Tag: highered

Proposed Examination Reforms

I’m not holding my breath, but this article has raised my hopes just a little bit:

Colleges and universities may soon adopt continuous comprehensive evaluation, a method that shifts focus from only annual or semester-level summative assessment system.
The suggestion has come from higher education regulator University Grants Commission (UGC) amid the increasing dependence on technology for education delivery in the current pandemic environment. Assessment at several intervals during and after achievement of learning outcomes specified for every module is needed as blended learning is gaining ground, UGC said in a draft proposal shared with higher educational institutions.

https://www.livemint.com/education/news/ugc-bats-for-reforms-in-exams-with-a-focus-on-continuous-evaluation-11621798197326.html

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: everybody associated with academia in India knows how broken, pointless and screwed-up examinations are, but nobody wants to do anything about it. And the most often quoted reason is R Madhavan in 3 Idiots going “Abba nahi manenge”.

Abba being the UGC.

But now, hallelujah, the UGC is talking about open book examinations and on-demand examinations. This was a “tears in my eyes moment“:

Open book exams is the “right way to move away from the conventional approach of exam where remembering and reproducing is prime”, UGC said. “In real functioning beyond formal education, life is all about open book examination. Hence, in higher education, we must prepare students for work life by making them acquainted with open book examinations. It will also facilitate better understanding and application of knowledge,” UGC said, citing an internal committee report.

https://www.livemint.com/education/news/ugc-bats-for-reforms-in-exams-with-a-focus-on-continuous-evaluation-11621798197326.html

There is still a world of pain that awaits those of us who are in academia. The inertia associated with the old system will take years((And if I am to be cynical, which is almost always the case, I’ll say decades)) to overcome, and it will be a long, unpleasant journey.

More, we will run up against capacity constraints, because shifting away from the “State in brief” questions to having students think critically will require the changing of multiple mindsets, along with intensive training of faculty in all universities.

And even if some universities were to adopt this whole-heartedly, one unintended consequence will be the exacerbation of already ridiculously high inequality. The inequality I speak of is in terms of access to quality higher education, of course. Better colleges and universities will get better still, and while that is desirable for the students who are lucky enough to get into them, it doesn’t bode well for equitable educational outcomes across the country.

But even so, the very fact that this is even being discussed in the first place is a welcome move.

The one thing that gives me hope is something that is discussed almost as an after-thought in the article: e-portfolios.

An electronic porfolio (e-portfolio) is a purposeful collection of sample student work, demonstrations, and artifacts that showcase student’s learning progression, achievement, and evidence of what students can do. The collection can include essays and papers (text-based), blog, multimedia (recordings of demonstrations, interviews, presentations, etc.), graphic.

https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/assessment-and-evaluation/design-assessment/e-portfolio

This blog, for example, is my “e-portfolio”. I pay around ten to twelve thousand rupees every year to maintain this blog, but one can of course start a blog for free. Or a YouTube channel, or an Instagram page or absolutely anything else you like.

In an ideal world, e-portfolios (and could we come up with e better name for it, please?) are solely the responsibility of the student. They can be in any language. They can be nurtured over time, for years together. Cultivating your e-portfolio needn’t cost money, in other words, and popularizing your e-portfolio is a life-skill worth developing in its own right.

Most importantly, developing one requires just a smartphone. Yes, this is still a challenge for large parts of our country, but I would argue that a learning system that revolves around the development of an e-portfolio is more efficient, cheaper and easier than even a perfectly reformed examination system.

Bottomline: marks, examinations and degrees are overrated. Doing the work, and sharing your work in the public domain is underrated.

Here’s a blogpost from last year about conducting examinations during these crazy times, and here are all the posts I have written about higher education on EFE.

Certificates and College Degrees

A past student of mine (and now a good friend) Alankar Pednekar shared a video with me recently.

Alankar mentions how at around the 10:15 mark in this video, an article is cited which speaks about how a certificate like this could potentially disrupt the college degree.

He had some questions about the video, and about the article. I answer them below (please note that I have lightly edited his questions for clarity. Any confusions that remain are down to me!):

