Higher Education should be flexible, personalized; Online education will improve access, GER: UGC Chairman

The newly appointed Chairman of the University Grants Commission, Prof M. Jagadesh Kumar in a freewheeling conversation with Shiksha.com, spoke about various advantages of online degree courses and regulatory reforms which are on offing. He also spoke how Education Technology (EdTech) companies can play a major role in delivery of online degree courses. The interview will be published in two parts, below is the first part of interview.

Q. How do you look at the proposal to establish digital university. What will be its structure and how this will be regulated to keep international standards as suggested by the Prime Minister?

A. There are two aspects to it, the first one is that there are limited options that students have and the other is the difference in the cognitive ability of the students.

The present university system is very rigid, not just in India, but across the world. When the university system doesn’t resonate with the needs of the student community whether it is working or non-working, then a large number of people who would like to acquire new skills, as the technology is also evolving, are left out of the higher education system. So, the idea is to address these two.

So, the digital university will help two types of people, first, those who are highly talented but could not get into the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) due to some or other reason. Second, those people who are on the job and want to improve their skills to become more productive in their jobs.

So, in order to address these two issues, higher education has to be flexible, it should be personalized, it should be customized and that is only possible when we introduce digital technology into higher education.

Q. UGC has allowed some of the universities to offer degree courses online. What is the change now through digital university?

A. Fortunately digital technology has become part of our life in India be it healthcare, welfare, land reforms, now technology is the backbone.

But for some reason, the education sector did not adopt technology, in the same way, the way we adopted it in other areas and our eyes were opened only during the COVID-19 period. The entire education system realized the potential of digital technology. Therefore the time is right, to introduce digital technology.

That is the reason that we are doing two things parallelly, one is enabling the existing HEIs to start online and a few universities offering some courses online will not meet our requirements. Now we are looking at scaling up the number of HEIs that can offer degree courses online.

Second thing is to have a national level digital university, which will work as a 'Hubs and Spoke' model.

Q. Right now UGC regulation allows universities among the top 100 in NIRF ranking and with a NAAC score of 3.25 to offer degree courses online. How this situation will change now?

A. This model where we allowed institutions to offer courses online could not succeed because of the regulations themselves. The regulations made it mandatory for universities to create their own facility to offer courses online by converting intellectual knowledge into digital content. Then they had to put those content on SWAYAM or some other portal, which put a lot of restrictions on universities.

Even if they had the facility, the regulations allowed institutions to offer only 13 courses and there was some attendance requirement.

See in a flexible environment you cannot have an attendance requirement.

So, what we did is we formed a committee and brought amendments to the existing ODL regulations and they are very revolutionary changes.

Now, we have one category of institutions which will be entitled to offer online education, under this any institution with a NAAC rating of 3.26 and above and has been in NIRF Rankings among the top 100 institutions will be entitled. So, without taking permission from the UGC they can start an online degree course.

The second will be those institutions that do not fall under this category but want to offer online degree courses, they can still write to us and will after satisfying ourselves we will allow those institutions to offer courses online.

We need to increase the student base in online education. Right now as we have a limited number of seats, we put a lot of restrictions like class 12 marks to be eligible to appear in the entrance or be eligible to get admitted in a programme. A lot of filters were put, basically, we were selecting students by eliminating them and in this process, a lot of talented students were not able to become part of the higher education system.

In this new system, anyone who passes class 12 will be eligible to get into any programme offered through online mode. Similarly, anyone who passes undergraduate, nothing like 55% or 60% can join any master's programme is offered in online mode. 

This will help a large number of students who were coming from different backgrounds, especially rural backgrounds. Now all of them will have the opportunity to gain knowledge and earn a degree.

This will also improve our GER, we have set a target of achieving 50% GER by 2035, right now we are at 28%.

Q. UGC recently issued an advisory against Universities partnering with EdTech companies to offer degree and diploma courses. Is there a regulation being planned to regulate EdTechs?

A. We bringing in third reform in line with the ones stated above, in which higher education institutions will now be able to collaborate with EdTech companies because now we are ahead of the curve in terms of the technology platforms that we have.

So, we will be allowing HEIs to collaborate with them on a couple of things, first, to convert our existing content into digital content we need to come out of our conventional thinking, just recording a lecture and uploading is not digital content. The digital content should have a visual effect, graphics, instant feedback for students through online tests and so on.

In order to do that you need a lot of technological support, like the studio, editors and other technical people, all the colleges or universities might not have it, there the technology companies can help. The second thing is once the content is ready where will the college host it, they might not have the platform, there the institution can use the cloud platform offered by the EdTech companies. There will be one unified interface to the students where students can go, choose, pick and customize courses depending on their interests and need.

The evaluation will also be done by the HEIs, with the help of the EdTech companies because today we have the technology for proctored examination.

The only thing that we are saying is when you collaborate with EdTech companies the idea is not to commercialize education, the idea is to get into an outsourcing franchise model where the institution will say that it is offering the course, not the EdTech company doing that. It should not happen that EdYech companies will start advertising that they are offering degree courses, BA. BSc, MA and so on while the university is in the background.

Our National Education Policy also says that there should be greater access with greater affordability, so the cost of education should be affordable.

Next week we will be putting draft regulations on the UGC website invite all the stakeholders for their inputs and modifying the regulations depending on the requirement and suggestions for the online courses to be offered by universities and other higher education institutions.

We will then finalize the regulations so that many higher education institutions can start offering courses through online mode from academic session 2022-23.

Q. There are apprehensions that online will become just a paper degree with no practical experience?

A. I would like to clarify that through online mode only those programmes will be offered which do not require practical or lab needs. We cannot offer Engineering, or medical courses online. But institutions can offer courses like Data science, computational biology, public health, anthropology, finance, hotel management, tourism management and so on.

People are looking to gain knowledge of these fields and gain employment.

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