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April 13, 2023Embedding EdTech in Higher Education Institutions
The pandemic posed several challenges to the education sector. Despite these, the whole education sector carried on unscathed, thanks to educational technologies and digital facilities. Educational technologies offer myriad benefits to all stakeholders and enhance the overall capacity of higher education institutions (HEIs). In this piece, the term “educational technologies” is used in an expanded sense to include the entire bouquet of technologies and applications employed well beyond the classrooms or teaching-learning activities, as defined usually, and covers the entire gamut of operations of the HEIs. The following are some major benefits, that are certain to accrue, from digitalisation. These benefits highlight the importance of embedding technology into institutions on a priority basis.
Digital Divide
When it comes to digital technology, the student is often the teacher. This is so because the students of this generation are, by default, digital literates, compared to teachers who need to work towards learning technology. Not being adept at technological usage puts even knowledgeable teachers at the backfoot in terms of teaching and results in sub-optimal teaching-learning outcomes. While subject knowledge is paramount, technological adeptness has become a prerequisite for teachers. Having an in-house education technology centre would help faculty members to learn, train and narrow the digital divide.
Content Development
Lesson plans, lecture notes and lectures of the teachers are all their intellectual properties. It is a fact that a teacher delivers the same content in different ways on different occasions, depending on the context. In traditional classroom mode, almost every content that a teacher provides to the students is retained only in some young curious minds that could comprehend the topics discussed, unlike in a digital classroom that is equipped to digitally capture the lectures as given, for eternity. Further, if the lectures are recorded, it motivates some faculty members to prepare and deliver better than they otherwise would have. Thus, the content created and stored could be used for faculty development also.
Digital Evaluations
Even before the pandemic-forced adoption of technology, many institutions, including public universities that are usually constrained financially, have digitised their evaluation process, having understood its utility. With the choice-based credit system (CBCS) and continuous internal evaluation now being almost universally adopted, a lot of person-hours are required to execute the evaluation process. In most cases, faculty members are responsible for much of the evaluation work, which crowds out their time for academic work. Even for non-teaching staff, digital infrastructure is a huge aid. Digitising the evaluation process allows secure, transparent, any-time, any-place evaluation, and does so with cost reduction and saving invaluable time of the faculty members.
Enriching Academic Outcomes
Besides collecting and storing rudimentary data, educational technologies also help capture data that were hitherto impossible to conceive. For instance, data that are too abstract like the number of times a student winks or rolls his/her eyeballs per minute, while reading some virtual content, which is used as a proxy for a student’s attentiveness or attendance, can also be captured. If the institutions are unwaveringly committed to outcome-based education then educational technologies provide the best option to gather, analyse and interpret digitally captured data about students and teachers at various levels and periods. Institutions can then leverage these valuable insights about the teaching-learning process to attain better academic outcomes. The adoption of educational technologies will lead to a transformative curriculum relevant to the knowledge era, where the outcome of education alone matters and not the mode of education.
Collaborative Research
The main purpose of HEIs is the creation of knowledge through research. Innovative ideas blossom when more minds collaborate. With interdisciplinary research and study bearing more fruits, digitising the research process is paramount. Web-enabled technologies foster research by clustering teachers, students, researchers, scholars, and industry into one coherent whole, by substantially negating the time-space constraints. Most technology imparting institutions conduct hackathons to find solutions to various problems. But they are held as one-off events than being mainstreamed as a regular aspect of the academic process. Infusing technology into the research and mainstreaming it will promote collaborative ideating, learning, research and innovation.
Aiding Administration
Managing the admission process, human resources, assets including estates, infrastructure, procurement, research projects, etc. have all been digitised in top institutions in various forms like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or University Management System (UMS), etc. Further, all rankings and accreditations are based hugely on data that are scarce and scattered. Usually, faculty members hold additional responsibility for some administrative jobs including those related to ranking and accreditation. Systems like UMS helps institutions complete tasks swiftly, and collect and retrieve data efficiently, resulting in saving a lot of precious time of faculty members.
With a plethora of benefits emanating from digitising institutions, any investment in higher education needs to focus predominantly on the creation and strengthening of the digital infrastructure, as against sprucing up the conventional assets and modes like bricks and mortar structures, printed books, physical evaluations, etc. Any delay in adopting technology across the operations will put HEIs at a huge disadvantage.
Views expressed by the author are personal and need not reflect or represent the views of the Centre for Public Policy Research.
M.Saravanan has worked in public policy for over 12 years, focusing predominantly on higher education. Currently, he works as Deputy Registrar & Chief Finance Officer, Anurag University, Hyderabad. He has offered consultancy services to the Union and State governments, private organisations and educational institutions. He has a Ph.D. in development economics from the University of Madras. His areas of interest cover higher education, school education, skill development and economics. He had been a part of the editorial team of a journal and has published opinion pieces for Deccan Herald and Business Line.
