Higher education in India

Table of Contents

Higher education in India: Relevance

GS 2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

In the Union Budget 2022-23, higher education policy planners and regulators emphasised on giving shape to the digital university.

Digital university is expected to offer any number, kind, and type of course without limits on intake, in a hybrid or ‘physical plus digital’ mode.
It proclaims to provide equitable access to quality higher education and employability- enhancing skill development programmes to all.

University Grants Commission has relaxed the norms and standards for setting up open universities. Particularly, land requirement has been reduced from 40 acres to just five acres.
More universities are being enabled to offer courses in the distance, open and online mode, mostly in collaboration with EdTech start-ups and unicorns.
Students are also made to complete a certain portion of their course requirements through Massive Open Online Courses.
Additionally, they can accumulate credits at will and deposit them in their Academic Bank of Credit to be exchanged for a degree at a later stage.

Technology can be effectively leveraged as a quality-enhancement tool. It would, however, be a blunder to regard technology-mediated teaching-learning as an alternative to face-to-face education.
Technology can supplement and not substitute teachers.
No world-class universities, including those with a high degree of technology integration in their teaching and learning processes, are planning to cut down their faculty cost or their number any time soon.
Higher education is a lot more than borrowing content and delivering them online or outsourcing content.
We must, instead, be focussed on exploiting our full potential to emerge as a producer of knowledge and providers of the global workforce.

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