Dear Editor,
Some of the most powerful high-tech centres in India are not at universities, but at a company’s training facility. Companies’ experts have suggested that the time has come to circumvent the traditional universities as a result of their archaic teaching methods and inadequate practical computer education.
I sourced the issues in this letter from Jeffrey Young’s ‘India’s Company Classrooms Challenge “Chalk and Talk” Colleges’ in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The corporate group that continues to advocate innovations at the university level and is unable to achieve its goals, indicated that in 2009, corporations expended about $1 billion to correct the deficiencies at the university, by bringing higher education to the corporation.
At Infosys, each classroom seat had a PC. Students must present themselves for an online test on the module the instructor recently taught every three to five days. If they fail a few modules, they receive dismissal notices from the company, and those who obtain a good number of ‘As’ in the 23-week training programme, would work their way to higher remuneration.
And attending class is like being in a job where the classroom hours are from 9-5.
Trainee Parul Shlikla in comparing his undergraduate education with this formal corporate training said, “We thought what we had was actually appropriate, but now that we’ve come here and we’ve been trained and we see how technology has been used, now we realized actually what we missed there… More technology would have meant a lot more knowledge.”
The University of Delhi’s Institute of Lifelong Learning assists professors to learn about animations, online training, and other high-tech action.
In order to buttress academic conservatism, academics sometimes use the argument that the university is a place to educate, and not to train; that is the job of the corporate world.
Well, perhaps in the 21st century, we may need to merge the ‘education’ activities of the university with the ‘training’ dimensions of the corporate sector.
Nonetheless, academia being so ultra-conservative may still in the end hold on to their archaic teaching styles, methods, and content. If this happens, globalization and competition will enable the corporate sector to intensify its engagement in higher education.
Yours faithfully,
Prem Misir
