Streamed education is diluted education

Context: The recent introduction of online courses by the government, being modelled on social distancing is a functional reduction and dilution of the meaning of education.

True Value of Education lying in classrooms:

• Symbiosis of teaching and learning: teachers and children help each other improve skills

• Teacher as intellectual midwife: facilitates in the birth of students’ ideas and insights through engaging in critical dialogue.
• In a conducive classroom environment, students play an intellectual midwife to the teacher’s ideas.

• An Essential laboratory: 

• Multidisciplinary through serendipity: the classroom acts as space where skills such as dialogue, debate, disagreement, and friendship are learned and practiced. 
• Social Influence: o?ers solidarity in the face of discrimination, social anxiety, and stage fear.
• Value influence: the proliferation of voluntary associations that lie outside the realm of family, economy, and state.
• A Litmus test: for any theory or insights as learners and engage in conversations.

Government’s Steps:

• Push for Massive online courses (MOOCs): by the University Grants Commission through SWAYAM platform in the wake of the pandemic.

• Excluded courses: engineering, medicine, dental, pharmacy, nursing, architecture, agriculture, and physiotherapy are left out because they involve labs and practical work.

Critique of online classes model in education:

• Unrealistic misconception: of pure sciences, the arts, the social sciences, and humanities curricula which are lecture- and theory-based, and readily adaptable to the online platform.
• Undesired excessive focus on means: GER acts only as a tool to achieve learning outcomes 

• False representation through GER: While the online courses would inflate the GER number to the envisioned level of 30% by 2021 (25.8 in 2017), it would flatten the learning curve.

• Re-enforcing top-down approach: in teacher-student directionality of learning whereby the teacher creates and students consume. 

• MOOC based systems would obviate the need for critical dialogue. 

• Diluted meaning of Education: as just gathering more information with a combination of content and consumption without a shared space to discuss and contest ideas.
• Diluted norms of evaluation: whereby a “good lecture” might mean merely a lecture which “streams seamlessly, without buffering”. 

Way Forward:

• Increase Accessibility: Value-sensitive and socially just architectures and technologies can be leveraged to make classrooms more accessible to vulnerable students.
• Resist the malpractice: of the dilution of education as the social distancing based online classroom model induces loss of value in education.
• Value education as an end: GER acts only as a means to an end i.e value education. 

• The act of pushing for online courses should not translate into something valuable (an end-in-itself, value education) into merely functional (a means-to-an-end, high GER)

• Online education as a Stop-Go variant: a solution to the temporary problem of pandemic.