How to Increase Consumption of online courses in India

In my previous blog, I had talked about institutions moving instruction to online. It was a hybrid model where most of the lectures were online, but students spent some semesters on campus, not for lectures, but to do labs, projects, extra-curricular activities, make friends, and may be a few classroom sessions too. If institutions could recruit a star faculty at higher salary to teach larger classes online compared with two good/average faculty members for in-class teaching of small classes, they could save money and improve quality of education.

But a natural question is how can our poor quality educational institutions with no flexibility to recruit star faculty, improve their delivery of education through online. And the answer is quite obvious, they can outsource their teaching. There are several providers of online courses who would also certify that the student has learn enough to satisfy the course outcomes. These include SWAYAM (of Government of India), Coursera, edX, and niche players like Harappa.

In fact, augmenting one's own offerings of in-class instruction with online courses from other platforms seems like a better thing to do than to have everything (whether online or offline) done by in-house faculty. But will this really improve quality of education as assumed above.

We need to make some assumption here. What I have been thinking has been best articulated in a recent tweet by @learning_pt

(7/10 offline) > (9/10 online) > (3/10 offline)
last category most applicable to Indian colleges

What they are saying is that a good teacher (rated 7 on a scale from 1 to 10) in a class is better than an excellent teacher (rated 9 on a scale from 1 to 10) online. But an excellent teacher online is better than a poor teacher (rated 3 on a scale from 1 to 10) in a class. (Would love to read any research in this. Currently, it is an assumption which seems right based on one's own experience.)

There is no denying that a large number of our educational institutions have a terrible shortage of faculty. As a result, many institutions recruit temporary faculty every semester at very low cost, which often results in very poor quality teaching. If temporary faculty is not recruited then permanent faculty is so overloaded that they can't do justice to the instruction. In some institutions, the permanent faculty is itself of poor quality.

A simple solution would be for the college to tell its students that out of 5 (say) courses they are supposed to study in a semester, only 4 will be taught in class rooms, and they should register one course online that the college will specify (say, on SWAYAM). And the college will pay for the cost of doing that online course, since it saves the cost of hiring a faculty, which is likely to be higher.

In this solution, students get better learning, college saves money, infrastructure requirements go down, may be faculty teaching load also reduces. So every single stakeholder is better off in this model. Considering this, UGC came out with its guidelines in 2016 in which it encouraged universities and colleges to offer up to 20 percent of the curriculum in online mode.

However, adoption of online has been painfully slow till now. Why is it that a solution which is providing benefit to all stakeholders is still not being adopted.

There are several issues, which essentially show that there is lack of autonomy and such changes will not happen through UGC diktats.

The most important issue is that most of our higher education system still runs in the archaic affiliated college model where a university controls everything about a college. So a college cannot decide the syllabus and whatever syllabus the university has decided will not match 100 percent with what is being taught in the online course. So unless the university agrees that the specific online course is equivalent to the course that university had designed, the college cannot ask its students to do that course. And the university does not agree.

Why does university not agree. Several reasons. One, it does not have time to figure out whether an online course is equivalent (called "mapping" in UGC parlance). Improving quality of college education is not a priority item for most universities.

Two, there is a uniquely Indian penchant for fairness. This implies that either ALL students in ALL colleges agree to do the university defined curriculum, or NO student in NO college should do the university defined curriculum and instead do the online course. Anything else will be deemed unfair. So a decision cannot be taken at the level of a college. It has to be university-wide and forced upon ALL colleges affiliated with the university. So, if one college lacks faculty in one area and wants that particular course to be taken online, but another college has faculty in that area and wants to teach the university prescribed syllabus, there is a problem. And the simple solution is to not take any decision, which means that everyone does university prescribed syllabus, even if faculty is not available in a college. (And this issue of fairness is not just in poor colleges and universities. It is there even in IITs. You can't have the same course being run independently by two instructors. So no innovation. Everyone agrees to common minimum standards.)

Three, most universities in India do not understand the concept of doing a course on Pass/Fail basis. So they will attempt to integrate the performance of student in that online course in their own transcript and not know how to interpret the grade given there as marks of the university. Should an "A-" grade by online course provider means 80 percent marks of the university or 85 percent or something else. An easy solution would have been to consider this course as being passed but not contribute to your CGPA or marks.