  1. Logically speaking this sounds true, but is it really possible? Do you see this happening sometime soon, maybe?
    …
    …
    It’s already happening, of course. I wrote about it earlier, and you might also want to take a look at Lambda School, or STOA School. In different ways, the idea of college is being challenged. And if you ask me, it is high time it was challenged! Higher education has remained far too hide-bound for far too long, and technology, resistance to outdated ways of teaching and weirdly, the pandemic have made all of us aware of what is possible, if only we kept our minds open.
    …
    …
  2. Will there be any scenario where – there won’t be any “Middle Men”- The colleges – in the education sector (As Professor Tyler and Professor Alex debate about in one of their “Duels”), and companies would prefer to educate (or should I say ‘Train’?) to people who are willing to learn and hire them directly?
    …
    …
    Part of the answer lies in we not being clear about what we’re buying when we pay money to a college for higher education.
    For some folks (in many places, at least in India, these folks are the majority), higher education is about a job, and that is it. Of course, it is impolite to admit this in public, but this is the stark truth: higher education is about a job. Contrast the enthusiasm with which placement talks are planned and attended with regular classes in your own college if you are a student, for example.
    For other people, higher education is about higher education – that is, about learning for its own sake. Until colleges, students, parents and firms acknowledge that this difference exists, we will have the confused system that we live in right now. This really deserves book length treatment, but I’ll stop here for now.
    ..
    ..
  3. Assuming this happens in reality, will that be an end of colleges and universities, or they will get replaced by training centers (which we already see in today’s markets). Will there be any existence for pure joy of learning and immense pleasure of understanding things around us (even though they might not directly help us in anything)?
    ..
    ..
    Training centres exist today to train people to write exams to get into colleges. And colleges are viewed as a way to get jobs. So why not have training centres to get people jobs?
    That then leaves us free to have colleges be about “the pure joy of learning”, as both David Perell and Alankar point out. The trick, if you ask me, lies in unbundling college. You should be able to purchase courses rather than degrees.
    The trouble is that a blogpost is easy to write, and to change a system that we are all so used to is all but impossible to do.
    But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. College as it exists today solves efficiently neither the problem of training people well for jobs in the real world, nor the problem of delivering quality education for its own sake. And the growing discontent is palpable.
    ..
    ..
    Palpable to me, at any rate.

Project Based Learning

This post is based on a discussion with a student about (what else?) unhappiness with marks.

What is the point of an education? Is it to score marks? Or to score a job? Or to better oneself? Or all of the above? And if it is all of the above, is it 33.333% weightage to each? Or are some objectives more important than others?

Now, if it isn’t clear already to long-time readers of this blog, my own personal answers to the questions I listed above have scoring a job and bettering oneself at about 99% weightage, with marks getting – maybe – 1%. There are many reasons for I thinking so, and maybe next Friday’s post could be all about that. But if you, for the moment, accept that the point of an education ought not to be marks maximization, it still begs the question: well then, what instead?

My answer would be: do the work.

Does a course on HTML teach you more, or does building and maintaining a website teach you more?

Does a course on business communication teach you more, or does running a podcast teach you more?

Does a course on statistics teach you more, or does building out a simple Google Sheet about distributions teach you more?

Is marketing best learnt through submitting an assignment, or by learning how to build out and market your own LinkedIn page, Instagram page and Twitter feed?

Much more importantly, what is the proof that you have learnt? Marks you score in an exam, or tangible proof of work done that is out for consumption in the public domain? What do you have more fun doing? What teaches you to work better in a team? What teaches you to lead people, and therefore learn perhaps the important life-skill of all?

More people in academia ought to know about project based learning, and when I say know, I mean implement.

Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. PBL contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems or scenarios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project-based_learning

No system, anywhere, ever, is perfect. So also with PBL. I’m sure it has its flaws, and having worked on the projects I have linked to above in this past year, I am going to speak about some of these flaws in this post. But I remain convinced that it is a better way to learn. And my conviction is multiplied many times over when it comes to the question of certification: projects over marks, every single day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

There are many reasons for this, and again, perhaps that is worthy of another post, but the most important one is this one: project based learning is a non-zero-sum game. Examinations are a zero-sum-game.

For me to win (or score well, or do well, or whatever ghastly phrase you want to use when it comes to doing well in an examination), you have to lose. But the successful completion of a project requires that everybody wins – in fact, it’s even better. For you to win as a participant in the project, you have to help others win. You have to persuade, cajole, berate and drive your team members to do their jobs well, in addition to doing your own task well – and you win only when everybody wins.

Which, if you ask me, is a better education than having to constantly look at how well others have done in order to feel satisfied with how well you have done. Plus, either a project has shipped, or it hasn’t. You don’t have to depend upon the subjective assessment of a professor to judge whether it is a job well done or not.

Besides, there is the rather important consideration that a podcast, a website, a Twitter account (and everything else up there submitted as evidence m’lud) benefits its viewers. You may sneer and ask for metrics, but so long as it is more than zero, it trumps your submitted answer sheet.

But there are downsides, to be sure. Of course there are.

PBL teaching takes more time to plan, more curriculum and technology resources, more day-to-day problem solving about how to scaffold student growth and success in their project work, more effort to authentically assess student learning, more communication with persons in the community, more support from the administration in terms of suitable scheduling and curriculum alignment, and more opportunities to collaborate with their teaching colleagues

Lee, J. S., Blackwell, S., Drake, J., & Moran, K. A. (2014). Taking a leap of faith: Redefining teaching and learning in higher education through project-based learning. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 8(2), 2.

(The word “more” is italicized in the original every single time. WordPress’ formatting italicizes the whole thing. Sorry.)

In other words, it is expensive. There is a part of me that wants to say so what, but hey, I work in a University, and reality means that this must be a consideration. But how to make PBL more efficient in terms of time and money is – to me – a more worthwhile and pressing challenge than explaining to students why x marks out of y (“when that student got z. And his wasn’t even all that good an assignment!”) actually isn’t that bad.

