The Inevitability of Universal Online Education

Students today are trapped in a strange dilemma precipitated by disturbing trends. One hand we have the devaluation of the college degree as more and more employers are demanding college degrees for jobs that essentially call for high schools ( see New York Times ) and on the other we have colleges rising exponentially and leading to a second debt crisis. ( See Time ) This may be a new phenomenon affecting the United States but has been a well known problem in the dismal economic scenario in poorer parts of the world. In India we have had the tragedy of graduate and even post graduate students fighting over janitorial opportunities in the arid job market while thousands of students never have the wherewithal to continue their studies beyond high school ( Class XII) or even middle school (Class X) In the gloom that is gathering over the global economy it is the student and the education system that is finding itself trapped in a cul-de-sac that seems to be leading nowhere in general and despair in particular !

image taken from www.usnews.com

Yet, it is only education and learning that could provide a safe, guaranteed, environment-friendly and sustainable way for the world to dig itself out of the hole that it has found itself in. But to use it effectively we must be open to throwing away many of the myths and misconceptions that cloud our judgment and inhibit us from crafting a bold new architecture on which the world of the future can or should be based. An architecture that is based on distance learning and online education.

The biggest myth about online education is that it can never be as effective as face to face classroom training. This has been repeated ad nauseum and has acquired a ring of Gobbelsian authenticity. The fact is that very often face to face classroom education, when delivered by incompetent and under prepared faculty, is no better than no education at all even though students are presented with a degree or diploma for simply sitting through the course and writing an exam. On the other hand, self motivated acquisition of knowledge from websites and Youtube videos have equipped many people with the skills that are necessary in their daily work -- even though there is no universally accepted certification in the end. The bottom line is that it is futile to compare online and class room education. Instead the comparison should be between effective and ineffective pedagogy, between good and bad teachers -- irrespective of the medium or the technology used to transfer data, information, knowledge and wisdom from the teacher to the taught.

The Massively Open Online Courseware ( MOOC ) movement is a step in this direction. In fact big name universities on either side of the Atlantic have come together to create two major consortia -- Edx created by MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley in the US and FutureLearn consisting of 12 British Universities namely  Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds,  Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU)  -- have been formed to develop the concept. And then of course there isCoursera a commercial entity  and Udacity created by Google employees who have all stepped into the game. While the jury could be out on the effectiveness and eventual viability of these enterprises, it might make sense  to see what is it that a traditional university has that distance learning must meet, match and exceed to be taken seriously. To understand that let us ask ..

What is a University ? At its most fundamental level a university has three critical characteristics, namely

1. People : Lots of people, both students and teachers
2. Space : A shared space that all these people can access simultaneously
3. Interaction : An environment that encourages vigorous and rich interaction amongst all these people

Now let us look around us and see if these three conditions are being met anywhere in the digital world and the first place that we look at is

Social Media : Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Google+, Instagram ... what is common to all these platforms ?

1. People : Again we have lots of people, though not necessarily teachers and students, though they are not excluded.
2. Space : Obviously these platforms are accessible to, and are indeed accessed by, all the people who participate
3. Interaction : There is no dearth of interaction and in fact interactions are the lifeblood of any social media platform.

What is even nicer is that these interactions can be very, very "rich" interactions, not just in terms of media -- that is images, audio, video -- but in terms of questions, answers, clarifications, comments, appreciation, criticism and even evaluation in terms of likes, shares and votes on each and every interaction. In fact I believe that social media interaction is far more richer in terms of diversity and depth than what could ever be possible in the physical world.

So the success of a distance learning program in emulating and surpassing a traditional university lies in its ability to map the university model on the social media model that has become so wildly popular.

In this context, it would be nice to keep in mind that when Apple had first introduced the Newton, a personal digital assistant, way back in the dim, dark “middle ages”, it was not accepted. But the iPad, which is essentially a similar device, was an instant success because ubiquity of the web and proliferation of the cellphone network through which the web could be accessed inexpensively created an environment where the iPad (and other tablet computers) could thrive.

Similarly, distance learning and the concept of open universities as established by institutions offering correspondence courses may not have been very popular but the same when delivered through the medium of a “Web 2.0” or social media platform could be far more effective and popular and pose a credible alternative to the established brick-and-mortar classroom that have become so impossible expensive and unaffordable for large parts of the global population.