Four, there is a fear of the unknown, rather, a fear of the technology. Is this really working. Can their evaluation be really trusted. (No one will say that their own evaluation can hardly be trusted.)

But what about smaller universities or autonomous colleges. Why aren't they adopting online courses. Well, a little bit of above. But there is another big problem. We have been pushing online (SWAYAM mainly) as a way to improve quality. And I too am guilty of this as this blog itself started with the assumption of quality, that an excellent online teacher is better than a poor in-class teacher, and hence online. It hurts egos to admit that an online course will be better than what some of them can teach.

Let us consider Tier 1 institutions. Almost every faculty there would be in the good to excellent range. So their own teaching is likely to be better than any online course by even an excellent teacher. So they refuse to consume online courses. So one IIT would not allow its students to register for a SWAYAM course taught by a professor of another IIT. Notice that if online was pushed as a way to provide flexibility to students - allow them to study electives that their own faculty do not offer, allow them flexibility of learning at any time (and if a lot of students do one course online, scheduling of remaining courses will become so much simpler and benefit everyone else too), allow faculty to offer esoteric electives for which there may not be enough interest in one institute but together with students from elsewhere, the course may become viable, and so on. As long as the focus is only on quality, Tier 1 institutions would resist allowing these courses to be credited by their students.

Let us consider Tier 2 institutions. Many of them do recruit poor quality faculty on temporary basis every semester, and could benefit immensely by using online courses. To some extent, the reasons given above hold, particularly, lack of exposure to technology and hence a lack of trust of these courses. Also, these temp faculty provide a very useful service to permanent faculty. Further, these institutions are desirous of getting good NIRF ranks and good score in accreditation. Our accreditation agencies and NIRF ranking does not recognize online teaching in the sense they will still seek student-faculty ratio and not look at the average class size of courses taught in campus. So, if they have to recruit faculty anyway to maintain the student-faculty ratio, might as well ask them to teach instead of doing nothing for that salary. Part of the reason is also that if Tier 1 institutions do not consider these courses as good enough for them, why should we consider them good enough for us. We are only marginally behind them in quality, if at all, will be the argument made.

So, each tier has its own reasons to not consume online courses. How do we then encourage online education in India. One possibility is that the experience gained during Covid-19 would have broken all mental barriers and convinced a lot of stake holders of the utility of online courses. If that happens, great. But I suspect that we might go back to our old habits, mainly because everyone has moved online without much preparation, and most of us have done our own courses online with poor infrastructure support and not really consumed other courses. Hence the experience and feedback may not be that great to sustain this beyond Covid-19 situation.

What do we need to do?

We need role models. If a few reputed institutions can start consuming online courses (perhaps in addition to creating online courses), and their students and faculty can communicate to the rest of the world that they are happier with the quality, choice, flexibility, etc., it would encourage a lot more institutions to try.

GIAN program, in which India invited faculty members from around the world to teach compressed short term courses, had desired that those courses be delivered live to multiple locations and everyone offers those courses for credit in their respective institutions. I don't know how many GIAN courses were offered for credit even in host institutions (where it was in live classrooms), not to mention in other institutions where it was beamed live. Now, GIAN has made it mandatory that the course be recorded in a MOOC kind of fashion, which is a positive step. But not enough. We need to ensure that these courses will actually be consumed by some institutions for credit. In my opinion, a course should be approved only when the host institution, along with at least a few more institutes agree to make it available for credit to their students. Otherwise, it is difficult to justify the huge cost of GIAN courses.

We need more autonomy to our institutions. They should feel empowered to take decisions. For example, they do not know if they are allowed only SWAYAM courses, or they can use any course by any institution.

We could incentivize institutions. May be some additional budget if an institution agrees to consume online courses. So, not only they save money, but they also get additional money.

And in all our communication, we focus not just on financial saving, or quality, but the flexibility it provides to our students.

What is interesting is that our student community has long been a fan of online education. If you look at the statistics of global players like Coursera, Indian students consume a large number of courses on their website, including paid courses. My own students keep telling me how much they learn from online content compared with in-class lectures. So our primary customers will be very happy if we can allow them some online courses.