The Editorial Analysis: From Higher to Hire Education

 

Higher education in India: Relevance

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

 

Education in India: Context

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

 

 

About 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.

 

 

Government steps for higher education

• 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.

 

 

Role of teachers in education

• 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.

 

Read current affairs for UPSC

CIET (NCERT) wins UNESCO’s King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize	World Mental Health Report 2022	National Conference on Cyber Safety and National Security	Single-use Plastic Ban to Effective from 1st July
MoHUA Launches NIPUN Scheme under DAY NULM	Pragati Maidan Integrated Transit Corridor	Critical Information Infrastructure (CII): Definition, Need and Protection	UNHCR Report on Forced Displacement in 2021
Payment Vision 2025	Parliamentary Panel Report on Promotion and Regulation of E-commerce in India	Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF)	Key Takeaways of WTO 12th Ministerial Conference
India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA): Negotiations Re-launched	Desertification and Drought Day	Criminal cases in Parliament: 40% Newly Elected RS MPs have Criminal Cases	AGNIPATH Scheme: Age Relaxation and Anti-Agnipath Protests