Introduction

Digital media offers a world of possibilities. It collapses space and time, allows for more social connectivity, and facilitates greater interaction among people. Cultures of relatedness are increasingly shaped by digital media with people using internet applications to stay in touch with family and friends. Some of the greatest protest movements of the twenty first century have been shaped by digital media^[1]. Digital and social media often become the site for counter-narratives, emerging as alternative spaces where the boundaries between readers and writers, journalists and citizens, are continuously challenged. Examples could range from blogging to tweets and memes surfacing online. As Walter Benjamin (1969) had argued, referring to the extension of the printing press at the end of the nineteenth century, the distinction between author and public would lose its basic character and become merely functional. If the reference here was to a special case of mechanical reproduction, introducing the era of mass communication and unrestricted circulation of information and ideas, these possibilities increase exponentially in the era of digital media. However, if digital technologies promise a more open and democratic world, they also in many instances facilitate social reproduction. The ambiguous role of the internet is such that while it may emerge as a site to counter and critique state practices, it may also work as a very effective means of state control and surveillance. Similarly, as Coleman (2010) argues, ‘if some technologists can make and use digital media to fight the injustices of capitalism, others are enmeshed in flexible post-Fordist capitalism’ (2010: 493). If digital media is a ‘double-edged sword’, it’s a call for us to engage with its promises, plenty and hopeful as they are, but it’s also a call for us to engage with its politics, to better understand how it mediates, challenges, or reinforces social inequality.

In the wake of the pandemic Covid-19, when interactions, exchanges, paid work, education, have increasingly been mediated by digital technology, whether successfully or not, popular discourse has come to revolve around the indispensability of digital media in our lives. While it is important to engage with how this will re-shape our lives, and reconstitute us as humans, it is also critical to check a technological determinism as the latter may paper over structural inequalities and differential access to resources and power. These are important questions, not to bring down the euphoria around the digital era, but to plan for more thoughtful interventions that do not go on to harden the already existing digital and social inequalities. This paper uses this larger context to engage with a question closer home – how are universities working with and thinking of digitally mediated education at the time of the pandemic, and what problems need to be acknowledged and addressed if we are to plan a more reflexive engagement with our students.

Connection Lost: Some Questions on Infrastructure and Access

With Covid positive cases rising in India and serial lockdowns announced since the third week of March 2020, universities and departments across the country have been devising methods to continue the teaching-learning process in the absence of regular physical classes. Across the world, online platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Hangout, Skype, Webex have become preferred options to conduct classes, and to give them their due credit, on days internet connection works well for most participants, they do allow some simulation of a classroom experience. However, as we plan our ongoing and future exchanges on online platforms, it is critical that we engage with some concerns with online education – particularly regarding availability of resources, contested claims to shared gadgets, and lack of conducive environment to participate in learning. These concerns become more urgent in the light of universities contemplating remote examinations for graduating students. A blanket assumption seems to operate that all students will be able to take exams remotely, just as they would have managed to log into their online classes.

However, it needs pointing out that many students have not been able to access their online classes and this is not an ‘exception’ that can be ignored in an assumed ‘larger interest’. Lack of availability of required gadgets, such as a computer or laptop, or availability of gadgets on a shared basis, can severely impact one’s chances of attending online classes. A glimmer of hope here is the mobile phone, a gadget that has definitely had deep penetration in India, with the effect that even in the absence of a laptop most online activity, such as emailing, coordination on WhatsApp groups, downloading e-material, logging into online classes, could be facilitated by the mobile phone. However, unlike telephoning and sending messages, these activities depend on a suitable phone model to support advanced operating systems and an internet connection with stable speed that is still not as widely available.

This suggests that even when certain gadgets are available, the online transaction may not be as seamless; rather it may be experienced as fragmented and discontinuous. This particularly comes to the fore in reports documenting how students, as well as teachers, in Kashmir and North East have been struggling with poor network and connectivity (Ahmad 2020; Karmakar 2020). Yes, new media promises transformative possibilities, but, as Brian Larkin (2004) argues, ‘much of the work on the transformative effects of media…takes for granted a media system that is smoothly efficient rather than the reality of infrastructural connections that are frequently messy, discontinuous, and poor’ (2004: 292).

