Dreams Unlimited

The field of education gives unlimited opportunities to dream.

And why would they or should they remain as dreams will take us into an analytical mode.

Instead, it could be fun (sadness in the form of) to dream about possibilities.

Sorry for repetitions:

Education or learning without degrees is a world to look forward to. 

Degrees have boiled down to efficient but meaningless signals for higher-level courses and employers, meaningless because they do not mean one is educated. 

What are the reasons why it happened so?

The notion that you require a common yardstick to measure what you are intellectually could be the foremost reason. Hence, you have Universities controlling affiliated colleges to ensure that they follow a common curriculum and also that their students are examined by a common yardstick.

Very few attempts were made through examination reforms to measure conceptual understanding, ability to use concepts to understand reality and change reality, creativity, ability to hold individualistic perspectives with one’s own logic, etc. Attempts to bring in these to enhance validity of examinations would have lead to unending discussions amongst academics, and academics would not have easily agreed on what and how some of these could be measured. Such disagreements are valid, as academics like to have independent thinking and also be proud of it. Interestingly, it is this privilege that they like to deny to students.


In case you just offer courses in-class or on-line and claim only the behavioural learning outcomes; the only stakeholder who gets affected will be the employer as it would lack an easy proxy by which to select students. Either the employers will have to go for matching learning outcomes with their needs using a software or will have to collectively evolve common yardsticks similar to degrees and marks. If the latter happens, it will just mean that the employers have taken over the educationally meaningless task of examinations and degrees from Universities.  Universities would then use these common yardsticks to prepare students and the whole system will be back to its meaningless present. Then the options for the policy makers will be either to ban common yardstick examinations or have a robust system that smuggles in learning into a common yardstick system.

Why are Educational Institutions in India against the Affective side of You?

Why are Educational Institutions in India against the Affective side of You?

Isn't it happening because we do not provide public spaces in educational institutions for romantic interactions and heterosexual socialization? 

Isn't undergrad education meant for discovering, experimenting with, reflecting on, generating and choosing cognitive, normative as well as affective responses? Are we neglecting the last one?

Aren't the Universities and we teachers also failing in giving our students meaningful assignments (not donkey work and copy paste assignments) that will need them to use the library resources in a meaningful manner?

Globalization of Education and Potential Impact on Intellectual Disparities in India

Globalization of Education and Potential Impact on Intellectual Disparities in India

India does not seem to be having an internationalization strategy at the national level for education.

It is in 2013 that the University Grants Commission came out with a regulation[1], which was more of a reaction to an unregulated scenario of large number of foreign tie-ups already in place than a strategic attempt to globalize higher education with a larger purpose.

Till 2013, the market was implicitly impacting on the education sector with tie-ups mostly catering to the foreign degree craze of Indian students than for any real educational or strategic reasons. The demand understandably was for technical, medical and management education. The collaborations were mostly in the form of twinning programs or franchise arrangements.

Since the craze for foreign degrees or the assumed social capital from a foreign degree was the force behind this mushroom growth, the collaborators from abroad were mostly from those institutions, which were ready to award degrees with least effort on the part of the students.

While the growth has either subdued or become negative now, there is still a student segment, which will go for it.

The Indian industry did realize that these degrees are not of much value and hence the segment of students who were looking for better employment armed with these degrees slowly disappeared. The only market left for these types of collaborations is the nouveau riche from the business community or from the socially less privileged class. It is this exploitation (which is as a result of the legacy of education policies of the Government itself) that provoked the University Grants Commission to come out with regulations.

While the regulation is in place, the implementation in terms of regulating the players who are in it only for money’s sake is still wanting. The mechanisms for this are yet to be put in place.

What is envisaged in the new regulations is a subset of what could have been the case in the unregulated situation. The regulations expect highest graded institutions from abroad to collaborate with institutions that are Grade B and above in India for twinning programs and for award of the foreign Universities’ degrees. The fact that such collaborations did not happen in a big way in an unregulated environment indicates that the market or social forces do not incentivize such collaborations.

That part of the Indian education system, which caters to the masses (in contrast to elite institutions which cater to the privileged few), has evolved into a system that enhances social capital by awarding degrees rather than by imparting education. Imparting real education for the masses requires pedagogical innovations and hence is costly and time consuming. Elite institutions will target better education through such collaborations and will also attract high-grade collaborators easily. Assuming high-grade institutions were shy to enter into collaborations in an unregulated environment, the real beneficiaries will now be elite institutions.

