Blog Series-1: Bridging the gap between learning and needs of corporate – Problem Statement

With growing market needs, Higher Education in India has seen massive growth in recent years; yet we see a wide gap in the supply of quality manpower to meet demand. Recent studies from Hewitt have shown that less than 10 percent (around 65,000) of the graduate and post graduate pool of 650,000 are eligible to undertake R&D related assignments. The reasons could be multifold –

· Unemployable not for the lack of theoretical knowledge but for the lack of skills and attitude necessary for doing the job successfully.
· Lack of finishing school for engineering graduates
· Everyone knows that the vast majority of learning in the workplace is informal, but not so many know how to go about it
· Colleges emphasize very heavily on finding a job as opposed to learning
· Low academic research focus and patent filings
· Universities are giving importance to imparting knowledge instead of creation of knowledge
· The higher educational degree programs are very precisely focused on producing quality graduates with refined technical and mathematical skills which will cater to companies focusing on research and product development (Gaps exists here too). Compounding the problem, we find that the majority of the industry in India as in principle Indian subsidiaries and companies are service providers and/or operating in consumer market that mainly requires engineers for operation, support & maintenance related activities. The conventional higher educational degree programs do not produce talent to meet this market requirement
· Educational institutes has the flexibility and energy to do exploratory projects but no capacity to put it to production
· Companies not having a robust “campus connect” program
· In the Semiconductor and Information Technology area, knowledge comes and goes so quickly that what IT professionals/Designers learned two years ago already becomes outdated today
· Lack of common body to govern faculty and to share best practices
· Absent of yearly scorecard on the Universities to access the performance of Universities on an overall basis and course basis
· No mechanism in place to have the best practices from one university currently not replicated in the others
· No common ground for professors to meet and exchange their views and ideas

All this sums up to - the industry is facing a "quality gap" with regard to talent. Imparting relevant knowledge that is sustainable in the changing conditions is important. Educational institutes should produce engineers with skills which are suitable for wide industries. Having customized programs for “a” industry will defeat the purpose of an educational institute. Skill and knowledge enhancement should be a continuous learning process.

But with so many reasons, I guess the top three problems that chiefly contribute to the widening gap would be:

1. Lack of blended learning – Mix of Informal learning and formal learning
2. Lack of problem based learning in curriculum to get better relevance with the industry wants
3. Lack of interaction between corporate and campus

Since the problems need separate attention and specific ways in which they can be addressed, I will be writing a series, where each blog will highlight a specific problem and some plausible solution to address the problem

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school ...Albert Einstein

What is Learning ?

Wikipedia defines learning as

“Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. “

According to Jonassen [1] "learning is biochemical activity in the brain; a relatively permanent change in behavior; information processing; awakening, remembering and recalling; social negotiation; critical thinking; knowledge construction; conceptual change; meaning making; activity; turning perceptions to environmental affordances; and learning is chaos."

All are descriptions of different aspects of learning. What all of these conceptions assume is that learning is an activity which creates unity of learning, doing and thinking. Learning, especially meaningful learning, engages activity[1]. There are various types of learning, such as learning through observation, rote learning, formal learning, informal learning, etc.

Let us focus on formal learning or from an educational perspective. Typically the process of acquiring knowledge in an educational context involves two key elements: one (teacher) who actively imparts knowledge and two (student or the learner) who actively gains knowledge. Each of these elements is equally essential for learning to be successful. The success is earned mutually for both the teacher giving the knowledge and the student gaining the knowledge. In teaching students one hopes to engage their minds and passions. The teacher must consider what he has to give and hopes to increase the student’s knowledge. The student not only gains new information but also weaves this information into his/her life. For the student, the key is how they acquire information and what he/she might do to make this information part of his/her experience.

So, the vital question is, how do we present the information so that the student acquires the information easily and secondly can make it part of his/her experience. I argue that by bring in activity based methods into learning will address both the 2 key questions.

References

[1] Jonassen, D. and Churchill, D. (2003). Where is the learning in learning objects? To appear in the International Journal of E-learning.

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Can social media aid higher educational institutes in India for improving student involvement?"

Off late there has been enough buzz around "social learning" and it’s potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the way students learn. Since, I personally believe in power social media weilds on the way students learn, I decided to give my take on this. Rather than delve upon the topic in general – as its been beaten to death, I am looking at a series of blog posts where I want to highlight the role technology/ social media plays in higher education in India. In this blog, I am looking to set stage and invite the views of the readers on this subject

For the uninitiated, I would like to share some quick facts about FB and its growth in India . The numbers are mind blowing.

Clearly, what this suggests is that today students in India are going and spending time on a platform and they are comfortable using it. The question we need to ask is "Can we use some of that time to drive student learning??"

Before we try and answer that, I would like to raise some key issues that I believe need to be addressed for adoption of any new technology in higher education, including things like "social learning".

What drives students?

One of the key things I keep hearing in Indian context is "Students are not interested to learn". However, I strongly believe that if the students are engaged and motivated in the right manner than a vast majority of them can be converted from non-learners to learners, and technology can play a vital role here. At the same time, technology/learning platform can only be an aid for the faculty, and its benefits to students will remain limited without the support and facilitation from the faculty.

What faculty wants?

Often, I have found that faculty is interested in adopting new technologies, but they do not want to spend a lot of time in learning the platform. They also have a lot of administrative and non-academic tasks at hand and consequently if any new technology demands a lot of their time, in all probability it will not fly. "Teacher training" has been cited as one of the key requirements for adoption of any new technology in Indian colleges, but again, it has its limitations.

So, for all the technology/platform providers, there are some questions that we need to ask ourselves:

"What are the technologies/platforms that we can drive student engagement and learning?"

"How can the faculty deliver more without spending a lot of extra time to understand the technology?"

The first question is reasonably talked about, but I feel that the second is particularly important because the faster the faculty can adopt to a platform, the more they can deliver to the students.

This leads us to ask the question -- "Is social networking the answer??" Part 2 of my blog hopes to address this…