One key area that distance learning falters on and yet, one that is of crucial importance to students is a credible evaluation mechanism that employers can depend upon and on the basis of which they can offer job placements. In fact, the popularity of most universities rest, not on what they teach or how, but how many of the graduating batch is placed and at what salaries. In fact, irreverent commentators have compared universities to job placement agencies but from the student’s perspectives that is great significance.

So the real challenge in distance learning is to put together a periodic examination process that attaches a credible grade or marks to each student that the employer can use to sort and sift the good, the bad and the ugly ! This can easily be arranged if we adopt a hybrid model where teaching is online but evaluation done in a  physical classroom under the supervision of strict invigilators in a number of distributed locations that need not be anywhere near the teacher who taught the course. This is hardly a big challenge since we are quite used to conducting examinations like the GRE, GMAT, CBSE, JEE on a nationwide or even global basis through certified and credible franchisees.

The last thing that we need is a placement service that will allow employers to reach out to qualified students and evaluate them in an objective manner. Job portals like Monster and Naukri can be plugged in with the online university and interviews can be conducted on Skype or Google Hangout to any level of detail.

All the pieces are in place. We just need someone to tie all this together and create a solution to problem of delivering credible college degrees to motivated individuals in an inexpensive manner.

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This article originally appeared in techtaffy.com a technology blog published from San Jose, California, USA.

Distance Learning : From Correspondence Courses to MOOC

Distance learning is a very seductive idea.

If we go back to the era of the Mahabharata, we learn about Ekalavya, the tribal boy, who on being denied access to Dronacharya's classes on warfare on account of his caste, taught himself archery simply by observing the teacher from a distance ! The tragic consequences of his effort are well known and should perhaps serve as a warning to societies in general and teachers in particular.

In a more realistic timeframe, approximately a hundred  years ago, correspondence courses appeared and over a period of time these courses became an integral part of various Open Universities. Unfortunately degree granting programs based on correspondence courses never acquired the popularity or employer acceptability of their classroom counterparts for a variety of reasons.

With the advent of computing technology, computer based training (CBT) programs appeared and while these never quite made it to the level of university courses, a lot of vocational training programs were developed on this model. This was particularly so in the case of training for computer oriented skills where both students and the course creators were generally comfortable with the usage of computer software.

Then came the internet and the "killer application" that it helped spawn -- the browser based world wide web. With rapid expansion of both bandwidth and computing power the teacher -- or at least his video, his words, his presentations -- could really overcome the inconvenience of distance and slide into the student's room, or at least his computer.

So is distance learning finally ready for prime time ?

Though a lot of us believe so there are quite a few sceptics who point out that like correspondence courses that were never quite able to replace the university, distance learning is destined to follow a similar trajectory. At best it might end up as a supplement to existing university programs and remain as that stepson who is allowed to stay along in the family along with the new children !

This is wrong and let me explain why it will not be so. It is not enough to have a good idea  -- there must be a field for the idea to germinate and grow into a big tree.

In 1987, when "IBM" personal computers were just about beginning to enter the corporate landscape ( in the Western world, not India ) Apple released a product called Newton -- a handheld computer called the PDA or personal digital assistant that was actually quite smart. Not only was it portable and could do many of the things that a regular computer could, it had some truly futuristic features like handwriting recognition. Unfortunately the product never quite caught on with people and was finally abandoned in 1998.

But only 12 years later, when the same company released a similar device, the famous iPad it got a rousing welcome and it has gone on to become one of the most successful products in the history of computing devices.

What had changed ? First there was the internet, the web and email but perhaps what was most important was mobile telephony. Thanks to the "field" prepared by these technologies, the idea behind the Newton PDA blossomed either as smartphones or tablet computers and has now become the most ubiquitous device that the world has ever seen. Now it is very difficult to question the relevance of any application that is based on these products.

How is this analogy relevant to distance learning ?

Let us assume that correspondence courses and computer based training programs are like the Newton PDA, an idea whose time had not yet come. What has changed since then ?

Before we answer this question, let us step back and examine the "competition". What is it that a traditional university has that distance learning must meet, match and exceed to be taken seriously. To understand that let us ask ..

