Edu-leaders

We met M.S. Vijay Kumar by chance. But perhaps it was no accident. For what Vijay is involved with could hold the keys to a treasure of knowledge that just keeps growing by sharing. An IIT Chennai alumnus, Vijay leads the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the hallowed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And he is the man behind MIT’s initiative to make its courses available to the rest of the world. For free!

Open knowledge and education is more than just making content accessible — it is a mindset. A mindset that does not view knowledge and pedagogical materials and practices as proprietary. A student or teacher in a remote village in India can use the Internet to access Economics 101 taught by a Nobel Laureate at MIT. She can watch video-taped lectures, access notes, read materials, take assignments and tests. She can also interact with others accessing the course, and even get questions answered by relevant faculty.

So what is the future of campuses if you can get all your education online? That’s a tough one to answer. For now, most educators agree that learning in a traditional setting will continue to attract students as long as education is seen to be the sum of one’s campus experiences, and not just the time spent in the classroom. However, what is also becoming clear is that while technology has hitherto supplemented conventional teaching, we may reach a point when classroom sessions will end up enabling and supporting Open Education!

While this may seem far-fetched, we are already moving in that direction. IGNOU, which leads the Open Knowledge movement in India, has just been declared the largest university in the world by UNESCO. Open Education could in fact be the key to overcoming the triple challenges of Indian Higher Education — capacity, quality and access. It could allow us to take quality education to the remotest parts of our country at almost no cost.

All this sounds Utopian, and we have a long way to go — given the pace of broadband adoption and other challenges. But, in the long-term, Open Education could provide answers to the enormous challenge of building the 1500 universities that our country needs.