The education system of our country is facing a crisis of preparing young students for jobs. Despite all the technologies, the way we learn is mostly the same since decades. Vikas Gupta, MD, Wiley India says, “The situation warrants an immediate plan of action. The idea is not to just start this essential conversation but to lay down a route that can be easily followed. The process starts by defining a well-strategized Skill Roadmap”.
Like all other fields, technology is ready to transform the field of education and is going to play a crucial role in future on how we learn. Since the advent of internet, education is not just limited to university and books. The millennial generation is looking for alternate education systems and how the future of learning in our country can adapt to newer ways. “Education needs to be available anytime, anywhere and should be personalized”, says Vikas Gupta.
Elaborating further, few key things that today’s generation expects for education are:
- Learning should be accessible anywhere.
- It should be available anytime.
- Education should be results-oriented and should focus on applications.
- The learning method should be personalized for an individual.
In addition to the above stated points, one needs to constantly evolve and re-skill themselves, in any field that they are working upon.
The attributes discussed above hold true for any country in the world, and not just India. The existing education models are stagnated and are very little worked upon since British times.
In such an evolving world, traditional classroom method for learning just doesn’t fit. It is due to the reason that every individual student learns in a different way. Some people grasp faster as compared to others, some others learn by applications as compared to books. We just can’t confine the learning method to university and classrooms.
One of the most troubling issues for our country today is unemployment. Though it holds true that there aren’t enough jobs as there are a number of youths for the jobs. It is, however, also true that majority of that un-employed ‘pool’ is not ‘fit’ for any kind of job. It’s because our learning method doesn’t focus on what a student will do after university.
This very mindset has resulted in a huge pool of ‘educated’ students ‘misfit’ for jobs. Students don’t know what employers expect out of them. Key skills like communication, professional manners, practical management is missing from their syllabus.
So, what’s the solution?
The thing we need to understand is in most of the colleges today in India, there is not any quality check that determines whether a student is actually ‘ready’ for the professional world.
Without any quality check or barrier, the college education is being rendered ineffective.
One way to overcome this issue is that someone from outside the college takes a quality check before a student leaves the college. “Placing at the exit stage, a government-controlled quality test will regulate the efficacy of college education in any field”, says Vikas Gupta of Wiley India.
What this ‘quality check’ would do, is that it will test every individual based on things they have learned and what they are going to pursue after college. For e.g., if someone has studied management and wants to get a job at any tech startup, they would be tested upon skills that are needed for managing a tech startup.
The employers can actually work together with government to ensure the ‘quality check’ is effective.
To make students ready for this ‘professional world’ we would have to keep a serious check on our learning model. We must make sure that:
- Learning can’t be in an isolated environment. It must be open, it must be social.
- Learning cannot and should not be one way. It’s a two-way process.
- Learning should involve applications, projects, real-life scenarios and simulations in addition to traditional assessments.
To achieve this, we can use technology in a more effective way.
We can go for AI-enabled adaptive learning tools. Such tools can help in a personalized learning platform for students depending upon their fields.
Other than this, we must make a serious transformation in our traditional classroom model of learning. We can go for something like flipped classroom models.
The technology will help us in making learning accessible and available anytime and anywhere.
About Vikas Gupta:
Vikas Gupta is an award-winning thought leader who is recognized name in education industry. Vikas is particularly interested and fascinated about making learning easy and accessible with the help of technology.
With a career spanning over 20 years, Vikas has been a forerunner in leading many innovative products and business models in the space of technology-driven learning solutions, research and faculty development, professional certifications and skill development.