What is a University ? At its most fundamental level a university has three critical characteristics, namely

1. People : Lots of people, both students and teachers
2. Space : A shared space that all these people can access simultaenously
3. Interaction : An environment that encourages vigorous and rich interaction amongst all these people

Now let us look around us and see if these three conditions are being met anywhere in the digital world and the first place that we look at is

Social Media : Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Google+, Instagram ... what is common to all these platforms ?

1. People : Again we have lots of people, though not necessarily teachers and students, though they are not excluded.
2. Space : Obviously these platforms are accessible to, and are indeed accessed by, all the people who participate
3. Interaction : There is no dearth of interaction and in fact interactions are the lifeblood of any social media platform.

 What is even nicer is that these interactions can be very, very "rich" interactions, not just in terms of media -- that is images, audio, video -- but in terms of questions, answers, clarifications, comments, appreciation, criticism and even evaluation in terms of likes, shares and votes on each and every interaction. In fact I believe that social media interaction is far more richer in terms of diversity and depth than what could ever be possible in the physical world.

So the success of a distance learning program in emulating and surpassing a traditional university lies in its ability to map the university model on the social media model that has become so wildly popular.

In an earlier post I had explored how we could deliver Distance Learning on a Social Network Platform but if we look around we would see that the movement towards Massive Online Open Courseware (MOOC) is a step in this direction.In fact big name universities on either side of the Atlantic have come together to create two major consortia -- Edx created by MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley in the US and FutureLearn consisting of 12 British Universities namely  Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds,  Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU)  -- have been formed to develop the concept. And then of course there is Coursera a commercial entity  and Udacity created by Google employees who have all stepped into the game,

Distance learning is no more a technology of the future. It is here and now as the technology is widely and inexpensively available. In fact, the way I would put it is that the bus is here but whether you board it or not is something that you have to decide and decide fast !

What would you need to get going ? That will be my next post.

Distance Learning : An Inverted Model for Indian B-Schools

"No army can stop an idea whose time has come." This quotation from Victor Hugo  has often been used in defence of many new but unpopular ideas and I will invoke it here to justify the usage of distance learning techniques, particularly in business schools that lead up to an MBA degree.

Image "borrowed" from http://smude.edu.in/blog/tags/distance-education

Whether we like it or not, many global trends are first set in the United States and then the rest of the world joins in and distance learning is one of them. Respected and well known schools like Stanford, Harvard and others are offering a large number of undergraduate and postgraduate programs that are based on a calibrated mixture of on-line and on-campus pedagogy.

Despite criticisms of being less effective than face-to-face teaching, distance learning is here to stay and grow because of compelling economic reasons -- many students are simply not able to pay the kind of fees that big US schools charge and unless schools are able to offer education at the price point that students can afford, the invisible hand of the free market will make the business of B-Schools unviable ! So just as US companies have accepted the hard economic reality of software services being outsourced to India, so will B-Schools accept the reality of distance learning.

But as many all cases, the Indian market is different from the US and that is why it may make sense to invert the model that is being followed in the US. In the US, the dominant pattern is that the faculty is sitting in Harvard or Stanford whereas the students are scattered anywhere in the world -- as long as they have a broadband Internet connection and a credit card. You register, pay, log-in and access course material either synchronously ( as in live lectures ) or asynchronously by downloading videos, slide decks and books. The only real challenge is the evaluation or examination process where it is difficult to ensure a no-cheating rule but it is a matter of time before even this will be resolved.

How is this different from the Indian B-School market ?

In India there is no dearth of "customer"s and students are flocking to even some very shady B-Schools that have been created by crooked entrepreneurs with the active connivance of the regulatory bodies for higher education. But the real trouble is that there is no one to teach ! There is no  good faculty, not just in these shady schools but also in the well funded, well known and well regarded Government schools like the IIMs and the IITs !

While the situation is understandable in the small schools, the situation in the big schools may be puzzling but easily explained in economic terms. Let us look at this issue from the perspective of who should be teaching in B-Schools and who are actually doing so.

B-schools act as feeders into corporate management and should typically impart skills that are necessary to run a business profitably and ethically. Ideally, a B-School faculty should be someone who has the practical experience of being in the corporate sector and has been in a senior position. In such positions,  he should have faced and resolved real issues in the area of finance, marketing, operations, HR and business strategy. But instead, what we find in B-Schools ( particularly the IITs/IIMs) are academics with PhD degrees who (a) are paper tigers with scores of theoretical papers published in academic journals that are only read by other academics, not by corporates and what is worse (b) are people who have never had the ability or the confidence of actually working in the industry. What rubbish do they teach ?