Larkin observes that studies on technology often discuss the effects of technology as if it is working at its optimum, but what is less discussed is how technology influences through its failure as much as through its successes (2004: 291). This also informs his unease with theorizing ‘digital divide’ in terms of the assumption that ‘economic and cultural effects of new technologies are absent from “disconnected” societies’ (2004: 305). For Larkin, this logic fails to examine ‘the structuring effects that technologies and their failures—however dysfunctional—have in everyday life’ (ibid.). Examining the infrastructure of piracy in Nigeria, that generates new economic networks and makes available to Nigerians a vast range of world media at an unimaginable speed, Larkin also draws attention to the material qualities of piracy that generate a particular sensorial experience of media marked by constant breakdown and poor transmission (2004: 290-91). Blurred images, distorted sound, muddy dialogues, loss of detail, broken screen colors, faded figures, are distortions that filter audiences’ engagement with media technologies as well as their experience of time, speed, space, and contemporaneity (2004: 307, 291). As Larkin argues, ‘while media infrastructure creates the reality of being ever more connected to a globalized world, it does so by emphasizing Nigerians’ marginalization at the same time’ (2004: 308).

Drawing from the discussion above, one can argue that while the unavailability of certain gadgets hinders access to digital media, digital inequality may also be at work when some of the basic requirements are made available. Thus, in the context of online education, being connected to new technologies may not automatically guarantee a seamless and liberating digital experience to many students trying to access their classes or exam material online. Rather, slow and fragmentary internet connection – manifesting in frequent disconnections, audio-video hang-ups, difficulty in downloading heavy files and reading material – may intensify the experience of class, or regional, or technological marginalization. As Larkin argues in the context of his work, breakdown and slowness of internet connection may create a temporal experience that has less to do with ‘dizzying, real-time global integration’, but a ‘frustrating experience of duration brought about by the technology of speed itself’ (Larkin 2004: 306).

The discussion so far has attempted to critically engage with an assumption, regarding online education, that may take for granted a certain quality of infrastructural access^[2] across regions and student demographics. I now move on to questioning another critical assumption underlying remote education that fails to acknowledge the dynamics of the domestic space from where most students would be accessing their online classes.

Re-thinking Home: Viewing the Pandemic through Gender Lens

When online classes are seen as the future, and demands for remote examinations are made, one not only takes for granted a computer or stable internet connection being available at every student’s place, one also assumes a certain domestic space where there would be enough room to work on online assignments, or log into multiple classes on a regular basis, or successfully take examinations. But what if the domestic arrangement, especially during lockdown with most family members home, does not permit this space? If in normal times one could have used the classroom or library space for personal study, amidst the pandemic there are less chances of escaping home. What this observation is aiming to challenge is not so much the potential of technology, but the assumption that with advanced technology ‘place’ ceases to matter. Yes, the only place the laptop literally needs is the lap, the wireless internet literally allows connection without plugging the gadget into a wire socket; but just as there is a huge material infrastructure of wire and pipes, very much tied to physical locales, that creates the experience of wireless for the end-user, the space one inhabits may also shape this ‘wireless’ experience and the very chance of experiencing it in the first place. By space, I mean not just the physical layout of the home or neighbourhood, but home as a space that is relational. This allows us to also consider that home may not always be the site of love and conviviality as often gets projected in popular descriptions. At a time when online classes have to be accessed from one’s home, this could severely impact one’s chances of access, even if the requisite gadgets and connection are made available.

Sociological studies on gender and family have long drawn attention to the dynamics of gender based division of labour at home. Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard (1992) adopt a materialist approach and study the family as an economic system where women’s labour often gets appropriated by the male head of the household. For Delphy and Leonard, an understanding of the unpaid work women do in the family, and the relations within which they do it, are key elements in understanding male domination (1992: 20).

They argue that the unpaidness, the specific character of housework, doesn’t depend on the special nature of the tasks, since all the goods and services produced at home can also be bought on the market. It depends rather on the fact that the tasks which comprise it are performed within particular relations of production where the ‘people who usually do the work do not own the products of their practical, emotional, sexual and reproductive labour’ (1992: 84). Moreover, these relations of production characteristic of housework (that is unpaid work, done in the home, by women) are not just restricted to the common housework tasks such as cooking and cleaning. Thus, in addition to housework and household work, Delphy and Leonard separate out and distinguish as ‘family work’ all the unpaid work done by dependents for the household head, noting most of the dependents are women as wives or cohabitees (1992: 79).

