Teaching Learning Process Transformation in Higher Education

Introduction

Like the health care industry, education is being rewired across the entire learner’s journey, from how learners access the information and education content, to how they pay for it, to how the learning experience is delivered. The intersection of the digital sector with education is accelerating the transformation of the learning process, making stakeholder of education sector more fluent in using digital technologies and more receptive to virtual engagement. The effect can be seen everywhere, from learners to educators to regulators. Digital technology is becoming younger and younger every day, making us feel older and older. In order to stop this feeling, we need to adopt a lifelong learning approach.

Why is a change needed?

For a generation brought up in a culture of consumption, my way, what I want, when I want, where I want it, delivering education services is a big challenge. We cannot offer them education and educational services in a conventional way. We need to identify ways of offering education and educational services. We need to bridge the gap between the conventional education system and the expectations of the current generation. The way Apple rewrote the relationship between listeners and their music with the help of Digital Technologies, we need to rewrite the relationship between learners and their education.

Traditional classroom teaching learning is giving way to hybrid or blended learning. Data Analytics and machine learning are helping to offer better learning outcomes and experiences. Further enabling a culture of lifelong learning.

The teacher’s work initially focused on sharing information and assessing the learning. Considering the vast availability of educational content, now they need to focus on how to curate information, provide counselling and guidance, becoming co-creator, co-innovator, and co-learner. Teachers need to move from the " let us see the tree “ approach to let us see the forest. It means, instead of making the learner Chintatur (चिंतातुर), we should make the learner Chintanatur (चिंतनातुर).

Google Buffet Approach in Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning are now becoming more collaborative in nature, moving from teacher-centric (Sage on Stage) to learner-centric. Or we can say that instead of outsourcing teaching to teachers, it is becoming more of a friend Sourcing. Where the teacher is an enabler, guide, and friend in the learning process. Learners, instead of focusing on how to produce good drawings, should be trained to focus on what good drawings they can produce.

To improve the overall teaching-learning experience, we can also use the Google Buffet concept in education. In the buffet at Google, items are marked red, yellow, and green.

Red means be careful while eating.

Yellow means a good couple of times a week

Green means healthy and should be eaten every day.

Plates are small to discourage taking more and avoid waste. Cooks are walking around and talking to the diners about food and answering their queries.

We can apply a similar approach in teaching and learning. Teachers can provide curated content from YouTube videos, TED talks, video lectures, notes, a portion of a book/chapter, research papers, patents, etc. It can also be offered in the form of a playlist of the above-mentioned lists, well before personal interactions.

During classroom interaction, teachers can resolve queries related to content shared earlier, provide guidance in further learning, possible applications in day-to-day life,/ Social sector/industries/businesses, etc. This will make the overall learning experience more contextual, enjoyable, collaborative, socially useful, and productive. Further, this will make learning less about adding something that is not there than recognizing, reinforcing, and redefining what is already there.

Like more crop per drop, the teacher shall be able to focus on more curated personalized information and content/analysis/transformation per click per touch.

Disruption Opportunities in Education

As in the case of industry, banking, and the service sector, in education, we also have to extensively use technology with a human touch to identify 10X disruption opportunities. To provide a better learning and assessment experience, we need to identify enablers as well as disruptors of the teaching-learning process at the level of

• Classroom interaction

• Online or virtual interaction

• Individual interaction

• Social and business interaction

The 10X technological disruption initiatives need to be explored in the following aspects of education to take the overall teaching-learning experience to the next level.

• Online learning

• Blended learning

• Grouping of learners based on learning style, peer selection, student-teacher fit, demography, etc.

• Moving from compliance to an engagement approach

• Synthesis of tech and touch

• Gamification of learning and assessment

• Interaction with society and business to solve the problems

• Research methodology

• Timetabling or calendaring instead of per week, thinking of alternative ways of aligning time and assigning time to the learners as per their needs

• Academic Bank of Credit (ABC)

• Pedagogy

• Use of Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality/Metaverse

• Micro credentialing

• Make your own degree

Challenges

A major challenge to any change, including the teaching and learning process, is the Change in the Mindset. Still, adaptation and change remain challenges for most of us. All changes, even the smallest, depend on trust. As George Shultz, U.S. secretary of state during the Reagan administration, famously observed late in life, “Trust is the coin of the realm.” When trust was in the room, he wrote, good things happened. Without trust, they did not.

The problem is that, too often, stakeholders of the education ecosystem do not trust each other. Until this problem is tackled and solved, critical initiatives around the transformation of the education system or the teaching-learning process will be very slow.

We need to change our attitude towards failure. The quickest way to do so is to change the method of assessment. Current methods of assessment are too teacher-dependent and consume important time of teachers, adding very little value in learning experience. By use of technology, we can make continuous, comprehensive assessment, on-demand assessment, constructive assessment more effective, freeing teachers for designing innovative questions, teaching learning models, and carrying out research.

Additional New Roles for Teachers

The use of digital tools in education is changing the role of the educator from a traditional lecture-based approach to one that is more facilitative, helping learners navigate and make sense of the vast amount of educational content available online. To offer the next level of professional experience, teachers, apart from being an enabler of learning and research, can also be offered additional profiles, such as

• Chief Adaptive Learning Officer

• Chief Motivation Officer

• Chief Research Officer

• Chief Knowledge Management Officer

• Chief Assessment Reengineering Officer

• Chief Freelancing Officer.

• Chief Social Interaction Officer

• Chief Students Interaction Officer

• Chief Lifelong Learning Officer

• Chief Learning Transformation Officer

• Chief Industry Institute Interaction Officer

• Chief Humour Officer

• Chief Human Resource

• Chief Data Officer

• Chief Development Officer

• Chief Big Data Analysis Officer

• Chief Data Security Officer

• Chief Networking Officer

Conclusion

Higher Education institutes should continue their deep tradition of analysis, methodological rigor, and creative pedagogical innovation, while also adopting data analytics to fuel an obsessive, learner-centric philosophy in response to digital transformation. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-enabled counselling, preparing for just-in-time to just-in-case education scenario of education delivery model, are some of the opportunities made available by digital technologies for overall transformation of education ecosystem. A tech-driven teaching and learning experience can be further enhanced by the touch of a teacher. This will help us to move closer to the Tech-Driven Educare approach of education.