Blended Learning Won’t Work

Context: Educators wish to embrace the UGC’s new proposal, but the ground reality is different.

Background

• Blended learning (BL): A recent circular by University Grants Commission (UGC) proposes that all higher educational institutions (HEI) teach 40% of any course online and the rest 60% offline.

Significance of blended mode of teaching

• Anticipated benefits:
  • Increased student engagement in learning,
  • Enhanced student-teacher interactions,
  • Improved student learning outcomes,
  • More flexible teaching and learning environments,
  • Increased opportunity for institutional collaborations.
• Shifts role of the teacher from being a “knowledge provider to a coach and mentor”: As BL enables teachers to have a greater influence and effect on students’ learning.
• “Student-driven, bottom-up, and customised”: Against traditional classroom instruction, which is “teacher-directed, top-down, and one-size-fits-all”.
• Introduces flexibility in assessment and evaluation patterns

Challenges

• Rural concentration: The latest All India Survey on Higher Education (2019-20) report shows that 60.56% of 42,343 colleges in India are located in rural areas, and 78.6% are privately managed.
  • Only big corporates are better placed to invest in technology and provide such learning.
• Exacerbate existing geographical and digital divide: Resulting in exclusion of a large number of rural students as internet penetration in India is only 45% as of January 2021 (Datareportal statistics).
• Leaves little room for all-round formation of student: That includes development of their intelligent quotient, emotional quotient, social quotient, physical quotient and spiritual quotient as listening part and subsequent interactions with the teacher may get minimised.
• Whitewashed assumptions: Concept note assumes that all students who enter arena of higher education have similar learning styles and have a certain amount of digital literacy to cope with suggested learning strategies of BL, which is not true.
  • Education in India is driven by a teacher-centred approach, and expecting students to switch over quickly to collaborative and technology-enabled learning will be stressful.

Recommendations: Actualisation of three cardinal principles of education policy – Access, Equity and Quality

• Government should ensure equity in access to technology and bandwidth for all HEIs across the country free of cost.
  • Massive digital training programmes for teachers: Teacher-student ratio needs to be readjusted to implement BL effectively.
• Decentralised design of the curriculum: Based on a bottom-up approach and more power in such education-related policymaking should be vested with State governments.
• Continuity factor: Government must think of overhauling the curriculum at the school level as well.
• Periodical discussions, feedback mechanisms and support services: At all levels would revitalise the implementation of the learning programme of National Education Policy 2020 and BL.