During the last 25 years or so, I have witnessed and participated in some significant developments that are directly related to education. I refer to the global advancements in the use of technology in creating tools, devices and platforms.
I recall the early experiments in the pre-Internet days conducted in India, through the use of television. There is much that we can learn from those. The point is that though technology plays an important role, it is not half as necessary as having good ideas and talented persons driving technology-based education.
Take the case of Salman Khan of the Khan Academy fame. I know of several school students who have benefited greatly from his YouTube offerings; many of them have derived far more from his lessons than from their regular classroom learning. There is a Pakistani girl who displayed a flowering of talent by educating herself through the Khan Academy. Similarly, there is a Grade 9 boy in Delhi who achieved proficiency in calculus and related parts of mathematics through Khan’s lessons, beyond what his teachers are capable of.
In a modest way, I too have had encouraging results in some of the experiments I have conducted where technology is a secondary but important player, since it helped me gain access to a large audience. One of those experiments from 1992-93 involved Doordarshan. We used television to offer six interactive lessons on calculus to school students across the nation.
The country witnessed the sessions, but a select number of classrooms across India could use live telephone lines to interactively interject, comment and question me during the course of the lectures. I recall the sack loads of mail from students and teachers that the post office delivered from every corner of the country appreciating the six lectures. I subsequently designed even more interactive and productive lessons through live television where audiences could take part through telephone lines. The results were phenomenal. The unfortunate part is that these experiments have remained, in many ways, stand-alone. I do not wish to belittle the many advances in the use of technology that have happened in our land, but none seem to have matched the impact that the above experiments have had on students.
When the Internet became fairly ubiquitous in India, I conducted another experiment wherein I persuaded a gifted mathematician-friend in the US to teach through the Internet, in a live and interactive manner, an advanced graduate course in mathematics for a semester to anyone in India who cared to enrol. My friend later informed me that he enjoyed these lectures much more than the in-person ones on the same theme that he had delivered that semester at his university. It shall interest readers to know that Khan has now partnered with OpenAI for interactive teaching that is personalised for each student. To my mind, this is likely to be the way of the immediate future. Teachers, please take note.
Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU