New kodak moment for old eureka moment

The rank in innovation-driven entrepreneurship is again an impressive three offering a completely new range of products and services that no other businesses offer.

Eureka,” shouted Archimedes as he stepped out of his bathing tub the moment he experienced the water volume and body weight relationship. In this current generation of immersive and experiential learning, schools or households cannot have bath tubs for students to test Archimedes’ principle with their own Eureka moment.

We need to give the students their own Eureka moment using new-age Kodak moment digital technologies. Is India ready for this massive upsurge that has the potential to sweep the entire education landscape? The answer is a simple ‘Yes’ and here is why and how.

The recent 2019 report of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) has introduced the National Entrepreneurship Context Index (NECI), which ranks economies based on 12 indicators of the external context that can influence entrepreneurship.

The NECI score is arrived at by looking outward at the environment for entrepreneurship, reporting on societal attitudes, self-perceptions and entrepreneurial affiliations with entrepreneurs. Assessing the economies of 58 nations based on 12 framework conditions, GEM ranks India at an impressive five for its healthy entrepreneurial context.

The rank in innovation-driven entrepreneurship is again an impressive three offering a completely new range of products and services that no other businesses offer.

The capability of India as an innovation-driven economy is also visible in its jump to 52 in the 2019 Global Innovation Index.

The dual combination of being an innovation-driven entrepreneurial economy provides a good platform for a disruption in the education system using emerging digital technologies of which Virtual Reality (VR) is an explosive tool.

The range of benefits VR offers is from a simple immersive experiential and contextualised learning to advanced capabilities like remote presence, time machine effect and global teleportation.

VR presents itself as an inspirational tool for entrepreneurial growth in the education sector, beginning with K-12 and beyond. The dual challenge of physical infrastructure and teacher quality in schools has always been an area of worrying concern to policymakers.

The plentiful problem presents bountiful VR solutions which has a very wide range of applications in school education at all levels—pre-school, primary, secondary and higher secondary.  

The policy map for using VR in school education will be a good start to focus on the larger ICT policy. Globally, we are only at the dawn of this powerful technology and India has the innovation drive and entrepreneurial energy to convert this VR opportunity into a massive social policy instrument.

There is a global shift in the way in which school education is shaping up with learning pains removed with gaming fun inside classrooms.

Kodak failed to reinvent itself in the changing landscape of digital photography. Indian school education cannot afford such a costly failure. The Draft NEP has identified the use of ICT in education and there cannot be a time more appropriate than this to create the old Eureka moments using new Kodak moments through Virtual Reality.

S Vaidhyasubramaniam

Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University

vaidhya@sastra.edu

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