The Hindu Business Line: 'Social' technologies in Education

Vaidya Nathan

The IT boom did many things, and one of its significant effects was to cause a shift in the conversation from only `employment' to `employability' and `scale,' observes Vaidya Nathan, Founder and CEO, Classle Knowledge Pvt Ltd, Chennai (www.classle.net).

The speed at which it hit the education system, India's most `regulated' sector, caught everybody unawares, he continues, during a lunch-hour interaction with eWorld.

"With solutions being looked at at every level starting from policy and governance downwards, can the wonderful capabilities of IT solve education's woes? Innovative start-up companies such as Classle, EduComp, Everonn, say `Yes'."

On a positive note, again, is a `breaking news' story in www.philly.com about Microsoft founder Bill Gates calling for revolutionising US public education with the Government's stimulus funds.

The $100 billion in economic recovery funds earmarked for improving education should be used for creating more effective charter schools, holding teachers accountable for student performance, enforcing strong common standards, spreading knowledge through online learning, and developing better assessment tools to evaluate individual schools, pupils and teachers, Gates argues.

Ask Nathan, and he would say that with factors such as size, scope, variations, velocity, cost, and accessibility characterising the education problem, the solutions have to be innovative and at the same time be easy to adopt.

Excerpts from the interview.

What are the innovations that can help in education?

Many of the concepts and technologies used in Internet services share the attributes of our problem. The newer and popular phenomena such as `social media' (Wikipedia, YouTube, Podcast, and so on), `social networking' (Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn), `social bookmarking' (del.ico.us, digg, etc.), and micro-blogging (twitter), handle large size, a wider audience, are viral, accessible, and free.

So far, they have been looked at and used from an informational and entertainment perspective. But as a capability, they are potent and have the attributes required to solve the concerns of education.

Thankfully, the newer companies in education have identified these capabilities and combined them with other insights and innovations to directly address the issues of education. Even the principle of `social enterprise' is available as a business model.

What's more, from an adoption point of view, the youth, who are the target consumers, take to these concepts and technologies quite naturally.

Communication and sharing are a very common and natural behaviour for them. They don't think in terms of `What's in it for me?' They just share.

Also of relevance are technologies such as the cloud computing environment, and Open Source software, apart from the increased availability of connectivity, mobile platforms, and abundant material on the Web. All these pieces have individually, and in combination, demonstrated their potency and effectiveness with solutions.

We have the pieces, so what do we do next?

All the pieces are available to address different aspects of the education issue. What is now required are the `system integration' principles which are very common in IT. Interestingly, most of these tools are available at a level that is extremely economical.

We are really looking at a scenario where IT-driven innovation can dramatically alter the academic and professional quality of education, especially higher education and research.

While technology can set the stage, the actual actors have to enact the play. That is, all hands have to join together to solve the problems in education with these technologies. Let us not forget that all the tools which form a part of the solution are `social' in nature. This will succeed only when `society' is involved and engaged in the exercise.

That is, everybody, including the academic institutions, instruction staff, industry, students and even parents, have to be a part of the solution. The good news is that the technologies make the effort involved in participating in the solution small. All that is required is to make that behavioural change.

How do you see IT impacting research?

Research is also another area where there are serious imbalances. The low preference for research is only a symptom. Actually, the students who prefer to do research go out to other countries.

There are many structural and policy changes which are required to improve the condition. Some of the issues are the time taken for the research degree process, the relevance of problem statements, and the availability of collaborators, referees and mentors. If the transparency, reach and collaboration, which come easily with IT, are factored in, and the process redesigned accordingly, that would be a necessary first step to give a boost to research. Our research should be able to make technology more democratic, more localised, a lot more sustainable and definitely more people-friendly. IT, by bridging the islands of academia, industry and society, can certainly bring about a positive change.

Source: www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/ew/2009/07/27/stories/2009072750120400.htm