Teaching, education, access to quality instruction….. we have been hotly discussing these issues
here in India in recent times, and a central problem or crisis that has been highlighted is that the access to quality education in India is still seriously limited. “Demand” seriously outstrips “supply”. This assessment of the state of affairs is, unfortunately, true and applies to the entire spectrum from basic primary to professional or college level education. Let me focus on professional education. A particular crisis of sorts is in place for top-tier engineering and management education where a paucity of quality faculty is acute. A question I pose is whether we as technologists, particularly in information technology can do something to improve the state of affairs. I think the answer is in the affirmative even with the available technologies we have, and I also see a tremendous, almost historic opportunity for significant technological advancement driven by the need today.
Can technology, particularly IT, alleviate the education crisis ?
The benefits of IT and our networked world have been much raved about, but let me revisit that briefly. The access to information is instant, the degree of replication is practically infinite, storage and archival of information is cheap and scalable. A lot of this access and benefits are in developing countries as well, most certainly the urban middle class in India, and access in rural areas too can and will increase in the years to come. The access to information has increased dramatically, it is also fair to say that the access to knowledge has increased. One has access to online books, tutorials, encyclopedias, online self-evaluation exams and what not. For many professional topics, particularly common undergraduate courses one easily comes across entire sets of class slides. While significant, we have merely scratched the surface here. If we look at just what we can do with the technology that we have available today, the possibilities are enormous. More multi-media content of the subject material, digitized videos of entire lectures, and other material all neatly organized, browsable, searchable, downloadable. The IITM NPTEL initiative is a fine example of this. But we can raise the bar here. For instance search technology that helps a student get to the relevant portions given his quest “what is the basic notion of object orientedness ? “. An “give me an example” button along with the online course material she is browsing. The online course material in its present form will benefit the more “prepared” student, a computer science student who wishes to learn from the material by himself, an IT professional looking to learn about a new area etc. But this accessibility bar needs to be brought lower. And one way this will happen is with better search and retrieval methods. I do not have satisfactory means to day to search for “a tutorial that provides a basic introduction to SVMs”, or “what is the difference between multi valued dependencies and regular functional dependencies”.
Now let us get bolder. Envision a “teaching intelligent agent”, software that can “teach”. That can introduce, guide and lead a student through the course material. That can evaluate his understanding. That the student can interact with for clarifications, questions. Any artificial intelligence (AI) researcher today will tell that we have years to go before we address many of the underlying hard research challenges that have to be addressed before such an agent can be realized. True, but it is evolution that must lead to revolution. We can go “bottom-up” here, from the online tutorials and evaluations we have today to something a level more interactive tomorrow, perhaps with features such as visual interaction the step after and so on. In fact this i.e., the use of software itself for teaching and training is now an active area of research ( ). Intelligent tutoring agents have already been developed and used for military instruction.
Literally any civilization has over the centuries seen periods or rather events or innovations of immense impact, that have literally revolutionized the way knowledge is created, managed (stored or recorded) and imparted. Such “revolutions” have actually been both social as well as technological, but let me consider the technological part. Perhaps the written script is the first such, the development and advent of print technology would be another. And we in our time have witnessed the arrival of digitized media and the internet. The impact on education amongst other things has been significant in this short span of time. Let us take on this challenge. Let us design, develop, implement, research teaching information technologies. Amartya Sen asked a rather worthy question a the central theme of his address to NASCOMM, which is”what can IT do for India” (Google: “amartya sen nasscom keynote 2007” ? We are poised today where we stand with world class IT infrastructure and a large pool of professionals. But history has also placed us at a point where hundreds of thousands of young people would benefit immensely from access to quality professional education. What a worthy challenge !
