Education renders learning that induces awareness and prepares for life. It needs to be an activity or a process that nurtures, natural talents that nourishes and contributes to individual cognitive development leading to skilled behaviour. The outcome of education should facilitate the ability to apply the acquired knowledge in any given situation to provide an innovative, unique solution – be it in private, personal or professional self of an individual. It should alleviate or make easier for individual decision making.
To get off the ground – education happens from birth to death. It is not restricted to only school / college / university or as class room learning. These are a few formal structures that allow facilitation for learning. Most of the learning gets applied outside these structures in real life – non-formal or informal. Education is more didactic – Instructive (especially excessively) in the current scenario. It needs to move to immersive, intuitive, interactive & inclusive – leading to education freedom that contributes to a sustainable education eco system that contributes to an innovative economic growth.
In the current digital era, there is a storm of information and knowledge sharing. The positivity of this era is, it is developing tolerance to knowledge sharing, criticisms and opens up new challenges to pursue. Making room for a lot of informal learning and experimentation at individual level, which is a good thing. The gap between teaching and learning is slowly impressing to a progressive liberal learning. It imputes to an open intellectual and skills forum that brings out and nourishes the inner potential of individual. Obviously, this results in a huge talent development with inherent capacity for coming into being. This needs to be incorporated in the formal education system.
It is time education system incorporates open and informal learning methodologies – leading to innovative, applied knowledge and experiential learning outcomes. This calls for collaborative learning eco system – involving individuals (professionals/ entrepreneurs/ experts inclusive of outside formal education system), institutions of learning, industries and research centres.
Open skill schools to be promoted locally and encourage students at all levels to have access to learn skills. No basic education is required for learning in these skill schools. These schools should provide flexible learning time / phase. The objective is to channelize the learner’s interest, support the learners with the required learning concepts, motivate to bring out the latent talent to the optimal and encourage learning outcomes for an impactful result. These schools serve to provide opportunity in terms of learning and an acquiring environment.
To optimize the current education resources for an impactful learning eco system, suggest Technology wide interoperability for Resource Access (TiRAc). This would mean to pool the existing institutions of learning and skill development in a layered or composite architecture – to support learning outcomes in terms of human resources, financing, equipment & facilities, systems & practices, processes & procedures etc.
In a layered TiRAc, the research institutions to adopt and support institutions of higher learning, Institutions of higher learning to adopt & support polytechnics, polytechnics to adopt & support ITIs and ITIs to adopt & support community colleges. In a composite TiRAc, research institutions / institutions of higher learning to adopt & support a cluster of polytechnics and community colleges.
Expected outcome of a TiRAc architecture are:
- Unlock/ optimize resources and talent that are currently inaccessible to rest of the skill providing institutions
- Develops facility/infrastructure pooling for similar skills
- Increase cooperation & information sharing across skill imparting bodies
- Delivers uniformly skilled resources across industrial requirements
- Be able to respond more quickly to dynamic industry/market changes
- Develops broader people capabilities
Role of Industry
Industry needs to partner with research institutions, adopt institutions of higher learning for mutual knowledge sharing, unlearning and relearning. This should help the industry increase penetration in smaller cities and optimize the resources. Be overt to institutions in sharing industry problems for innovative solutions. This would lead to a debatable learning society. Education is currently more literacy based and not a knowledge-based society open to debate. Industry and institutes need to come together to create a learning café – partner players who are innovative and want to build an inclusive and sustainable education experience that can be useful to everyone. This should spark advance to build an innovative and sustainable education model for national progress.
Industry should be able to project the future demand for skill requirements to institutions, which should help to build a more realistic learning curriculum. Industry members need to be on the school academic boards. As having industry members on the academic boards of research and institutions of higher learning, industry should consider having members from research and institutions of higher learning as part of its development board. This augments a two-way process to optimize and expedite a more progressive, result oriented, impactful outcome that is need of the hour for the nation to boost its economy.
Role of Institutions & Research Centres
Education institutions from school to higher learning centres to have teachers work in industry. Robust holistic continuous training for teachers at all levels to be made mandatory. Industry personnel to consider work in institutions on sabbatical. Schools and institutions of higher learning to source experts for guest lectures and demonstration from the industry. Research centres to share the practical knowledge with students. This should help attract good talent. Separate student board to provide learning suggestions at school and higher education levels. It would make a difference, to have students included in academic / technical boards at higher education level. Higher education institutions to evolve as Centres of excellence in their respective areas of specializations and rise to support industry at the time of a need or a recession. Research and higher education institutions to support regular training programmes that are made available from recognized institutes for availing training by teachers.
This could just be a beginning – a stage set for a symphony orchestra. An empowered education system is the foundation on which an empowered nation is built that is progressive and flourishes.
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