Context: Pandemic induced education crisis paves the way for comprehensive implementation of online/digital education initiatives.
Challenges to the Digital Education: The following constraints hinders the delivery of promises made under the New Education Policy.
- Low Education Expenditure: The NEP allocates 6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education, but is unclear over how and when the goal is expected to be achieved.
- In 2020-2021, the government spent only 3.2% of GDP on education, down from 4.14% in 2014- 2015.
- Implementation issues due to COVID: For E.g. The migrant labour crisis was a recent example of our challenges in execution.
- National Optical Fibre Network is still not completely operational after almost 8 years.
- Limited accessibility to inline mode of education will adversely impact the marginalised, rural and poor populations.
- Only about 25% of Indian households have access to internet facility (while rural households stands at 15%).
- Limited digital infrastructure/resources in terms of appropriate platforms, technology, tools, interactivity, curation, content and a lot more.
- Government schools and colleges do not have the resources to provide digital education.
- Lack of a proper policy on digital education, infrastructure and multiple languages.
- Challenges for the parents in terms of fees for data services, uninterrupted broadband connectivity, adequate space and digital discipline.
- Curation and mentoring challenge for teachers, who are presently trained to teach and not mentor.
- No mention of leveraging existing infrastructure:
- While the National Knowledge Network exist to promote collaboration through digital connectivity, on a few institution take advantage of it due to:
- Lack of understanding and technical expertise.
- Lack of local facilities and funding
Government Initiatives for Digital Education
- National Knowledge Network (NKN) was established as a high bandwidth, low latency network to connect all knowledge-creating organisations.
- Encourages collaborative development and building of repository of knowledge in all fields.
- Lack of understanding, local facilities, funding and technical expertise limits its usage.
- National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN- Bharat Network) : as a part of National information Infrastructure (NII). – to address the shortage of quality teachers.
- Free 100 Mbps to 1Gbps bandwidth was planned at each panchayat under it.
- Use of Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund: to build NOFN has countered the challenge of lack of private telecom investment due to lack of profitability.
- National Knowledge Commission (NKC) has experimented on the use of Information Technology (IT) in panchayat schools to synchronise present teacher-centric education and IT-based teaching.
- Previous impacts of NKC (2004-2009): Emphasis on Expansion, Excellence and Equity.
- Over 900 universities including IITs and IIMs were built.
- Increased funding for education in 11th five-year plan.
- Passage of Right to Education Bill.
Way Forward: Leveraging the existing architecture -
- Relook at the NOFN (BBNL) and make it a core component of the Digital India initiative
- Leverage NOFN to provide e-services at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
- Digitally connect all schools and improve the digital education ecosystem using NOFN and NKN.
- NOFN and NKN was built as an IT-based teaching system to address the shortage of quality teachers and school infrastructure.
Conclusion: The transition from teacher-class based teaching to digital-education will need multipronged efforts over time.
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Quotes
“Digital India” is not prepared for digital education.
Plan for the worst and hope for the best