There is a real opportunity to make blended learning the standard for education and skills of the future. Are we going to get committed?
We have tried and failed and we keep trying without the necessary conviction to make technology-enabled skills and education a reality in this country. The problems are many. Schools in small towns and rural India and even the municipal schools in large cities suffer from uninspired teachers and poor quality infrastructure and teaching.
With a million youth entering the job market every month and just a couple of lakh finding good quality jobs, the newly minted Skills Ministry is in need of comprehensive solutions to provide a steady stream of well skilled manpower in the country, prepared to meet the demands of jobs as well as entrepreneurial opportunities.
Many women are at home, unable to do long commutes and stay away from young children for many hours during the day resulting in a waste of a national resource of well-educated women. All this begs the question-are we attacking the right problems?
In the last two decades, many attempts have been made both by the government and the corporate sector to bridge the gap between expectations of industry and what is taught in academic institutions and skilling centres in the country.
An early attempt by the Confederation of Indian Industry in Western India, where industry leaders were encouraged to work closely with second tier academic institutions bore fruit and the institutions participating in it were able to build bridges with corporations and also benefit from industry involvement in faculty upgrades and student connects to enable industry confidence to develop ahead of the placement season. And for the last five years and more, some training institutions like Global Talent Track through their unique “source and train” model have demonstrated that even second tier academic institutions from smaller cities and town can produce good quality human resources if the connections to job giving industry participants can be made early.
An important fact to be considered is that while there is much to be said for quality and objective redefinition and enhancement in the academic and skilling institutions across the country, the scale we need is impossible to provide without extensive use of technology.
Technology experiments have been many in the country from the early ventures by Doordarshan with Country-wide Classroom and Zee Telefilms with Zee Education to use the power of the television medium to reach out on an all-India basis to the recent MOOCS, which have seen a modicum of success in well implemented instances in excellent institutions like IIM Bangalore. However, by and large they have proved to be a damp squib.
The newly minted Skills Ministry is in need of comprehensive solutions to provide a steady stream of well skilled manpower
When skills and education go togetherThe problems of single digit percentage course completion rates and the general apathy towards learning without physical or live interventions have slowly found some solutions with innovators like the founders of Fuel 50, Career Waze and Skills Alpha through the use of contemporary technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Learning Analytics and adaptive learning to customise learning methods and outcomes to the specific needs of individual learners.
An example from Skills Alpha should serve to underline the difference in approach today in the use of technology for learning. Meet Aditi, a twentyfour- year-old digital native working in the marketing depar tment of one of India’s largest insurance companies. She is already bored of the repetitive nature of her job and needs an engaging method of learning the skills she needs while retaining affinity towards her role. Enter Skills Alpha, one of the newest start ups in our entrepreneurial eco-system and it would appear to have found the perfect solution to the problem of motivating Aditi and millions like her in India and possibly hundreds of millions of youth who are disengaged from their current vocation and dissatisfied with the opportunities they have in corporations, society and the world!
Skills Alpha is a platform that uses the best of engagement tools to provide a truly adaptive learning environment for Aditi. Aditi is engaged by an Artificial Intelligence “learning bot” from the minute she gets on to the platform, which enables her to assess her own aspirations and goals, look at alternative learning and career paths and get thoroughly engaged on a journey of content discovery, opportunity exploration and learning throughout her tenure in the organisation.
The advantage of platforms like Skills Alpha are threefold. First, they are able to move the learning and development discussion from training and content consumption to motivated learning and context creation. While the operations and human resource heads have the opportunity to define career and skills imperatives, the platform leads Aditi to a self-discovered and self-paced path that enables her to realise her own aspirations and link them to the organisation plan. Second, the use of new technologies like interactive video, augmented and virtual reality and the ability of platforms to adapt the content that is served up to Aditi’s personal learning style (extensive videos rather than presentations) make the whole process pleasant and experiential. And finally, the application of cognitive tools, starting with the “bot” and extending to a host of new technologies makes the efficacy of learning and organisation development go up by an order of magnitude while substantially reducing the cost of training.
Ganesh Natarajan