Second, it is very much dependent on the team working on the program. If there is a change in personnel (that is, the faculty members who are running the show), and sooner or later that is inevitable, the PBL system can break down overnight. It is comparatively easy to set up processes for the efficient conduct of examinations by making personnel irrelevant – but all but impossible to do for PBL. Well, impossible is a strong word, but it’s close enough. How to increase the supply of profs who are willing to work in such a system is a major, major challenge.

Third, and this takes me into what I think are very deep waters: culture. Part of the reason the Sharmaji ka beta meme is funny is because it is true. In certain cases that I personally know of, it is devastatingly, distressingly true. We judge our successes, our children’s successes by asking if our performances were better than everybody else’s. And the more I work in this industry, the more convinced I get that until our culture changes, very little else will.

I, of course, have not the faintest idea about how to change culture. Except, perhaps, through running PBL experiments – which is what I try to do.

And until it (culture) changes, I’ll have to do that part of my job that I detest above all: talking to students about how many marks they scored and why it isn’t all that big a deal.

A very short, but also a very painful post

Seth Godin wrote a post that was painful to read for me, and if you’ve been reading my posts recently you’ll know why. The title of the post was “What does it mean to do well in school?“:

Is it the same as “doing well on some tests”?
Because that’s what we report–that perhaps 240 times in a college career, you sat down for a test and did well on it.
That’s hardly the same as doing well in school.
Where do we look up insight on your resilience, enthusiasm, cooperation, curiosity, collaboration, honesty, generosity and leadership?
Because it seems like that’s far more important than whether or not you remembered something long enough to repeat it back on a test.

https://seths.blog/2021/02/what-does-it-mean-to-do-well-in-school/

Yes, so much yes. But of course, those of us involved in running academia excel at designing tests. The other things, not so much.

And then, to add injury to insult (not a typo), this Twitter thread:

Education as we know it is changing in front of our eyes, and for the better, but it is happening in spite of colleges, not because of them.

And nobody seems to care.

On The State of Higher Education in India (#1 of n)

Quite unexpectedly, I have ended up writing what will be an ongoing series about discovering more about the Indian Constitution. It began because I wanted to answer for myself questions about how the Indian Constitution came to be, and reading more about it has become a rather engaging rabbit hole.

Increasingly, it looks as if Mondays (which is when I write about India here) will now alternate between essays on the Indian Constitution and the topic of today’s essay: the state of (higher) education in India.

The series about the Constitution is serendipity; the series about education is an overwhelming passion.

I’ve been teaching at post-graduate institutions for the past decade now, and higher education in India is problematic on many, many counts. I’ll get into all of them in painstaking detail in the weeks to come, today is just about five articles you might want to read to give yourself an overview of where we are.

In the last 30 years, higher education in India has witnessed rapid and impressive growth. The increase in the number of institutions is, however, disproportionate to the quality of education that is being dispersed.

That is from the “Challenges” section of the Wikipedia article on higher education in India. The section highlights financing, enrollment, accreditation and politics as major challenges. To which I will add (and elaborate upon in the weeks to come) signaling, pedagogy, evaluation, overemphasis on classroom teaching, the return on investment – (time and money both), relevance, linkages to the real world, out-of-date syllabi, and finally under-emphasis on critical thinking and writing.

“Educational attainment in present-day India is also not directly correlated to employment prospects—a fact that raises doubts about the quality and relevance of Indian education. Although estimates vary, there is little doubt that unemployment is high among university graduates—Indian authorities noted in 2017 that 60 percent of engineering graduates remain unemployed, while a 2013 study of 60,000 university graduates in different disciplines found that 47 percent of them were unemployable in any skilled occupation. India’s overall youth unemployment rate, meanwhile, has remained stuck above 10 percent for the past decade.”

That is from an excellent summary of higher education in India. It is a very, very long read, but I have not been able to find a better in-one-place summary of education in India.

A series of charts detailing some statistics about higher education in India, by the Hindu. For reasons I’ll get into in the weeks to come, the statistics are somewhat misleading.

Overall, it seems from this survey, which shows impressive strides on enrollment, college density and pupil-teacher ratio, that we have finally managed to fix the supply problem. Now, we need to focus on the quality.

Swarajyamag reports on the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) in India, 2016-17. As the report mentions, we have come a long way in terms of fixing the supply problem in higher education – we now need to focus on the much more important (and alas, much more difficult) problem of quality.

“Strange as it might look, the quality of statistics available for our higher education institutes has been much poorer than our statistics on school education. Sensing this gap, the central government instituted AISHE in 2011-12. We now have official (self-reported and unverified) statistics on the number and nature of higher education institutions, student enrolment, and pass-out figures along with the numbers for teaching and non-teaching staff. Sadly, this official survey does not tell us much about the quality of teaching, learning or research. There is no equivalent of Pratham’s ASER survey or the NCERT’s All India School Education Survey.”

That is from The Print ,and it takes a rather dimmer view than does Swarajyamag. With reference to the last two links especially, read both of them without bias for or against, beware of mood affiliation!

Education needs to become much, much, much more relevant than it currently is in India, and half of the Mondays to come in 2020 will be about teaching myself more about this topic. I can’t wait!