Education Post COVID-19: e-Session with Prof Sudhir K Jain & Prof Pradeep Khosla

“Online learning can enable learning to happen in a variety of contexts, locations, and times; it allows for a transformation of curriculum and learning.” – Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera (from ‘Disrupting College’, a report by The Center for American Progress)

Two eminent IIT alumni and top leaders of academia (Prof Sudhir K Jain and Prof Pradeep Khosla) discussed the drastic impact of the novel coronavirus disease on education – are these changes permanent? Will we now have a new normal in education? and other similar issues. The discussion took place on 25th June 2020, in a session titled ‘The New Education Norm: Post COVID-19′. This was the first installment of a virtual conference series organized by PanIIT USA, a California non-profit public benefit corporation aimed at promoting and enhancing a common brand for the IITs and its alumni and offering common alumni services to help them achieve their professional and personal goals. This series will cover topics that are of interest to all IITians across the world.

Prof Jain received a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee) and a Masters and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He is an internationally reputed scholar of earthquake engineering who was the faculty of IIT Kanpur for 35 years and is currently serving his third 5-year term as Director of IIT Gandhinagar. On the other hand, Pradeep Khosla completed his Bachelor’s degree in technology from IIT Kharagpur, and Masters and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an internationally renowned electrical and computer engineer and is the eighth Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego.

IITGN Rising To The Crisis

The recipient of Padma Shri (one of the highest civilian awards of India), Prof Jain provided us a brief overview of IITGN. This second-generation IIT provides excellent opportunities to experiment with education, innovations, and governance. Some of the building blocks of this Institute are its cutting-edge curriculum (Foundation Program, project-oriented-learning, learning-by-doing), interesting co-curricular activities (Explorer Fellowship), maximum interdisciplinary interactions, globalization, diversity, and social awareness initiatives (Nyasa, NEEV). Given its creativity and uniqueness, many colleges across the country have implemented the concept of the Foundation Program over time. Constant efforts have been made to inculcate the aspect of inclusivity, promoting the idea that everybody can be a part of IITGN.

Proceeding further, Prof Jain explained how this Institute handled the COVID-19 crisis. The first decision was not making the students leave the campus premises – if they wished to stay, they were most welcome and if they wanted to leave, the Institute supported them at that point too. Almost 25% of the student body decided to stay on the campus. IITGN launched Project Isaac, taking inspiration from Sir Isaac Newton, to keep the students engaged in online creative projects and awards. The objective was to keep boredom away during the times of lockdown.

Unlike many colleges and universities that went into the online mode of teaching immediately, the Institute declared summer vacations during which the faculty and students prepared themselves better for participating in the upcoming virtual courses. After the required training and arrangement of hardware and infrastructure, it started its own online classes from 8th June 2020. In the meantime, IITGN also approved several massive open online courses (MOOCs) on edX and Coursera and assigned them equivalent grades. The students could take them as a part of their summer courses at the Institute and earn credits towards fulfilling their graduation requirements.

Prof Jain stated that the Institute fully realizes the difficulties faced by the graduating batch of 2020 with respect to their overseas admissions and job opportunities. Keeping this in mind, IITGN has announced a special scheme wherein its students could get direct admission into a one-year PG diploma. Moreover, special fellowships have been created for research-oriented students and leadership fellowships for those who are interested in corporate jobs. All this will give them some cushion time and help them tackle the present challenges.

Furthermore, our alumni raised some funds for the Shramik Kalyan Samiti and it helped the 900 construction workers staying on or near the campus premises. The Institute is a strong promoter of developing friendly relationships with its neighboring villages, Basan and Palaj, and created the Padosi Gram Sahyog Samiti to provide some relief to their financially weak families in these tough times. 

Prof Jain sees this new paradigm of online learning as a great platform for teaching and collaboration. An entire mindset shift has taken place and this will create a lot more emphasis on ‘learning to learn’. The fact that about 60% of the IITGN students have successfully experimented with courses on platforms like Coursera and edX gives great hopes that a fair amount of potential is unleashed in the student body. The global exchanges need to be reimagined. In terms of academia, it is the possibility of collaborative classrooms – imagine a situation where a prof from IITGN and another one from the University of California are teaching together and their students are attending lectures from all around the globe! Virtual education can really help us in scaling-up (variety as well as depth) the entire educational experience. The novel coronavirus disease has significantly lowered the resistance towards using online tools, both for industries and institutes. These techniques can be very useful for future placements (online recruitment by distant organizations) and studies. As the world is becoming more complex and challenging, the new workplace would be very different as compared to the pre-COVID-19 one. This is the time when leadership, communication, and life skills will be much more needed as well as appreciated.

