“It was all so sudden, but we had to act quickly”, says Sunita Jacob, a mathematics teacher from Clarence High School, Bengaluru, who retired from her formal teaching career about a year ago. The online experience for her in 2020 was one of learning very quickly how to take a class online and keep her students engaged for 40 minutes. It would set her up for retirement, she says, as she now splits her time taking some extra classes online and working on writing a new mathematics textbook for the Class 10 CBSE curriculum.
Ms Jacob and others’ pandemic-era takeaways are relevant for the increasingly popular online SWAYAM courses that the government is encouraging for higher education. More interaction, effective monitoring of students beyond a command-and-control approach, and allocating weightage to the educational value of course content rather than just popularity may put SWAYAM on a firmer footing.
Sara Tony, who runs the NIOS department at Bethany High School, experienced a steep learning curve when transitioning to online teaching during the pandemic. Like many teachers, she faced challenges in adapting to new technologies and keeping students engaged. Despite these challenges, Sara successfully integrated online tools into her classroom. And within three weeks, everyone was familiar with the routine: four to five hours of class, followed by all the readings uploaded onto the platform for the next day. While the pandemic placed the country and Indian education system onto the petri dish of new tech and online learning, the government had been working on something similar for much longer.
Fillip from pandemic
In May, 2024, the Ministry of Education put out a notice with the revised guidelines for the SWAYAM for developing online classes. SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) was implemented in 2017 many years before Covid, and (overlooking the forced acronym) was envisioned as a method of allowing greater access to quality digital education for anyone who wanted it. In their own words, “SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who remain untouched by the digital revolution.” As of July 2023, 3,087 courses have been created of which 10,514 course deliveries have been made rounding off 3.84 crore total student enrolments in these courses. While the program has seen significant enrolment, it has also faced challenges in ensuring student engagement and overcoming technical barriers.
SWAYAM built a significant enrollment base during covid, and focused on external skills building while teachers in schools teaching compulsory subjects were still grappling with their task of making online learning as relatable as the classroom experience
SWAYAM is meant to serve as a skill-building programme to a wide audience of higher secondary school-going students up to university enrolled students and working professionals. It bases itself on ‘self-paced’ learning and depending on the numbers of credits can go anywhere from 5 to 12 weeks in a semester.
The core of SWAYAM courses exists in 4 quadrants – (1) a video lecture, (2) specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded/printed (3) self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and (4) an online discussion forum for clearing doubts.
Mapping of course content to curriculum
For Suchitra Joseph, a teacher in commerce and business studies for twelve years at Bishop Cotton Boys’ High School, it was the administrative nightmare of it all that stands out the most. “With an online space, the time devoted to actual teaching is surmounted by the course material that has to be prepared in advance.” “It can easily increase a teaching day of four hours into eight or nine hours of prep.”
Content development under SWAYAM must comply with technical aspects like correct mapping of course to curriculum and interactivity of the content. But content creation in itself can become monotonous. “How many powerpoint presentations can you make after a point?”, asks Sunita Jacob, “For technical subjects, you need to be interacting live.” These were the reasons most teachers ditched presentations and set up whiteboards in their rooms to continue live teaching in 2020, she adds.
SWAYAM does not have a live component apart from the online discussion forum. Sweta Sree, the SWAYAM programme coordinator for IIM Bangalore, one of the many partners in offering courses on the platform, says apart from the discussion that is attended by a few at the end of the semester there’s no interaction between teacher and student.
Suchitra Joseph says the only way to get her students to engage with the content was to flip the script. “I asked them to set the questions for the exam because I knew they would refuse to engage with the course material just as is.” Inability to keep their students stimulated and a reduced attention span was something all both teachers noticed. “Improving the interactive space is a huge part of how students’ outlook towards their own learning changes”
The monitoring of these courses is done through a command-and-control center (CCC). ‘Command-and-Control is a regulatory governance approach that involves an imposition and penalty clause to ensure compliance with a system. But monitoring students, Ms. Sara Tony will tell you, and more importantly student learning outcomes is hardly as easy as that. “There is always a sense of insecurity after having taught a class online where there is no interaction with the student. You wonder whether the concept for the day is clear enough for your student.” Her suspicions were only confirmed once regular classes began and she found herself having to go back to some of the more fundamental parts of her subject where her students should have been thorough by now.
Still the gap hangs on most students, it gets wider when students that spent much more of their formative years online come to the higher classes. Back in school, Ms. Jacob notes that her students were struggling to finish their papers on time. “Mathematics is as much a physically practiced exercise as it is a mental one. Some of my students thought they were watching a movie when we were online. So naturally, the speed to solve sums on paper was never a part of their learning.”
There was also a marked difference in the writing style of their answers to questions in the exam, all of which still exist in the paper pencil format. “All my students began writing in points when they came back to class”, Ms. Joseph notes. “I felt like the ability to write out a rationale for the answers or make an argument was lost”.
Most SWAYAM courses also rely on a final written exam to complete the certification of the course, one part of the online learning that still relies on some offline legitimacy. The pattern of the paper follows multiple choice, multiple select, short answer and long answer components. This structure follows a sharp shift from primarily online learning methods, reading material and even the Q&A session to a fully marked assessment on paper.
IIM-B’s SWAYAM coordinator, Sweta Sree points out that the exams are structured in such a way that some questions are easier than others to make the paper accessible to everyone. SWAYAM could focus on more hands-on assessment methods in the duration of the course as a method of more effective learning and better accessibility.
Funding support
SWAYAM courses, according to the new guidelines, are assessed every two years on the level of market demand amongst other things. Academic Credit courses like those run by NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), IIMs and IGNOU that do not receive at least 100 exam registrations, are no longer financed through SWAYAM. If enrolment is less than 5000, the courses are killed in the following year. The number of enrolments is a key metric for assessing SWAYAM courses. However, a significant disparity exists between enrolment rates and exam registrations, primarily due to the fixed exam fee of ₹1,500. According to the 2024 guidelines, the goal is to increase exam enrolment up to at least 20%.
“Those that need the certification are either college students for the purpose of additional credit or working professionals”, says Sweta Sree. This points to the larger signalling benefit that SWAYAM offers to students based on well-known names like the IIMs or IITs. This is where the pool begins to close and students from younger classes or those who do not have the means to afford the exam enrolment aren’t given the kind of visibility that SWAYAM claims to offer.
Allowing the market to decide what courses should be available to students in a space that is meant to function on the principles of “access, equity and quality” still speaks to the experimental nature of SWAYAM and the risk-averseness towards education spending in India. India stills spends only 3% of its GDP on all education combined.
Right now budgeting of SWAYAM courses is based on content development, learner enrolment, learner feedback and assessment adoption. This funding model, while designed to incentivize quality content development and learner engagement, may also inadvertently create a competitive environment where providers prioritise popularity over educational value.
Hari Krishna Maram, founder of Vision Digital India who recently concluded a conference on Navigating the Future of Higher Education and Skilling at IIT Madras, says SWAYAM functions like most other private MOOC players in that regard. “Like Coursera, Harvard and MIT, it’s the model that works best for these kinds of initiatives”.
The rapid adaption to the online education space is commendable, but it does not indicate that we quite have the hang of it yet. In the ambitious broader goals of SWAYAM, voices like those of teachers and stakeholders who are live actors in the online education space can probably help rethink short-term metrics and long-term goals of equitable education.
Published - September 30, 2024 06:30 am IST