This allows a focus on the variety of work women do within the family-based household (see Delphy & Leonard 1992: 226-253). As the authors discuss, this could range from their direct contribution to family members’ occupational work, often filling in as unpaid assistants, to ‘emotional work’ – work which establishes relations of solidarity, maintains bonds of affection, provides moral support, friendship and love (1992: 21). In addition, and often overlapping with emotional work, care-giving to elderly family members and children is again work largely done by women. In the context of the pandemic which has led to massive uncertainty among people regarding jobs, livelihoods, healthcare – the demands of emotional work and care-giving would have become more pressing. Even maintaining kin contacts between households and checking up on relatives becomes a task expected of women. Delphy and Leonard argue that even when men contribute to domestic work, the chances are that the overall responsibility of housework would still lie with the woman. Even when women are employed outside, they would generally end up working very long days and at the least favoured aspects of household work (1992: 240).

This discussion highlights the diverse tasks that constitute important components of women’s domestic work – which rarely gets visibilized or addressed as ‘work’. It also suggests that in critical times such as the pandemic, the quantity or intensity of women’s unpaid work may go on to increase exponentially. For instance, with the lockdown entailing that most members stay put at home, there is more food to be cooked, more dishes to be done, more clothes to be washed. This increase may still not de-invisibilize housework. In fact, it’s interesting to note how the jargon of ‘work from home’ may further invisibilize house-work. The expression refers to office-work that is paid and can be done from home. It not only allows a legitimate insulation from housework but also rests on someone doing the larger part of the unpaid work. As Janet Finch (1983) observes, ‘women’s coverage of domestic work enables men to work at home while being assured of protection from disturbance’ (Finch 1983; cited in Delphy & Leonard 1992: 235). What’s particularly relevant for the present discussion is Delphy and Leonard’s observation that there are repercussions for wives and children when men work at home. As they argue, ‘household space and routines have to be organized around the husband’s needs to allow him to carry out the breadwinning activities’ (1992: 243). They add, ‘the house becomes ‘reconstituted as a semi-public place’ (Finch 1983: 55), and the wife loses her privacy and must organize herself even more around her husband’s timetable’ (Delphy & Leonard 1992: 243).

This analysis acquires a tinge of prophesy in the present times. For women, not only has their share of unpaid work increased, but the freedom and time that was guaranteed by either their stepping out for work or their husband’s stepping out for work has also gotten curtailed. For women in abusive relationships, a daily spatial-temporal separation from family members was paramount for escaping control and developing coping strategies. In lockdown-like situations, the chances of escape become more difficult to negotiate, as also suggested by reports of rising domestic violence during the lockdown period (see Mlambo-Ngcuka 2020).

Why is this relevant to a discussion on pandemic and university education? The gendered nature of domestic work, most of which falls on women and girls at home, may affect the chances of women students to access their online classes and prepare for assessments and examinations. They may also be negotiating with other family members to access shared gadgets and internet connection and would be affected in case there is selective preference for their elder siblings or male members of the family. Further, going to college allowed women students to escape familial authority and surveillance and discover themselves anew in terms of their choices, whether of dress, friends, courses, politics, sexualities, which may have not found acceptance at home. Now at home, many would have to carefully guard their identities as the cost of breach could make staying at home more stressful. As we deliberate on the future of university education in the time of pandemic, I argue that it is important we take into account that many of our students may be navigating through lack of gadgets, poor internet connection, house-work, care-giving, family conflicts, loss of parents’ livelihoods, just as they may be navigating their online classes. These are concerns that must be accounted for if we are to plan more sensitive and thoughtful engagements for the next semester.

Conclusion

It is difficult to imagine university education today without some reliance on digital resources which has made some of the best scholastic literature widely available online. But if new media promises spaces of democratic possibilities, conversely, it may also reinforce existing structures of power and inequality. These questions are pertinent to a discussion on the future of university education, especially public educational institutions. Our classroom spaces are not free of economic, cultural, and social disparity, but if a commitment to public education compels us to constantly evaluate our universities and fight for non-discriminatory and affirmative policies, it is just as important for us to take cognizance of the ways online education may amplify existing inequalities and plan for interventions that prioritize greater inclusivity. It is important that universities and colleges take students’ experience of online classes seriously, take into account their constraints and design modules in a way that students without facilities for online sessions are not disadvantaged. This is also a time for us to question if we can think of education in a way that does not necessarily culminate in an end semester examination. Remotely offered education in exceptional times shouldn’t make education ‘remote’ in terms of being inaccessible to students.

