THE GIST of Editorial for UPSC Exams : 13 June 2020 (Streamed education is diluted education (The Hindu))

Streamed education is diluted education (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: National
Prelims level: SWAYAM platform
Mains level: e-learning platform and its sustainability in India

Context:

All that is of value is diluting into the functional, and there seems to be no vocabulary to capture this dilution of value.
Our conception of value itself has been diluted to mean just exchange ‘value’.
Here, I will relate this to the meaning of education.

The UGC scheme:

Recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University Grants Commission had issued a circular to universities encouraging them to adopt massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Courses were offered on its SWAYAM platform for credit transfers in the coming semesters.
This sounds like a benevolent act during th...............................

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MOOC-based e-learning platforms:

MOOC-based e-learning platforms tend to reinforce a top-down teacher-to-student directionality of learning whereby the teacher ‘creates’ and the student ‘consumes’.
This misses the point that teaching and learning are skills that are always in the making.
The teacher is after all “an intellectual midwife” who facilitates in the birth of students’ ideas and insights through engaging in critical dialogue.
In a conducive classroom environment, this role is often switched and the student plays intellectual midwife to the teacher’s ideas.
Moving to a MOOC-based degree system would rob young teachers and students of these essential lessons in teaching and learning from each other.

Sacred spaces:

Taking higher education online is much like taking up a sport such as cricket, football or boxing online.
One has not actually learnt the sport unless one has engaged with it in one’s gully, stadium, field, or ring.
In education, the classroom acts ........................

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Litmus test:

Implicit in every curriculum is the tacit assumption that the classroom is a laboratory for hands-on testing of ideas, opinions, interpretations, and counterarguments.
A diverse and inclusive classroom is the best litmus test for any theory or insight.
Multidisciplinarity happens more through serendipity — when learners across disciplines bump into each other and engage in conversations.
Classroom and campus spaces offer the potential for solidarity in the face of discrimination, social anxiety, and stage fear, paving the way for a proliferation of voluntary associations.
In the absence of this physical space, teaching and learning would give way to mere content and its consumption.

Dilution:

Without a shared space to discuss and contest ideas, learning dilutes to just gathering more information.
This could also dilute norms of evaluation, whereby a “good lecture” might mean merely a lecture which “streams seamlessly, without buffering”.
This is not an argument from tradition.
One could think of greater value-sensitive and socially just architectures and technologies that further foster classroom engagement.
And also make it accessible for students of various disabilities and challenges, thereby adding more value to the existing meaning of education.
But public education modelled on social distancing is a functional reduction and dilution of the meaning of education.
It could add value only as an addendum to the classroom.

Conclusion:

Such platforms must be seen only as stop-gap variants that help us get by under lockdown situations and complement classroom lectures.
Our vocabulary has many terms for the loss of function — failure, malfunction, dysfunction, breakdown, etc. — but hardly any for the loss of value.
‘Malpractice’ is the closest that comes to mind.
This malpractice of the dilution of education must be resisted, else we are asking for multiple concussions.
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Prelims Questions:

Q1. What is 163348 (2002 NN4), recently seen in news?
(a) A giant asteroid
(b) A satellite launched by North Korea
(c) Fastest Supercomputer developed by Israel
(d) An Exoplanet