Rethinking Technology in Higher Education in India[1]
Anil Pinto
Dept of Media
Studies, Christ University, Bangalore, INDIA.
(Published in the journal ELT Vistas Vol 2, Issue 1. 58-63. Print. ISSN 0975-8526.)
While there have been many discussions on
technology in higher education,
especially in the context of language teaching, they have largely been either
utopic or dystopic.[2]
The former argues that technology is a panacea for all the difficulties that
one faces in teaching in the regular classroom, and educational administration.
The latter’s view would disagree with technology doing a better job than the
human teacher. The second group also asks questions about the teacher becoming
redundant with the technology, or the consequent loss of human touch in
education. What is to be noted is that both the responses are a reaction to the
phenomenon of the proliferation of the digital technology in the society and
its direct and indirect bearing on the classroom. However, both polemic positions ignore
the complex ways in which the digital technology has come to redefine our
engagement with the social- and the political aspects of our society and
consequently also the classroom.
Before I begin to discuss digital
technology in the context of higher education, I wish to clarify the use of
some key concepts here. One is technology. Technology on the one hand has come
to be understood as an object out there, and on the other, in recent times, to exclusively
refer to high technology like mobile phones and computers. However, I draw upon
the etymological understanding of the term technology which comes from the
Greek word techne meaning skill or that which reduces human labour. By
extension I treat script, print as technologies. Script and print are the two
technologies that have redefined the way human societies were organised and their
worldview.[3]
Although there is no availability of evidence that can stand the rigour of
academic inquiry to suggest that the digital is also a similar technology like
that of print and script, empirical observation, and anecdotal evidence clearly
points to such a direction.
I use the term digital technology in order
not to group the new phenomenon under the rubric of other technologies as I
wish to draw attention to the nature of the technology that defines it –
digitality. I also use it to make a point that the digital technology is
distinct in that “[m]uch like the print technologies the rise and emergence of
digital technology seems to be producing new citizenships, forms of governance
and public spheres of which … technology-mediated identities are a component.”[4]
Classroom although linguistically suggests
a physical organisation of place within an enclosure of four walls where
teaching-learning takes place, needs to be considered more as a space that
emerges in a specific relationship between knowledge disseminator and knowledge
‘receiver’ within the norms and laws framed by the state or society. Such an
understanding of the term will help in understanding the nature of the
classroom in the context of distance, and internet-mediated learning.
One of the reasons why the polemic
positions regarding the digital technology arise is because of the tendency to
concentrate only on the technology and not necessarily reflect on how do the
technologies influence and sometimes transform or enable different subjectivities.
The other reason is due to the tendency to treat the digital technology merely
as another technology and thereby collapse the present development as belonging
to the old developments of the television or print technology era.
Digital technologies have already unleashed
a different imagination, behaviour and thinking that are changing the
socio-political conditions as we knew them. These have already had a direct
impact on the classroom. The use of mobile phones quite unapologetically, constant
touch with the world outside the classroom through mobile phones, plagiarism
that seems completely normal for the students, blogging, social networking
among students based on political causes, academic needs, expressing academic
disappointment, venting the grouse against the teachers and institutions in the
cyberspace, institutions trying to woo prospective students through
institutional websites are some of the
immediately perceived outcomes of this new condition.
What makes the phenomenon worth taking note
of in India
is the recent interest of the state to harness the internet technology to
address the issues affecting the higher education. The Indian State has been
allocating significant amount of money and putting organisations in place to
not only make information and communication technology (ICT) part of existing
higher education apparatus but also to look at creating a new system
facilitated by the ICT alongside. Recently, Cabinet Committee on Economic
Affairs (CCEA) gave its go ahead for the National Mission on Education through
Information and Communication Technology. This mission costs Rs 4,612 crores in
the 11th plan.[5]
Indira Gandhi National University (IGNOU) is making its course material
available online and allowing students to take exams online round the year for
select courses. Quite a few universities are also shifting to making the course
material available on their websites, or giving it in CDs.[6]
These are some of the examples of existing universities trying to adapt to the
changed social demands mediated by digital technology.
There is however, an inherent flaw within
the present imagination which has brought ICT into the existing higher
educational institutions which are trying to accommodate the ICT within the
structure that is largely a legacy of the print era. For examples, one of the
direct outcomes of the digital technology is to increasingly present knowledge
as contested. This comes clearly in conflict with existing lecture method which
assumes that there is definiteness to knowledge and the teacher’s reading and
view is the sufficient proof of that.