Why is this ? Economic reasons. Under the 6th Pay Commission, a senior faculty at a premier Government institute is paid around Rs 12 - 15 lakhs for annum which is just on par with the average salary that an MBA student gets when he or she passes out from the same school !! A well respected manager, with about 15 - 20 years of experience -- the kind that we would like to have as teachers in MBA schools, would be drawing anything from Rs 40 - Rs 80 lakhs per annum. Now no sane person in his senses will leave his corporate job -- however stressful it may be -- and take a 80% salary cut to join a B-School. And even in a moment of madness (for example when he has been passed over in the annual promotions ;-) he were to contemplate this, his financial commitments ( children's education, EMI for flat) will prevent him from doing so. And if this involves moving to a different, non-metro area, then the spouse will have violent objection because she would be cut off from her normal earning and entertainment opportunities. ( This assumes that the person concerned is a man but is even more true if it is a lady who is contemplating this move)

So in the US, they have lots of good faculty in good schools but losing students but in India we have lots of students but no faculty. Hence time to invert our model of distance learning.

In an earlier post on Zoho Show and Google Hangout I have shown how easy it is for a faculty, sitting a distant location, to teach a class full of students using simple and inexpensive technology.

So my model works like this. We set up a B-school and create the infrastructure for students to live and work. In fact this could be at remote and picturesque locations so that academics is not disturbed by the discordant notes of urban life and, perhaps this is more important, land is cheap and so capital costs are low.

There is no need to recruit any full time faculty at all and in any case, if the location is remote,  good faculty will in not join anyway. Only utterly jobless people who cannot go anywhere else or old and retired professors trying to pass of their ancient and out-dated knowledge in their second and third innings of their career will be interested. This is precisely the kind of people whom we do not want in our B-Schools.

So instead of recruiting full time faculty, what we have is a network of high end managers located wherever they are currently employed -- anywhere in India. In each city we can either set up a small "transmission" kiosk, through a telephone operator or if the faculty is comfortable enough install the simple hardware ( basically one or two computers with audio/video and a high speed internet connection ) at his home or place of work.

On campus we create an excellent telecommunication infrastructure so that every student has more than adequate bandwidth (enough even for his not-so-surreptitious Torrent downloads ;-) both in class as well as in the hostel.

To make things a bit smooth, the faculty may be required to make one visit to the campus at the beginning of the semester, get acquainted with the students and if necessary get familiarised with the technology. As the class progresses, he can keep in touch with his students through private social media platforms like the Kollaborative Klassroom or through more mainstream media like LinkedIN or Facebook.  In fact the Coursera model has similar ideas but we need to remember that it is US model and so needs to be tweaked for our inversion.

This model also removes the one big irritation in traditional distance learning -- how to conduct valid examinations ? In this case, this is not a problem at all since all the students are located on the campus and local staff ( not distant faculty) can monitor the examination and ensure fairness. Moreover with the students living together on the campus, there is no difficulty for them to work together and collaborate on assignments -- which is one of the important aspects of B-School pedagogy.

While this model will allow a Institute to draw upon the best B-School faculty from anywhere in the country, it also has the potential to push up faculty earnings in a dramatic manner. Typically a faculty at a premier Government Institute teaches two 3-credit subjects in a semester and so faces a class for six hours every week. [ I am ignoring "research" because B-School research is generally pointless-data-collection-followed-by-regression-analysis, nothing else. It is done only for the purpose for faculty promotions because of the philosophy of publish or perish adopted in many Institutes ] For this six hours of work per week he is paid Rs 12 lakhs. A corporate manager works 40+ hours a week and gets say Rs 60+ lakhs. So it makes sense for a corporate manager to move to academics if and only if he can teach in at least five or six institutes simultaneously -- and this is very much possible if we adopt the distance learning model that was explained in my earlier post ! In fact with this model, well known Institutes can create the distance learning environment that will allow their faculty to enhance their income five or six times and so draw the best people from the corporate world into the academic domain.

Of course faculty is not the only thing that matters in a B-School. Placement plays a very important role in the success of school. We also need to look at the existing curriculum and see what changes can or should be made. But these are big topics and need to explored separately.

