UGC’s Proposal on Blended Teaching

Why in news?

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has made a proposal to encourage “blended teaching” in higher educational institutions.

What is “blended teaching”?

• It effectively means replacement of face-to-face teaching with online teaching.
• UGC recommends that 30% of courses would be online initially.
• The aim is to eventually make it to 70%.
• The UGC document is in the public domain for feedback.

What is the rationale?

• UGC claims that the move seeks to “liberate” students.
• The present teaching is top-down, teacher-centric, and one-size-fits-all.
• It ignores the diversity of students.
• A blended approach would -
  1. provide students autonomy
  2. instil a disposition of self-advocacy
  3. promote student ownership

• It would enable students to learn at their own pace.

• Teachers would become coaches and mentors instead of merely knowledge providers.

What is the similar move made earlier?

• The massive online open courseware or MOOCs were introduced in 2012.
• This was seen as a potential replacement of physical campuses.
• MOOCs failed to persuade universities in the USA to accept them.
• But in India, universities are already being pushed to teach courses available on the Swayam MOOC platform.

What are the concerns and how should universities be?

• Online courses could not replace face-to-face interaction between students and teachers.
• The right of the faculty to develop their own courses and pedagogy cannot be taken away.

• Higher education institutions are not only about students.
• They are also meant to be a space for teachers.
• Teachers are not merely knowledge providers but are also knowledge creators.
• What happens on the campuses is dialogue.
• By interacting with generations of students and colleagues, one learns to think.
• And thinking does not happen in isolation.
• The student must have an opportunity to be in the company of differences and disagreements.
• Especially in the context of India, a key role of universities is to help democratise society.
• The campuses give the youth relative freedom from the shackles of communities they come from.

What are the other apprehensions?

• The move is seen as a measure to cut costs in higher education.
• The last 7 years have seen a gradual reduction in the budget allocations for higher education.
• The new proposal is a way of cutting the number of teachers in the name of liberating students.
• This proposal also refuses to acknowledge the huge digital divide that exists in India.
• It would certainly affect poor students and those from the SC, ST communities the most.
• Also, a centralised body like the UGC would attempt to impose its own selection of courses on all the universities in the name of uniformity.

• In all, reducing the role of the universities to merely enable the transaction of a pre-cooked syllabi is to ignore their larger and more important purpose.
• Universities in India are historically seen as places where political citizenship is shaped.
• Marginalising this idea and seeing students as consumers of “knowledge” is unwelcome.

Source: The Indian Express