Towards Hybrid Learning

Prof Khosla expressed that because of the globally spread SARS-CoV-2 infection, thousands and thousands of lives are at stake. Educators across the world had to vacate their campuses and send students home to ensure everyone’s safety. Basically, pretty much everything switched to remote overnight. We also adapted our research and innovation very swiftly. Many companies changed their models and modes of functioning. But, this remote teaching and working were considered to be a taboo for a very long time in academia. Now that we are 4-5 months into this new paradigm, one of the important questions that we face is – what is it that we are going to keep and what others do we throw away?

Talking more about remote education, he said that there are positives as well as negatives. Anytime anywhere access to learning is clearly an advantage. At the same time, the lack of physical interaction is a disadvantage and many of the students and faculty do not like it. This virtual education approach will not go away. It will stay, but not purely in a remote form. We need to combine it with the in-person (classroom) education – a hybrid form (blended learning)! Then, there is also the issue of assessments – how does it all work? How to engage students in remote settings vs. room discussions? Basically, many such topics have come to the surface and they need to be addressed. Another positive example of remote connection is psychological counseling, which has become a big issue in all the US universities. It turns out that these sessions, when conducted online, are more scalable and nearly equally effective. Even though the present pandemic crisis is something that we were not looking forward to, there has been a lot of creativity unleashed because of this situation that the educational institutes never saw or delivered before.

Prof Khosla thinks that in the future, the world will have in-person learning amplified with remote delivery in a physical setting. In the coming years, we will see some new innovations such as augmented and virtual realities being combined into this remote delivery of education.

The Group Discussion: Sharing Experiences And Views

In response to one of the questions about online education, Prof Jain discussed that it is similar to replacing a slide rule with a calculator. Now, we are graduating from calculators to platforms like zoom and google meet. Teaching a class whose students are distributed across different places of a country (or world) – this is the power of virtual learning. It is up to the faculty and their creative skills to make this new classroom experience richer and better! There is a need for all teachers to relearn how to teach effectively in class.

According to him, the current pandemic is similar to a big plastic deformation – there is no way to restore the old normals. We cannot go back to where we were before this crisis emerged. The new normal has already been created. It is now on us to leverage that; we need to minimize the damage caused by the pandemic and at the same time, maximize the gains that arise from this situation, as much as we can. Agreeing with Prof Jain, Prof Khosla emphasized that human beings have to rework on their ability of social interactions. These, when mediated by technology, are not the same as when two people sit down together and have a discussion over a cup of tea. We are seeing the stress levels rise as people work remotely – so we can clearly make out that there are major social, emotional, and psychological components involved in the entire process. At this point, we do not understand what exactly is this relearning and how is it going to happen. Maybe, the brain has to be rewired and retaught what are technology-mediated social interactions and how to make them effective!

Finding the Right Mix: Online X Physical Classes –

Addressing another related question, Prof Jain described that he does not see online education as a replacement for physical classes. In due course, online will be supplementing the offline modes of education. The right mix of the two is what is needed. In a very short time span, we all have experienced something that we would never have dreamt of. In academia, a whole new dimension in learning is opening up and educators across the world should try their best to give their students superior global experience. Prof Khosla added that there is a lot of growth along multiple dimensions that happen in students. Institute campuses fulfill those requirements by creating a diversity of people and it is definitely not the same as being in a 5-8 person family. 

So, it is very crucial for us to understand that the physical dimension of interaction and proximity cannot be just taken away and replaced completely with a remote lifestyle. We can utilize remote to amplify it, we can use it as a transition path, but we certainly cannot implement it completely in place of our physical growth and work processes.

Next, Prof Jain gave his views on how his belief in the younger generation strengthened when he saw students at IITGN managing the entire Institute family efficiently during these times of panic and anxiety. This kind of volunteerism and leadership became huge supporting manpower. The positive attitude of the young students, faculty, and staff made it comparatively easier for the Institute to deal with COVID-19. Prof Khosla pointed out that his and Prof Sudhir’s experiences on this matter are different and complementary. In the US, community service and social work are an integral part of educational enterprise on a daily basis. All these activities have been more limited because of lockdown issues. What was non-intuitive was that earlier, faculty were of the opinion that remote education is not a great experience but now that they have gone through the whole process, many do not want to come back and still want to work remotely. They can look after their household chores. Their work-productivity is increasing and they are happy with that. Basically, we can really manage our real estate and infrastructure costs, and this is unpredictable – this is not what we had expected how people would react!

Towards the end of this session, Prof Khosla said that they have announced a strategy of ‘return to learn’, the objective of which was to build a program of asymptomatic COVID-19 testing, tracing, tracking, and isolation. Social distancing and cleaning protocols are in place to safeguard everyone’s health. Prof Jain concluded that IITGN’s motto for the last four months has been Safety First. He has been a great proponent of freedom, but when it comes to safety, this freedom is curtailed. Nobody inside the campus is allowed to come out of their rooms or apartments without wearing face masks. According to Prof Jain and Prof Khosla, they are making sure that their community members follow all the survival rules as we watch the world beginning to reopen amidst this pandemic. The ultimate goal in response to any crisis should be to create effective solutions and interesting opportunities!