Towards a future of Universities without walls
NEW YORK: At the recent India-US Higher Education Summit held in Washington DC, educators, thought leaders and policy makers of the two countries got more than mere statistics and projections for possible collaborations. They found themselves being challenged to think different, think people-to-people, and to think of future universities without walls.
Co-hosts of the Summit India’s Minister for Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in their respective inaugural address on the morning of Oct 13 at Georgetown University, threw up radical yet achievable ideas at the 300 attendees that included heads of elite educational institutions, industry leaders, government officials and diplomats.
“We need to open up the university as a learning space, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls between institutions.” That was a visionary call to educators and policy makers towards radically transforming classrooms of the 21st century as evinced by Minister Sibal.
Minister Sibal laid out his vision for a more democratic process of learning aided by technology and unencumbered by physical boundaries in the near future.
“The nature of delivery of educational services is changing rapidly,” the Minister told the gathering. “Technology has facilitated collaborative learning through the democratizing influence of the web. It may be too early to write the epitaph for the classroom, but the classrooms of the 21st century will be different from those that served us in the past. The content of pedagogy too would be radically altered. The silos that fragmented knowledge have already started collapsing. Customized learning across cultures will be the dominant theme of higher education. We need to open up the university as a learning space, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls between institutions.”
Sibal said he foresees a day where an engineering student from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) can register for a liberal arts course offered by Yale while simultaneously enrolling for an economics course in Stanford. “The university as a physical entity may no longer remain the unit of learning space,” he prophesied.
Impressively, Minister Sibal made the responsibility for educating Indian youth a global responsibility as he sees it. “With declining demographics around the world, the global community will require a suitably skilled workforce to serve its needs. Our demographic advantage could, thereby, become an integral part of the global workforce,” he said.
Pushing for American Universities to collaborate with Indian universities he said that providing quality and skill-based education to the millions of youth of India today would prove to be a demographic advantage for not only India but the world at large.
For all the future benefits, there are challenges in the present that need to be met head on. “More than 100 million youth – the combined labor forces of Britain, France, Italy and Spain – are projected to join the workforce by 2020,” Sibal explained. “This will be a great potential resource only if they are empowered with education and skills to leverage available global opportunities. If we fail to do this, our demographic advantage will be lost and our youth alienated. For us, it is a fundamental imperative that our young have access to affordable, quality education.”
The Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in higher education in India is presently around mere 15%, about 10% below the world average. India aims to increase its GER to 30% by 2020. “This would require us to provide for opportunities in higher education for an additional thirty million children by 2020. To do that, we will need to build an additional 1000 universities and 50,000 colleges. To serve these institutions, we will require quality faculty of over a million assisted by quality support structures,” the Minister said.
The “new” demand for higher education in India, Sibal said, was emerging from three groups that traditionally did not have easy access to higher education – the disadvantaged and marginalized, women and a “rising” lower-middle class.
To sustain its own economic growth, India requires a skilled workforce of about 500 million by 2022.
Towards that end, India needs to build a robust Vocational Education system that links education to the world of work. “This requires the award of qualifications of international standards accepted by industry globally,” Sibal said. “This will enable mobility of students across vocational and higher education. Students endowed with skill-sets sought by industry globally will then serve its needs. We can draw from the experiences of community colleges in the US as we proceed to develop the vocational education system in India.”
Looking to the challenges of the 21st Century, Sibal said “they are truly global” and that nations would have to transcend boundaries in thought and action for sustainable and affordable solutions. “Food security, global warming and the environment, demands on energy, water, security in physical and virtual spaces, healthcare are all matters that we need to address together,” he said.
“Business as usual is a sure recipe for global disaster,” Sibal warned. “The global economy will not be defined by financial flows and trade but by global, collaborative, knowledge networks where ideas move seamlessly.”
Social networks and resource sharing in cyber-space are precursors to the development of knowledge networks that will aim to address the problems of tomorrow, he said, adding that technology has led to the “death of distance”.
No idea is off limits
For Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as a student at Wellesley had hoped for a Fulbright India scholarship but could not get one owing to a suspension of the program at the time, academic collaboration between India and the US is more than just government to government. Clinton challenged academicians and educators to come up with out of the box solutions, citing a real example:
“A few years ago, a small group of American and Indian classmates at Stanford University decided to work together to build a better baby incubator,” Clinton narrated. “Four hundred and fifty premature and low-weight babies die every hour, and traditional baby incubators can cost as much as $20,000. So the students developed the Embrace baby warmer, a portable incubator for use in poor and rural areas that doesn’t require electricity and only costs around $100.
“After graduating from Stanford, this Indian and American team moved to Bangalore to continue working on their idea and launched their project. And it’s now in use in hospitals in India and saving babies’ lives. Their goal is to save 100,000 babies by 2013.
“Now, this is a simple idea born out of conversations between students from both of our countries talking about shared hopes for a better world that led to action. And it took these American and Indian students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives working together to make it happen.”
With that story, Sec. Clinton said: “I’d like to challenge all of us to jumpstart these kinds of relationships and opportunities for cooperation… consider no idea off limits, no outcome impossible, asking yourselves: How can our universities deepen our collaboration and particularly our student and faculty exchanges, and how can we work more on research, and how can we set goals for ourselves that we then work toward meeting? How can the private sector and government help our educational institutions help catalyze the workforce that will be needed in the 21st century in both of our countries? What institutional barriers can we and should we break down, and how do we build forward?”
The Obama-Singh Initiative launched when the two leaders met in 2009, provides $10 million for increased university partnership and junior faculty development.
The Fulbright-Nehru program has nearly tripled in size in the past three years, and the United States now conducts more faculty exchanges with India than with any other country through this program. Through the new Passport to India program, the US government is working with the private sector to help more American students experience India through internships and service projects. The US has also expanded its Education U.S.A. advising services for Indian students and their families to provide information about opportunities for study. In that context, Sec. Clinton said “frankly it is to help (the Indian students) sort out misleading offers that come over the internet, and we know flood into homes across India, giving young Indian students the idea that a certain approach will work for them when, in fact, it is a dead end. We don’t want to see that happen. We want to see real exchanges with credible institutions, and we will do everything we can to support that.”
SRIREKHA CHAKRAVARTY
India Post News Service