NOTES

^[1]The ‘Arab Spring’ is often invoked as a textbook case for studying the role of internet and networked social media as being at the centre of civil resistance and political uprisings that engulfed North Africa in 2011 (see Eko 2012).

^[2]I must add that though one is raising the infrastructural question in terms of online classes, it’s a pertinent question even for physical classes. Are our university spaces and classrooms designed in ways that allow differently-abled students to access college facilities easily? This concern also raises important questions vis-à-vis online teaching – how do differently abled students manage online classes; are their needs taken into account when universities plan online examinations?

REFERENCES

Ahmad, Mudasir. 2020, April 22. Students, Teachers in Kashmir Struggle with 2G Connectivity as Classes Move Online. The Wire. https://thewire.in/education/kashmir-2g-online-classes

Benjamin, Walter. 1969 (1936). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, pp. 217-252. New York: Schocken Books.

Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2010. ‘Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media’. In Annual Review of Anthropology. 39: 487–505. Doi :10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104945

Delphy, Christine, & Leonard, Diana. 1992. Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Eko, Lyombe S. 2012. ‘New Media, Old Authoritarian Regimes: Instrumentalization of the Internet and Networked Social Media in the Arab Spring of 2011 in North Africa’ in New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law & Policy.

Finch, Janet. 1983. Married to the Job: Wives’s Incorporation in Men’s Work. London: George Allen and Unwin (Publishers) Limited

Karmakar, Rahul. 2020, June 13. In the Time of Online Classes, Northeast Waits for a Faint Signal from a Distant Tower. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/ground-zero-in-the-time-of-online-classes-northeast-waits-for-a-faint-signal-from-a-distant-tower/article31815979.ece

Larkin, Brian. 2004. ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’. In Public Culture, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2004, pp. 289-314. Duke University Press

Mlambo-Ngcuka, Phumzile. 2020, April 6. Violence against Women and Girls: The Shadow Pandemic. UN Women https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/4/statement-ed-phumzile-violence-against-women-during-pandemic

Aarushie Sharma teaches Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Views expressed are personal.

This article is part of a series called New Directions in Higher Education in India after COVID-19. The remaining articles of the series can be found here.

Higher education in India has indeed been in dire need of new directions, Covid or no Covid. But the arrival and continued presence of Covid-19 has added to these and also given new direction to the challenges themselves. Technology has emerged as a major aid and suddenly technology aided classes have become the norm not only in universities and colleges but also schools and even pre-schools in certain cases.

Although it was in the air, the lockdown was formally declared with no notice (four hours cannot be counted as a notice period – it only caused panic and chaos), and like most others, educational institutions were caught unprepared. And the Indian education system coped with it like many other sectors did: introducing measures without much thought to the needs of the poor and marginalized sections. In that sense, this was not very different from what happened to migrant workers – their existence was invisible and cramped living conditions unknown to those who planned sudden lockdown with insistence on adequate physical and social distancing.

In addition, education sector responses largely did not pay much heed to the principles of ‘good’ teaching and learning at respective stages of schooling either. Online classes became the main mode of delivery not only in private but also in public institutions, largely driven by the pressure of ‘completing the syllabus’ and in the private profit-making sector, also by the need of ensuring the ‘value for money’ to its students (read customers). Most higher education institutions were no exception. Nevertheless, we need to acknowledge the efforts that teachers took in easily molding themselves to this mode, which they had hardly used earlier and also that it worked for some with access to computers, laptops or smartphones with ready internet connectivity.

However, the very fact that educational institutions either conveniently forgot or were indifferent to the diverse socio-economic-linguistic background of students shows that there is something deeply wrong with the system. Also, it is not only about access to technology but also about reconceptualizing education if it has to be delivered differently.

Two facts are worrying in this context, I will discuss those one by one. The first is that the knowledge on access to technology being a major barrier already exists and is not a new phenomenon. The research on open and distance learning (ODL) systems in India shows that it has rarely been designed by taking the structural bottlenecks marked by issues of gender, caste, location, illiteracy, linguistic-diversity, income-levels and the consequent powerlessness into account.

