The demand for a zero academic year is being raised as there is no respite from the coronavirus. The online classes going on now are an emulation of real classrooms, and also a travesty of education.
Moreover, the availability of digital devices continues to cause a huge gap in society. It is in this context that the demand for this year to be considered a zero academic year is emerging from various quarters of society.
What is the zero academic year? Our educational process is structured in such a way that it progresses hierarchically from one stage to the other. Each academic year, the cognitive abilities that the student acquires through the teaching-learning process form the basis for the next year. Therefore, it is imperative that every student pass through each step as they are connected spirally.
If students are not able to successfully complete an academic year, it deprives them the basics to progress to higher levels. But this is a unique situation in which no student is able to complete the minimum requirements for getting promoted to the next level. This is where the discussion of the zero academic year comes into play.
A zero academic year makes all students eligible to proceed to the next stage without any screening. To put it a little more clearly, zero academic year means giving everyone the right to enter the next level without the mandated teaching-learning process.
What should we do? The answer to this question should emerge from what we are doing now. What is currently going on as part of online education is only a digital imitation of the teaching process in the classroom, where a teacher teaches and students watch remotely. In fact, this is a distortion of not only the original classroom but also of digital teaching. The digital system is designed to facilitate individualised learning.
The immediate thing to do is to reduce the content of the syllabus. It is to be noted that this syllabus reduction is not only for this year but for the next year as well. This is because the syllabi are arranged in a spiral structure. What is learned this year should be the basis for next year. So if the students do not study the basics this year, they will struggle to imbibe the content of next year as well. Would cutting a few chapters serve the purpose? The answer is no. Doing so may be unscientific as well. But the chapters that are not absolutely necessary can be omitted.
What we need to do is to conceptually reconstruct the subtleties contained in the syllabus. It should be possible to reduce the syllabus to ideas, concepts and principles, and present it to the students with examples. Evaluation should be done not to see whether the students have acquired knowledge but to see if the student has acquired these concepts, ideas and principles. This would be tantamount to converting a zero academic year into a latent academic year.
Possibilities offered by latent academic year: This crisis gives us a great opportunity to think about what we can do to make the exam more enjoyable, not just in the zero academic year. This is the ideal time to think about take-home examinations, one of the main options in the open exam system. The take-home examination system and the open examination system have been recognised all over the world as the most effective way to assess the higher-order cognitive abilities of students.
But our teachers need to be trained before the take-home examination system can be introduced. This is because if traditional questions are asked in the take-home exam, the chances of fraud are very high.
We live in an age of information technology. The main challenge our students face is not the availability of knowledge but the abundance of knowledge. Therefore, the most important skill required is not to memorise the answers but to summarise the answers to each question and use them in the way we want. The questions in the open examination system should be for the evaluation of higher-order cognitive abilities such as critical, analytical, creative, etc.
Such tests should not ask questions that can be taken from books and various sources of knowledge. The questions should be set to understand interpretation, analysis, critique, creativity and problem-solving ability. It is important to make sure that the answers to such questions are not available in different sources. Only then will teachers be able to confirm the utility of their question. At the same time, when evaluating such questions, teachers need to relate to students in a way that identifies their spontaneous writing style. This relationship can help teachers avoid large-scale external interventions like adult assistance and quickly identify them if they occur.
The student can be deterred from augmented writing by limiting the number of words in an answer. Therefore, the work of learning is transformed to a variety of mental activities such as discovery, analysis, critique and evaluation of information. The time has come for the educational authorities to start working on reconstructing the syllabus and the evaluation process by prioritising the acquisition of concepts, principles and ideas as the pivot of the teaching-learning process. If learning and teaching can be reconstructed in this way, there is no doubt that the zero academic year can be converted into a latent academic year.
Amruth G Kumar
Head, School of Education, Central University of Kerala
(amruthamar@gmail.com)