Without any explicit strategy articulated by the Government, globalization of higher education in India probably will result in larger disparities between the intellectually privileged and the intellectually underprivileged.

---

[1] http://www.ugc.ac.in/page/UGC-Regulations.aspx accessed on 9 October 2014

Making Students Get Hooked To Learning

“A Good Teacher is a Bad Teacher: Teaching versus Making Students Learn”

At some point of time during my school days, I learned that lucid step-by-step explanations by my Mathematics teachers did not help me in solving mathematical problems on my own. Though I learned it, I did not become conscious of it till my doctoral program.

I had a privileged background. My father was educated and also a college teacher in Mathematics for sometime. During my vacations, he used to pose problems that I had to solve by evening. If I did not complete them by evening, I will be put to shame by his solving them. That was a challenge and I struggled and solved them on my own. That is what made me learn mathematics.

The teachers, who lucidly explained how to solve those problems with the logic behind, never offered such challenges. We students were under the myth that we could be as good as our teachers by being attentive to them. We did like those teachers and later in my life I realized that we liked them because they were good performers. We liked their performance. But, we didn’t get trained.

It is during my doctoral days that I became reflective and realized that it is not those lucid explanations but my own struggles that helped me learn. There was nobody who could or would explain lucidly to me as to how I should do my doctoral dissertation.

My consciousness of the struggles I underwent helped me in becoming a teacher who would take his students through the same route again but with much more lucid explanations than my teachers.

Though I enjoyed that process and became a good performer in the classroom, I realized that I am making the same mistake my teachers made. Instead of making students learn through challenges, I was also making them listen to narrations on my way of solving problems.

That forced me to unlearn an activity that I was good at and go through a period of hardship to learn how I can teach my students to be independent of their teacher or how I can teach them so that I become dispensable.

I started framing questions and sub-questions that I will ask my students which pose simple to complex challenges in a graded manner. I learned to avoid making declarative statements in the classroom and ask only questions. I had to be patient and go at the speed of the slowest learner. And also offer complex challenges to those faster learners.

I find this is not enough. If I have to design learning sessions to make myself ultimately redundant, I have to make my students ask those questions themselves.

So my challenge before me now is: how do I give that initial push to my students to create and pose challenges to themselves so that they get hooked into learning on their own.

Do Decision Making Levels matter in Case Method?

Majority of the cases that are available with HBS or Case Centre, etc. deals with decision dilemmas faced by top management than executives at the bottom.

Aren’t we using them as though the capabilities that we develop in the students in dealing with top management realities help them to deal with junior executive realities too?

Or, are we again telling that content does not matter; what matters is the process that we make them learn using content as just a context?

How Does Case Method Work?

How Does Case Method Work?

You discuss a decision dilemma situation in 70 minutes; with preparation possibly taking couple of hours.

In reality, you face the decision dilemma gradually over a period of time (let us say weeks) and solve it through many and possibly disparate actions spread over again many weeks.

You feel the method has an impact on the students. Students do acknowledge, even after many years, that they benefited.

How does the 70 minutes process develop capabilities to tackle issues spread over many weeks?

Courses without Syllabi

I have been experimenting with Case Method as the dominant learning method in management education.

Over the years, I have been becoming increasingly aware of what I should have done in the class versus what I did. That lead to more and more engineering on my part before I enter the class. The more and more the Case class gets engineered, the more scope it gives for getting the gaps in my case teaching highlighted. The engineering includes

1. Articulation of competencies that I want to develop in the student using the particular Case. I now do it with as much specificity as possible. 
2. Specifying the 'discussion blocks' (specific issues on which certain amount of class time gets used) in concrete terms including predictions on the positions the students will take and the questioning strategies that I have to adopt.
3. List of alternative and interesting action plans that emerged in previous classes and the ones I invent which I normally project as though they were presented by students in previous classes. 

While these are done from our side, there is usually very little information on what impact these cases  had on students.

For example, if the case generated lot of excitement in the class, the impact can be excitement with very little learning on the part of the students.

If you ask the student to articulate the impact, the impact gets created then and there due to the demands for articulation.

Pre-post behaviour changes can be very costly to measure and with lot of clouding by other factors.

The question based on the title of this posting is: Is there value in Case Method independent of whatever is listed above? Is there value in Case Method however professionally or non-professionally it gets used? If so, what in Case Method creates that impact with enough play for case 'methods'?