This can be elaborated by taking examples of our national ODL institutions at both school and university level: National Institute of schooling (NIOS) and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), which are heavily technology dependent for all their processes: admissions, teaching support and examinations. These rarely pay any attention to the fact that this becomes exclusionary for many sections of the society. Girls, for example, are denied access even when the household may have smartphones. It has also led to the emergence of unscrupulous middlemen who thrive on exploitation of aspiring students and parents who themselves cannot access or maneuver technology (Jha et al, 2020).

The second worrying development is that it is not seen as a stop-gap arrangement during or post-pandemic response. The Indian higher education system seems to be moving towards embracing this mode as an important means of delivery. That is how it looks like if one glances through the latest version of the New Education Policy, which lays disproportionate emphasis on the use of online for various purposes including vocational education with reference to an imaginary ‘global quality and standards’ without defining what it means, and also without reference to relevant research. That literature is full of evidence about thresholds of illiteracy, poverty, social position and powerlessness play an important role in success or failure of online education but that concern does not find any mention in the document.

In addition to the access, pedagogy and learning resources are equally important and as complex issues in the context of ODL based teaching and learning. Most modern learning theories identify the role of socio-cultural environment and dialogue as critical and intrinsic to learning at all levels. The ODL literature identifies transactional distance as a major pedagogical constraint for the system. In the Indian context, with deep-rooted hierarchies in place, transactional distance plays a negative role even in face to face classrooms, which gets magnified in online classes where opportunities for expressions and dialogue are fewer and far more rigid. At times also completely absent. Lack of peer interaction opportunities makes it worse. It is also much more difficult for teachers to intervene in such situations even if they want to as compared to face to face classes.

For science education and research, where laboratories and close interactions play an important role, it is obvious that online teaching is hardly an option. However, irrespective of disciplines, subject areas or streams, education is a process of co-creating values, skills and knowledge – and online education is limited in its potential for facilitating this co-creation, especially in countries like India characterized by high levels of social, economic and gender inequalities.

The success of the technology enabled education systems is also linked to autonomy and motivation of the learner. Therefore, it has worked well in the context of those where the learner is highly motivated with access to diverse learning resources: books as well other forms of learning tools. The ability to access and negotiate diverse resources and contexts play a critical role in its success. That is why such means and mediums are successful in helping those who want to upgrade their knowledge or skills as a supplementary or complementary mode as an autonomous learner in contexts where otherwise the access to school education and technology is fairly universal. It has been successful for that segment of Indian society as well. But it is severely limited in its potential to work as a primary mode for higher education in the Indian context where less than one fourth of the relevant age group attends higher education institutions.

Higher education is important for an individual in our context not only for seeking and expanding one’s knowledge, skills and information, and attaining degrees that are expected to be valued in the labour market or for further studies but also for its socialization effect. The need for such socialization is greater for lower income groups or girls but to a lesser extent applicable to all. Technology enabled education systems fares poorly on these counts.

For example, for a large number of young people in India, especially women and those coming from poorer families or rural / small town locations, education institutions are also the only places where they meet others, make friends and form alternative micro social systems of their own, which is otherwise not accessible for them. Teacher-student and peer relationships often go (or at least it is supposed to go) beyond classroom teaching and open new paths and newer ways of looking at the world. In other words, sheer participation in higher education institutions has a potential for widening the freedoms in a manner that technology enabled education systems can rarely do.

So, ultimately, it is important to realize that education at all stages is inherently a political process but much more so at higher education stage, where values and ideas are discussed and debated, and the very choice of a course, a research problem or how these are chosen, framed and delivered, is reflective of these ideas and values. Online education, even when delivered effectively and with rigour, is limited in its potential for fulfilling all these objectives of education. Important to acknowledge that most higher education institutions are not necessarily centres for enabling new ideas and creativity but greater dependence on online or technology-based education is definitely going to make education merely a technical exercise rather than a transformative process of co-creation of knowledge and widening of freedoms.

It is also important to point out that even in situations like the present ones, where distance education becomes the only choice, it needs to be reconceptualized taking the alternative mode of delivery and unavoidable distance into consideration rather than using the same face-to-face pedagogy and teaching-learning materials. For instance, many students, especially girls, may not have the same freedom at home to be present in an online class at designated time, they may not have access to libraries or even internet to enable searches, they may have various other pressures to deal with if living with families, and therefore, it may be misplaced to have ‘regular’ online classes.

