Indian Higher Education Ecosystem Needs To Be Reset: Experts

Even when the epidemic stopped everyone, the education sector was ready for the challenge. The mode of education shifted online and in the process, educational institutions faced challenges and explored opportunities that opened up for the present and the future. To discuss this in broader sense, the panel had the proponents of the domain: Aditya Berlia, Co-Promoter, Apeejay Stya & Svran; S P Singh, Vice-Chancellor, Royal Global University, Assam; Sahil Aggarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Rishihood University; Dr K Ramesh Kumar, Professor and Vice-Chair (UG), Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham; Prof S Sreenivasa Murthy, Dean & Chairman – Placement & Finance, Institute of Public Enterprise & Dr S S Mantha, Chancellor, K L University (Session Chair).

Explaining the current situation, Prof SP Singh said, "Since we were ready with the digital platform and fortunately, our students have proper connectivity and mediums, we never faced a major problem. But then if I talk with respect to any discussion point of view the lot of digital divide with respect to many students on the north-east and other which is not only in terms of availability of the bandwidth or availability of the internet but also with the physical infrastructure that is required."

Talking about educational reforms, Aditya Berlia asserted, "I cannot think of a better time for NEP (New Education Policy) to come right in the middle of all of this because on one hand, you have a revolutionary reform policy matched with an unfortunate, but brilliant worldwide experiment which has once and for all has completely put to lie or put to bed concerns by all stakeholders on a wide variety of education issues and this ranges from Regulators to parents to students to everybody and most importantly even to faculty. In fact, I think the Indian higher education ecosystem needs to be reset. "

Explaining about the online way of teaching, Prof Murthy said, "We are providing recordings of all lectures to students. If any student misses a class, they will get a video of that particular class session. Also, the collection is available so he can go through that and can get the doubts clarified too. Even for the placement process, the process of internal evaluation in term evaluation, which used to be offline now everything is online. We are using direct track and the online exam is conducted at the same time, not compromising the quality of the question paper." 

Stressing on the condition of the education system, Aggarwal said, "I think the education system has evolved in Indian independent history. There has been an extremely slow pace of reforms, but now we see some bright spots. So I would classify pace when we're looking to increase the pace. I would see that there are three major ways of increasing space. One is providing access to education to more and more students. The second would be to improve the quality and the third would be to make it industry or socially relevant." 

The event was concluded successfully in partnership with the Tourism Finance Corporation of India.