Let us first get cracking with the faculty issue and address it with our inverted model of distance learning. It is a win-win strategy that benefits both Institutes as well as faculty since the former gets good teachers and the latter gets to earn much more without stressing the economic and business model of MBA education in India.

Distance Learning with Zoho SHOW and Google Hangout

image : getcareerkhabar.in

Distance learning is a concept whose importance is growing by leaps and bounds everyday. We all know that there is nothing that can beat the physical presence of a teacher in the class but the exigencies of delivering educational services at an affordable price point is forcing everyone -- both students and teachers -- to accept the reality of this technology.

In fact it boils down to the ROI, the return on investment : we all know that it would have been far better to have been at London and watch opening ceremony of the Olympics but the cost of the travel and tickets forced all of us to watch it on TV and I am sure that the Organising Committee earned more from TV rights than what they could have got through ticket sales. So it was a win-win for all to have the show broadcast in a virtual medium even though the experience was sort of degraded by the small screen. So is the case with distance learning.

Most distance learning platforms use a combination of streaming video -- to carry voice and video -- and a way to show slides ( of the Powerpoint variety ) by sharing the screen. I have in the past experimented with Anymeeting and other webinar software to teach my MBA class but the results are very uneven. The Java based software is rather unstable especially if bandwidths are low but what really hurts is the way the screen share is often blocked by campus or corporate firewalls. Moreover when in screen share mode, the presenter -- or teacher -- cannot see the video of the classroom and this makes it very difficult to speak "blindly" into a slide. Believe me, having done this a number of times, I am yet to get used to this and it really cramps your style and having to toggle between the video mode and the screenshare mode is very irritating for the audience.

Which made me look for alternatives and I have discovered that the combination of Google Hangouts + Zoho Show is a wonderful combination.

Let me explain how it works.

We have a class of 60 students and in the front of the class is a computer that is connected to the internet and also to an overhead projector. The teacher creates a Hangout and invites a student to join the same from the computer that is connected to the overhead projector. So the video of the teacher comes on the screen and his voice is heard through speakers. If this computer has a camera then the teacher gets to see the students in the class. [ If you want a better view, a second computer with a camera can also join the Hangout -- you can go upto 10 machines ]

Now it is possible to share a screen from the teachers laptop through the Hangout but this is messy -- the text on the screen becomes small so does the video. So we do not do this.

Instead, the teacher has a second laptop and he uses Zoho Show to run a presentation in broadcast mode. Now each student in the class has a laptop ( all students carry laptops these days, particularly MBA students ) and they fire up a browser and go to a URL of the presentation that the teacher is running. This means that they see the same presentation and -- this is the clincher -- they are always on the same page, or slide where the teacher is ! In fact, when the teacher changes slides, all the students get their slides changed automatically.

So the students watch the teacher talking on video on the common classroom screen on the wall AND they see the slides that the teacher is talking about, on their personal laptops -- closely simulating the situation in a physical class ! And the icing on the cake is that when viewing the Zoho Show broadcast, the students have ready chat screen with them in which to type in questions.

When the teacher sees a student raising his or her hand he looks at the chat screen, reads out the question and then answers it verbally for the benefit of all the students in the class.

The single biggest advantage of this hybrid approach is that because the video is delinked from the presentation the chance of a breakdown / freeze up is far lower. The standard webinar software like Anymeeting, by clubbing the two functions together, introduce a lot of instability that causes frequent breakdowns that degrades the pedagogical experience.

It is not that Hangout does not freeze, but when it does, the teacher can exit the Hangout and rejoin again and the class continues without much difficulty. In fact having two parallel and independent channels across the two locations gives a lot of flexibility to all concerned.

Zoho Show is an excellent cloud based presentation tool where you can either create smart slides or it will happily import existing Powerpoint or OpenOffice/Libre Office presentations. So creating a deck of slides in Zoho is quite easy. But what  makes Zoho Show really useful is the broadcast mode that allows a whole class of students to view the the slide deck synchronously with the teacher and the other students. Google Docs, the other cloud based presentation tool, does NOT have this feature at the moment.

Net-net, after using the Google Hangout + Zoho Show combination for nearly 75 minutes today, both the students and me ( the teacher ) were very happy with the outcome. Let us see how far we can push this technology.