Education and Technology: Why digital literacy must replace literacy as a parameter of education!

I do not want to waste time and space here to lament the Indian education system the way it exists today. Indeed the ground for developing talent into professionals is far from ideal and consistent efforts from the government to push the cause of education among the rural areas and the underprivileged urban communities have failed to reap any satisfactory results. One reason is the lack of equity that exists and despite the much maligned input based approach of the government, as opposed to a more output based approach, we still do not have on board a system that can guarantee a minimum quality in education for every student irrespective of the geography or the demography. The fact is that we just do not have good enough teachers or enough good teachers. Teacher training has been promoted over the last decade or so but as we increasingly put our faith in teacher training without seeing any significant improvement in students’ skills, we continue to lose the battle.

It is here that I believe technology has a big role to play in our efforts of democratizing education, in ensuring that a student in a village in Bihar gets the same quality teaching as the student studying in the best private school in Delhi. We have had some welcome news in this regard as Salman Khan’s videos are now in the process of being translated in various Indian languages. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), an innovative concept of professors at MIT, can prove revolutionary in the education space. Coursera, a MOOC program which was launched in April, 2012, provides courses from the best universities that students can take online and already has more than 1.75 million users across the world. This was hot on heels of Udacity and was followed by EdX – similar programs that use technology to take courses available to students who were, till very recently, unable to afford the best education possible. Hope is that soon these courses could also be used for accreditation. In K12 space, Mindspark – an adaptive online application - has reinvented the way kids learn with its expertise on students’ misconceptions. As the government aims to provide Akaash tablets to all kids in government schools, such services will prove to be the cornerstone of any technology driven initiatives.

While the benefits of technology may seem endless and can give rise to new, more efficient ways of teaching, it depends crucially on the quality of usage. Distributing tablets is barely the first step and would fail to make any significant impact unless accompanied with proper training on how to use technology. There needs to be constant monitoring of how devices are being used and to what end. This may even change the role of teachers into more of coaches, a requirement which may eventually be worked out better than training teachers. In places where quality teachers are available, technology will enhance the teaching as a supplement and a complement. There are professors in US universities who have turned the traditional model upside down and use readings and videos as a prelude to a class as opposed to assigning them as homework while the class time is used for discussions and debates. But for all of this to materialize, digital literacy is a basic requirement in a country like India. We can no longer treat technology as just another subsidy. Taking technology to the grassroots will be accompanied by large costs and substantial portion of that costs will have to be dedicated to training students, teachers and all stakeholders concerned. It also requires a change in mindset. Policy makers can no longer obsess over literacy as a parameter of development. Indeed, digital literacy is what we need to be concerned with. If the last ten years have taught us anything, it is that it is difficult to plan for technology and what it may do to change the paradigm. But what we can do is be prepared for changes. Digital literacy is the first step in that preparation.