Lessons from the coronavirus crisis

If the focus is the acquisition of life-skills and attitude backed by knowledge and not on procuring a mere level of qualification then in the context of a pandemic, all that the academia would have to convey to students and parents is to not be worried about exams!

For students’ progression at the higher education level, what is significant is learning. This happens when students are enabled to do most of the activity--right from sourcing authentic reading material (in consultation with teachers), reading, comprehension, thinking, linking, sharing their learning through written, oral or in any creative forms. Here, teachers would act as facilitators. She or he would support only when the students ask and gradually progress to providing more than they are asked, and this would be different for each student depending on their participation level, absorption level etc. Also, teachers would conduct a timely evaluation of the students’ understanding through assignments and make students do the most. Learning by doing results in acquiring the needed skills and attitude in addition to gaining knowledge.

Merely dumping web links sourced from the open course wares on topics relating to 5-6 subjects in a semester is deplorable! Instead, University heads should use this as a unique opportunity to showcase the collective competencies of its teacher resources.

In each subject of under-graduate and post-graduate course, listing about 20-25 must learn concepts and developing content in a way suitable to be consumed through a dedicated common electronic platform would be laudable. In addition to serving as the proof of having done the work, such a customised repository of concepts would not only invite the appreciation of parents and the public but would be worthy of replication by our students, some of whom could be the academicians in the making.

This crisis induced by Covid-19 has brought to the foreground yet another important metric of higher education--the student-teacher ratio. If the teacher has to largely play the role of a facilitator or mentor, this ratio is ideally 1:15 or a maximum of 1:25. In an unguarded environment like the home environment, millennials need the motivation to behave with discipline, to concentrate, to commit and complete a specific learning process.

Ensuring that each of our 15 to 25 students learns three concepts a day by enabling them to share their learning creatively through video, audio, enactment or practical display itself can result in a large number of evaluation assignments for a teacher! In such a situation, to what extent the students are right or wrong isn’t the focus, but the focus is on their engagement.

The challenge posed by the pandemic to the higher education space has reinforced one more important aspect that has been long discussed by almost all the stakeholders of the teaching-learning environment-- that is a continuous assessment pattern instead of tail-end exams.

Learning is progressive and additive, and compounds with each learning opportunity. This calls for a system of continuous assessment, which would be a combination of everyday classroom participation plus end-of-the-lesson assessment, and the tail-end exams in the ratio of 60:40 in a given subject. These assessments would be part of announced and un-announced schedules. Leveraging technology to upload the end-of-the lesson assessment marks and the cumulative scores of a given subject on the University Portal can serve as an effective mechanism on all fronts. At times of such crisis, the historical scores of a student serve as a reasonable score for any extrapolation. Such systems of continuous assessment are expected to bring discipline in classroom participation. There cannot be choice about building discipline among the future human capital of the country. Democracy needs discipline.

(The writer is a practicing higher education professional and Member of Governing Board at National Institute of Technology)