Table of Contents
Higher education in India: Relevance
- GS 2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
Education in India: Context
- In the Union Budget 2022-23, higher education policy planners and regulators emphasised on giving shape to the digital university.
About digital university
- Digital university is expected to offer any number, kind, and type of course without limits on intake, in a hybrid or ‘physical plus digital’ mode.
- It proclaims to provide equitable access to quality higher education and employability- enhancing skill development programmes to all.
Government steps for higher education
- University Grants Commission has relaxed the norms and standards for setting up open universities. Particularly, land requirement has been reduced from 40 acres to just five acres.
- More universities are being enabled to offer courses in the distance, open and online mode, mostly in collaboration with EdTech start-ups and unicorns.
- Students are also made to complete a certain portion of their course requirements through Massive Open Online Courses.
- Additionally, they can accumulate credits at will and deposit them in their Academic Bank of Credit to be exchanged for a degree at a later stage.
Role of teachers in education
- Technology can be effectively leveraged as a quality-enhancement tool. It would, however, be a blunder to regard technology-mediated teaching-learning as an alternative to face-to-face education.
- Technology can supplement and not substitute teachers.
- No world-class universities, including those with a high degree of technology integration in their teaching and learning processes, are planning to cut down their faculty cost or their number any time soon.
- Higher education is a lot more than borrowing content and delivering them online or outsourcing content.
- We must, instead, be focussed on exploiting our full potential to emerge as a producer of knowledge and providers of the global workforce.
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