The very nature of distance education needs reconceptualization in terms of how to engage students and engage with students while allowing flexibility in terms of time and openness in choosing the pace. Even in the short run, online or distance education cannot be delivered effectively using a rigid frame, and it is indeed not a replacement for face-to-face higher education. It can provide a flexible alternative, as mentioned earlier, for supplementary or complementary education but that too needs to be designed with adequate attention to both access and suitable-pedagogical issues to be effective. New does not necessarily mean novel, and novel is not always noble.

References

Jha, Jyotsna, et al. (2020); Open and Distance Learning in Secondary School Education in India, Routledge, London.

Jyotsna Jha works as the Director of the Bangalore based think tank, Centre for Budget and Policy Studies. Views expressed are personal.

This article is part of a series called New Directions in Higher Education in India after COVID-19. The remaining articles of the series can be found here.

Recently a clinical professor at New York University wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he argued that since online courses were cheaper than in person learning, distance learning was the way forward for college education.

I see it quite differently. As I will enunciate below I believe that both face-to-face and online education have significant, complementary roles in our educational efforts going forward. What fraction of students should follow one model or the other is very country specific, but in general, a large fraction of people will be fine with a properly configured online experience. This, I believe to be relevant not only for the US but also for the Indian educational system.

By way of context, I got a B.Tech. degree from IIT Madras (IITM) and an Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’ve been an academic for over 30 years – the last 14 years at Columbia University, where I was Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering for six years (2010-2016). Over the last ten years, I have been visiting India at least twice a year, and the last two years I have been a Chevron visiting professor of Chemical Engineering at IITM. So I have familiarity with the educational systems across India and the US.

With these introductory statements, my view is that it is apparent that the American Educational System and that across the world is in a time of serious change. A few background facts are relevant.

• There is a commonly held perception that education is ubiquitously required: statistic after statistic shows that people, at least in the USA, make significantly more money if they complete their undergraduate degrees and beyond.
• The cost of US higher education has exploded. An undergraduate degree at an Ivy league institution like mine, Columbia, will cost a family roughly US$300,000. (Columbia is ranked joint #3, with MIT and Yale, in the US for undergraduate education by US News and World report.) To put this number into perspective, consider the fact that only ~1-2% of the US population makes that amount as an annual
• The COVID epidemic, and the accompanying move into virtual learning (which has now been pushed for a decade through the device of MOOCs), has made online learning a forefront issue.

Unlike in many nations, in the US, almost all universities are almost completely private – even “State” schools frequently get less than 10% of their budgets from the government. So money is a critical player in this discussion. The money lost in the pandemic will likely mean that a significant fraction of educational institutions will go out of business. Those that remain will fragment into two categories, one focused on online education and the other on face-to-face learning. I posit that education needs this division. While the driver for this division in the US is money – the motivation for this split in India is somewhat different because money is not such a prime driver.

As a sweeping statement, with all its caveats, I assert that many people go to school not to learn: they go to get a degree. For this cohort, online education is the ideal solution. It satisfies both parties.  It is cheap(er) for the students, and the institution gets to make money without all the attendant issues of accommodating students into physical spaces (classrooms, dormitories, lunch spaces) especially during a pandemic. There are, of course, issues about quality and testing but these are in the details. Not that these details are trivial – they are critical for the survival of this model, and ones that need to be addressed.

In broad strokes, online education teaches what you could learn from a book, without any of the subtlety involved in learning. It imparts knowledge, but not a way of thinking. It does not readily permit the formation of learning communities, ones that can critique and prevent people from going way off course. The face-to-face generational transmission of experience and learning is also not the focus of this model – this was what was valued in India as the guru-kula system. In its extreme form, unregulated online education could thus fit into and could potentially drive the global move towards anti-intellectualism, as manifest in populist leaders such as Trump, Johnson, or Bolsonaro, whose perspective is that reading a few books (or maybe not even that) puts you on par with an expert who has spent a lifetime thinking about an issue (e.g., Dr. Anthony Fauci). What that train of logic ends up with is with someone asking you to inject yourself with bleach to kill a virus and other such ill-conceived thought. So online education, especially if done badly, is counter-productive and can even be dangerous. However, with these caveats, online education has a significant role to play – it is appropriate for the large fraction of students who want a degree as a means of employment qualification; it is relevant for someone who wants to learn something quickly; for someone who is not necessarily desirous of deep scholarship in a topic but rather needs some level of qualification to complete a task.

