With a grand new crop of students joining the higher education every year, guardians of these pupil look for institutes that provide quality environment and facilities to innovate in big capacity.
This calls in facilities to impart and sharpen the skills of the incoming candidates that the globalized market is constantly demanding. To meet globalized labour market’s requirements and skill-ing students well, institutes and universities need to adopt to new ideas and pedagogics.
How is the tech-world affecting higher education in India?
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is the work space of the era and, the nation’s institutes gel-ed in its colour and hence, have taken teaching-learning process to a new level.
Much prominence is currently given to tech-tools to impart education. These tools help learn, create, collaborate, communicate and study on and off campus.
The most adapted tech-trends are:-
Digitization of books: Soon to follow the western footsteps, e-books, pictures, videos simulations and visualization through university’s own digital repository have become a common media of studying.
Not only this trend save a lot of resources, but also makes the study material available at all times everywhere. This also enable quality distance learning.
New methods of teaching: The All India Council for Technical Education – Indian National Digital Library in Engineering and Technology (AICTE–INDEST) is a consortium which has been set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to make journals and bibliographic databases easily accessible to the students. Similarly, UGC has also created digital libraries consortium covering subjects like arts, humanities, technology and sciences.
Mobile phones: With the increased use and accessibility of mobile phones, it has become easier for educational institutes to approach students for any awareness. Students can easily download lectures, provide feedback , do instant messaging, share class notes and important notices simply by their smartphones.
Social learning: Education is scarcely limited to books anymore. With an entire ocean of knowledge, Internet attracts students to learn additional and in-depth information about their courses.
Delivery websites such as YouTube, iTunes U and Big Think are introducing a new trend in higher education. Students today are using various websites, blogs and social media channels, as well as new online video repository to get the content for a specific subject or course.
Yet, there are challenges that come in the way of digitization of education. With Prime Minister’s dream to spread e-Literacy all over the nation, we are moving fast towards it. but, there are still many challenges:
- Limited access to tech-tools
- Slow internet speed
- Low literacy rate
Even so, digitization of education in India is inevitable.