Home-grown Technology Can Address The Need Of Education System, believes V. Ramaswamy, Global Head, TCS iON
TCS iON is a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) focused on enabling education institutions, and organizations from multiple industry sectors to be efficient in their recruitment process, learning and skilling and overall business operations.
V. Ramaswamy, Global Head, TCS iON expresses his views about digital learning, growing digital assessment and education system of the country. Edited Excerpts:
How do you plan to boost your digital assessment business?
Our plan for the Digital Assessment Business will be 4-prong.
We have achieved the completion of more than 100 million candidates’ assessments by leveraging our robust TCS iON Digital Assessments Platform supported by a countrywide infrastructure. This large scale infrastructure can help conduct assessments for nearly 2 Lakh candidates on a single shift nationwide.
Our vision is to work very closely with the government; several large exam-conducting bodies and boards in India to redefine the process of digital based assessments. Paper based and manually assessed examinations are still very prevalent in the country. It is indicative of an opportunity for growth in digital assessment. The model has worked to benefit our customers and is now being replicated by TCS iON in 20 countries including Japan and the UK.
How e-learning is getting its sheen back?
Every few years, technology reinvents itself in every domain. Learning is no exception. Digital Learning in its current wave opens new possibilities and new business models for the industry.
Some of the recent developments that are driving the digital learning adoption include:
1. Engaging Content: Content is becoming more interactive and gamified
2. The digital-native Gen-Z learners are demanding learning with social-like capabilities
3. Digital technologies are able to understand the learner behavior better and are personalizing the delivery
Today, education is at cross roads as digital technologies are disrupting traditional education by opening up new possibilities and transforming every aspect of learning right from what we learn to how we learn and where we learn.
What can be done to improve education quality in the country?
India needs a personalised solution to address the quality of education. We need to devise a home-grown solution to address the challenge instead of borrowing it from the west. Also, there are several dimensions one has to develop to achieve the singular goal of improving the outcome. Some of the key recommendations include:
The focus on learning outcomes to link with online available courses, is particularly remarkable. Apart from the reach and the dynamic array of content, there is another facet that digital education can help learners in India with. It gives liberty to the learners to learn at their own pace.
What are the new developments taking place in the industry?
Today, schools are getting industrialized. Industry wants skills. Institutions produce talent. The key question to ask is – “Who transforms talent to skills – Institutes or Industry?
We are dealing with a new generation, and the sooner we face the truth, the better. Merely changing the content into a digital format would not suffice. The context, the consumption, the texture, the continuum – everything should dissolve in a digital fluid if we truly want to nail what makes this generation tick. We are still at a very nascent stage of development in terms of leveraging digital technologies in education and we have only mined the tip of the iceberg.
How to accentuate digital learning. What are the future plans of the company?
We belive that we can make digital learning mainstream only by:
All this will result in an increased sense of ownership amongst the students and professionals fraternity, as they will be able to use different technologically aided tools and innovative ways of consuming knowledge to get best results.
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