The small remaining fraction of students are the ones who will build and then sustain the knowledge infrastructure for the next generation, and beyond. For them, the experience of in-person education is irreplaceable. The growth and sustenance of such thinking communities, which require a depth of knowledge, needs a face-to-face dialogue. These in-person interactions are critical for creating communities which embody learned knowledge, of best practices and what does and doesn’t work; we can and do frequently go to these communities for solutions – think about trying to create a COVID vaccine without tapping into a community of people that has been thinking about anti-viral treatments and vaccines for their lifetimes. Dr Fauci, for example, starting thinking about HIV/AIDS, another viral pandemic, in the early 1980s.

On a personal note, over a three-decade long career, I have collaborated with researchers across the world. My group and I use Skype/Zoom or other distance communication tools towards working and building these collaborations. Our experience teaches that meeting physically with collaborators allows for rapid progress, one that cannot be achieved virtually even if those meetings happen regularly over long time scales. There is something about the focus, the physical/visual cues that an in-person meeting has, that cannot be replicated by virtual learning.

I believe, therefore, that while online education will become more prevalent, there will always be a clear demarcation between these two types of educational modes. Columbia University has experimented with online education but has not had a significant impact in this realm. It is not that we don’t have the expertise to do it. Rather, us and many of our peer schools (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale) have come to realize that for the money we charge, students expect something significant in return – this includes the formation of peer groups that sustain careers. In-person interactions also foster connections between faculty and students. For the students, this has the promise of creating pathways for the best of them to be channeled into streams for advanced degrees and the best jobs. These student groups, in return, put money back into the schools thus sustaining our continuing high prestige. Online education would not allow us to build this brand loyalty, one which we believe is built when people spend time on campus.

Acknowledging these very different educational outcomes and planning for them is critical. Importantly, based on what I have said above, I believe it is unlikely that the same institution will be successful at both models (although experience teaches that they will all try to marry these two approaches). A split in educational objectives, namely a functional goal of getting a job versus that of building a more abstract educational community, often goes hand-in-hand with the implication that the face-to-face group is somehow superior. Such elitist opinions are the source of the current move towards populism, and thus how we address and mitigate the challenge of positively integrating these vastly different approaches into our education mission is a critical question that remains to be addressed.

How does this all port over to the Indian milieu, especially in STEM programs (which I am most familiar with)?

I would argue that most undergraduate science/engineering education in India could easily go online. Even the elite IIT system has always simply been a stamp of approval. It was true when I studied there and it is true now – anecdotally, nearly 90% of all students who go there are not interested in the education. They want a degree. There is a very small fraction of students who are interested in higher learning. I don’t think this should be dealt with pejoratively, however. Students who for example want to go the start-up route should be taught the basics of entrepreneurship, the ability to draw up a business plan etc. Knowledge of these subjects may simply be unnecessary for most students who will go on to get a Ph.D.  I think it is time to take Indian educational institutions and classify them as online educational in focus vs. face-to-face centric. The educational-centric institutions can focus on the pedagogy of virtual teaching, and the associated ideas of proper testing. This involves not only the lectures, but also holding remote office hours where students can get help in solving problems. How lab courses will be dealt with is important – they cannot be all virtual. Do students come to the institutions for a short period of time to participate in lab courses? Do they come in to take exams or does the current process of outsourcing exams in the NPTEL format suffice? The times that different cohorts of students spend on campus could be staggered so that the number of students on campus at any given time is small – infrastructural requirements are thus reduced. In this model it is unclear if these educational institutions must continue to have the ability to have Masters/Ph.D. programs. Faculty in these educational centric institutions do not need to get evaluated on research production – rather, a good teacher should be equally valued as an excellent researcher.

The small number of Ph.D. granting institutions can then be the focus of in-person education and also research activities. Regardless, the common metric should always be excellence – be it in teaching pedagogy or in research. Both educational models thus need to be supported vigorously, but their goals must be seen as very different.

Sanat K. Kumar is the Bykhovsky Professor of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York. Views expressed are personal.

This article is part of a series called New Directions in Higher Education in India after COVID-19. The remaining articles of the series can be found here.