When Learning Will Be A Lifelong Necessity

To even start to discuss the future of education and learning, one needs to wade through myriad unanswered questions. Are our universities, colleges and campuses stuck in a time warp? Why has learning and teaching not changed since the days of Nalanda/ Takshashila? Why even though the concept of kindergarten started more than 100 years ago, do classes and schools have the same look, the same format of desks and teaching? Why do we need to go to college at a specific age or graduate at a certain age? Are we now teaching what is relevant for the 21st century?

I may add that in these changing times, most sectors are crying out for disruption but in education I dare say we need a total reboot.

Education, reskilling/upskilling have the maximum impact on our lives — in terms of financial stability, comfort for oneself/ family as well as shaping who we become. However, we are least concerned with demanding the best out of our institutions and doing our best to stay relevant.

India doesn’t need Harvards and Oxfords. Why do we have such a fascination for such institutions when we are a country of 1.25 billion with over 60 percent under the age of 25? At this stage, we need scale solutions.

Around 60 percent of employers find it difficult to fill jobs despite a surplus supply of labour. This tells us that the type of skills required for these jobs are not available even though workers are. In light of this, what the future of learning really looks like is people being able to learn on their own time, without having to step out of the workforce.

Learning what’s relevant, even if that means learning continuously because industry trends are changing every year. This is why online education offers a great opportunity here and can be truly disruptive.

We cannot meet our growing needs unless we look at online as a serious option to educate our youth at scale. With so much changing in the industry, why do we need to go to college at a specific age and exit at a specific age?

With the rapid advancement of technology, things are changing fast and online has become an absolute must. Yes, there are still many misconceptions associated with online learning.

Let’s face it, we have over 125 million young Indians who should be in higher education and are not for various reasons, because most of them need to start earning as early as they can. As a result they practically give up their right to learn for good.

India will need $100 billion to build the brick-and-mortar universities to cater to its youth’s ambitions. Even if we were to manage to do that there is the larger issue of trained faculty. We need changes in our regulatory framework so that it allows more of the private sector to come in and solve the problem at scale. Yes, there have been a few that have taken advantage of the system and spoilt the path for change and innovation but it’s time to look past that and move the fault line and make tectonic changes and bold ones.

The sign boards are changing from words like management, MBA and engineering to the internet of things, virtual reality, big data, analytics, robotics, cloud computing and many more that now define the careers of tomorrow.

We have now officially entered the era of “LLL” or Life Long Learning.