hiring people who leave or retire from IIMs. However, what gets missed is that this is not just a quality problem. There is a whole lot more here, though it is difficult to analyse this appropriately in a country like India where innovation and courage are not really associated with education. However, a good place to provoke a discussion is indeed to look...

'Value Education' is claimed to be the next big thing in Indian Education. As the expansion of Engineering and Management Education has somewhat stalled - these have failed to improve employment prospects and demand for these has declined - the buzzword is now Values.  At the outset, one would assume that the need may have arisen because of the overt technical concentration in the Indian education system which leaves its graduates wanting in terms of moral commitments and social engagement. Also, Value Education, as it is practised and promoted in India, is also in line with the general revivalist tendencies as witnessed in the country today. It isn't about ethical and moral exploration, but about tradition and heritage; in most cases, this means pop-Hinduvta, extracts from traditional texts presented in PowerPoint, someone chanting out Sanskrit sound bites parsed with pie charts. At the surface, the trend very much reflects the conversations inside Indian compani...

It is fashionable now to talk about knowing-doing gap, but this emanates from the underlying assumption that knowing and doing are two different things, to be undertaken differently (See my earlier post, Knowing and Doing - Are They Different? ). This dualism, which separates thought from action, ideas from deeds, and reflection from activities, is institutionalised in our universities, which is perhaps creating the knowing-doing gap by design. Notwithstanding the popularity of capstone projects, study tours and work placements, which, by design, remain off-curriculum and almost reluctantly indulged, the idea of the university promotes itself as a safe space to do the thinking outside the challenges of our daily lives, accentuating the dualism rather than seeking to reconcile it.  It has become, more by default than design, my occupation to seek to bring learning and work closer together. This prompts me to think and to question, as I am attempting now, the model of the learn...

When I talk about universities being obsolete in a decade, I usually get the bewildered looks measuring out whether I am crazy. How could an institutional form, which is perhaps the most expansive and at the peak of their prestige right at this moment, be in any danger of obsolescence? This conversation also angers some people, who see in all this a neo-liberal conspiracy and me as a messenger of the For-Profit side, though my case applies as much to For-Profit universities as much to the Not-For-Profit and Public ones. There is huge amount of data coming out measuring whether universities are good investment, particularly as the students have to pay the full cost of education in an increasing number of countries. The case for universities, for the champions of that side of the argument, are hinged either on a teleological argument, that universities have a specific purpose and they are indispensable in a democratic society, or on the existence of a graduate premium. But both the...

Ed-tech has come of age. Gone are those days of HTML scripted pages with two big Next and Back buttons, the databases merely reporting how many seconds someone looked at a page and document repositories to be downloaded and printed at convenience. But how this came about may be slightly more contested. One may think it was video, made possible by robust bandwidth and multimedia in everyday computers, that changed everything. Yet others will think, like everything else, it was mobility, the ability to hold in hand a powerful enough device with a screen that does not tire off the eyes, that facilitated a different level of engagement with all things electronic. Social is also a big thing, and its advocates will claim that connecting with others electronically is changing everything. And, yet others will point to the emergence of the cloud, or affirmation of what they used to say in older times, 'the Network is the Computer', that changed computer from a box on a desk to a space...

Our minds love classifications, neat boxes that we can put stuff in. But, often, these boxes are just created by us rather than being a fact of nature, though we seem to assume that nature is indeed organised in neat boxes as we want them. The dualism that we apply to knowing and doing is one of those false classifications, which we created perhaps to preserve the dignity of what we call wisdom from the messy realities of the world, but as we keep pushing the boundaries of what we can do, this dualism has been outed as false, and even dangerous. Indeed, I am just quoting Dewey more or less in saying that Knowing and Doing are actually one and the same thing. There is no knowing without doing and doing for a sentient being involves some knowing all the time. This is the principal difference that human beings have from other animals, for whom doing and knowing may not be connected - and indeed, therefore, an animal may not know anything at all. So, this argument that one must l...

Whoever said it: The maxim of corporate dysfunction is when someone discusses their airmiles on the dinner table. While I scrupulously avoid it, making some of my friends what I really do when I frequently disappear for business trips, I can't avoid another frequent flyer syndrome: Having my moments of existential crisis at Airline lounges! So, here I am, in the quiet poshness of the Gatwick Lounge, and devoid of any conversations; the assorted Golf and Lifestyle magazines rather useless, staying off food in consideration of my soaring weight, with a touch of Internet fatigue (this post is being done retrospectively, or should I say, posthumously, after the thoughts have died). It was one of those moments when I don't want to start reading the books I am carrying in my bag, because I have to read them anyway for the next 7 hours, as I have seen all the movies that are there on Inflight entertainment (one less spoken about downside of Carrier loyalty) - and therefore, plunged in...

Professor Amartya Sen has withdrawn his candidature for the Second Term as Chancellor of Nalanda University, the prestigious International University the Indian government has set up. The reason is apparent reluctance of powers that be in Delhi to clear his appointment, even after being elected by the University board, and use the protocol requirement of President's approval of the Board Decision to signal their disapproval to Professor Sen's appointment.  Professor Sen's resignation has been met with the usual flood of ridicule on social media by the current Prime Minister's ardent supporters. Professor Sen was always an outspoken critic of the current Prime Minister on ground of his Human Rights records, and once he came to power, a retribution was expected. Indeed, Professor Sen's resignation taints the whole Nalanda University project - who wants to go to an university lorded over by Fascist lackeys - and undermines India's soft power further.   Ho...

As far as euphemisms go, one can't do much worse than calling something a Sharing Economy which is neither about sharing nor an economy in the usual sense of the term. Consider the beginnings, all that excitement about technologies of connection and collaboration being available cheaply and at a global scale, which was thought to have the potential of unlocking the gift economy, those little things that we do for one another without necessarily expecting anything in return, and give it a scale and scope not otherwise possible. However, the Sharing Economy, as the idea was usurped, became exactly the opposite, a mad rush for monetising every little thing - a death sentence for 'sharing', that is.  And, this is hardly an economy. An economy is a system, not just one for commission-for-everything deal making. It involves people, winners and losers, yes, but not one where only bookies stand to win at everyone else's cost. And, indeed, it involves relationships, eve...