The tensions one notices in the classroom or
within academic institutions between teachers and students are also due to the
way knowledge production has changed. During the print era formal knowledge
production was the sole privilege of the scholars and researchers on which the
teachers banked on. When knowledge production breaks the age barrier and in a
typical classroom or an academic space you have students who are producers of
knowledge in the cyber space, and teacher who has not involved in publication,
tension in their relationship is inevitable. The teacher and the student going
to the same source for information, for example, Wikipedia can also create new
tensions in the power-equations between the teacher and the students.
Within the Indian higher education set up the
present tension is due to the historical development of the borrowed university
structure meeting the changed socio-economic and political conditions. First, in
the Humoldtian imagination, a teacher in a university was supposed to be also a
knowledge producer.[7]
But the teacher for numerous reasons remained only as a knowledge disseminator.
It is this historical role only as a knowledge disseminator that now has come
to be challenged in Indian higher education due to state intervention which
likes to see teachers as knowledge producers and not merely knowledge disseminators.
Second, this state intervention comes along with the market demands for skilled
labour from the universities which has made theoretical or conceptual learning seem
like an aberration. Third, the exposure of Indian higher education to first
world thanks to globalisation coupled with India’s global ambitions
necessitated a global ambition of higher education.
However, none of these created a crisis in
higher education for which the state now thinks of the ICT as an answer. The
crisis that the state takes note of occurs when the three historical and contemporary
issues meet the fourth historical development of India – higher education as a
right – where increasingly various groups making claims to entry into higher
education . The demand looks nearly impossible for the state to achieve within
the present infrastructure and resources. Further, this claim to higher
education as a right runs counter to the Humboldtian imagination of the
university where the university is entrusted with the job creating a small
elite class which will preserve the national culture.[8]
Hence, the state turns to ICT as a way of addressing the crisis. In this
context the digital technology becomes for the state what in communication
theory is called the last mile solution. But the introduction the digital
technology to address the crisis, only further takes the university away from
its Humboldtian moorings.
The incorporation of the digital technology
would call for a different type of organisation of the institution in terms of
its curriculum, pedagogy, testing, evaluation, and administration. The idea of
institution as buildings may require change. It might more of a cyberspacial
presence. Curriculum may take on the coursework reading mode with blurring of
disciplines where the reading material is made available online. This might
even dissolve existing disciplines and create newer ones. Peer learning may
replace face-to-face regular contact classes. Testing could become anytime,
anywhere and may demand different levels of testing. Evaluation will undergo
changes perhaps of which we do not have clear idea. The administrative set up
of a university might undergo important change with the administrator becoming
the most important person than the professor, a trend that is increasingly
becoming a norm.[9]
While the digital technology is likely to
replace the physical teacher, it may not replace the symbolic teacher, and the
research-teacher.[10] The
symbolic teacher might be required to validate a skill or particular exposure
to knowledge and methods of a domain of knowledge. However, the
research-teacher is most likely to stay as the perhaps in a different role and
function.
However, the most significant change that
will occur would be the model of teaching-learning. With all the major
interactions of human societies with technologies which consequently shaped
them differently, if there was on model
that survived from the period of the script through print was the one to many
model of the teaching.[11]
It is this model that is under threat of becoming many-to-many model – a way in
which the knowledge architecture on the cyberspace is built.
In conclusion, with the state initiative in
proliferating ICT into existing traditional universities, and creating ICT
based educational systems imparting higher education, the very structure and
nature of higher education and classroom its microcosm, itself is emendable for
change. Since, such a change is inevitable, while implementing the ICT it would
be important to think about accommodating the technology enabled imagination
within the re structuring of the institution of higher education.
[1] This paper is an
outcome of the Digital Classroom course jointly taught by Ashish Rajadhyaksha,
CSCS, Nishant Shah, CIS and me at Christ
University, Bangalore.
[2] I owe this insight to Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
[3] Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. A
Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Blackwell,
2002, pp 1-14.
[4] Shah, Nishant and
Sunil Abraham.
Digital Natives with a
Cause? Bangalore:
CIS, 2010, 23.
[5] Mukherjee, Shubra.
‘Education Plan Halfway’. Deccan Herald. 31 Jan 2010, pp 7.
[6] Gandhigram Rural
University offers its M.Phil. course material in CDs.
[7] Readings, Bill.
The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, pp 15.
[10] This insight is from Anup Dhar of CSCS, Bangalore.
[11] This insight is from
Anshis Rajadhyaksha.
