Tag: Higher education

Social Media, Technology & Education

Teaching in Covid times: Looking back

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We are almost at the end of November. The HE institutions in India with semester systems are now winding down while the ones with annual systems hopefully are settling in the rhythm of teaching online. In the beginning of the academic year, I wrote about thinking differently to achieve best outcomes for online teaching and ideas for assessment and final exams. I hope many were able to tweak their teaching strategy to suit the online environment keeping in mind their students’ background and resources. 

The strategy of teaching with multiple 10 min long videos and 1 hour synchronous time per week seems to have gone well. The good part is that now the teachers have multiple recorded videos that can be reused for online teaching or teaching in flipped classroom mode after the f2f teaching resumes. 

Some teachers just imported their classroom to online mode with the same hour long or longer lectures multiple times a week. Most of these teachers reported dwindling interest from students. Fatigue has set in for both teachers and students as the crucial element of classroom interaction that kept up motivation was missing. It has been especially demotivating for students without resources to attend synchronous lectures everyday. Some of the constraints for synchronous learning were: lack of a dedicated device for each person in the house, patchy data connectivity, lack of space in the house at specified time.  

If you were unable to implement some of the suggestions from my previous posts, I would love to know what the constraints were. If moving from an hour long lecture to 10 minute chunks of videos seems daunting, I can help you figure out how to do it. If institutional policy is the constraint, I am happy to help redesign policies that work for all in the given circumstances keeping in mind specific constraints of your teachers and student body. 

Social Media, Technology & Education

NEP: some thoughts

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Some excerpts as I was reading the NEP
“moving towards a higher educational system consisting of large, multidisciplinary universities and colleges”
“build vibrant communities of scholars and peers, break down harmful silos, enable students to become well-rounded across disciplines including artistic, creative, and analytic subjects as well as sports, develop active research communities across disciplines including cross-disciplinary research, and increase resource efficiency, both material and human, across higher education”
“10.2. Moving to large multidisciplinary universities and HEI clusters is thus the highest recommendation of this policy regarding the structure of higher education”

Thinking out loud about the experience at Columbia University with respect to multidisciplinary coursework and research:
IGERT experience
Some fields do better in interdisciplinary research probably because there are already some pathways for them – Bioengineering, biochemistry for example. The Architecture and Engineering IGERT however struggled.
Different ways of teaching and learning, different value systems (nursing and medicine), unavailability of venues to publish research (Engineering and Architecture) were some of the challenges.

Creating coursework
School of Nursing and School of Medicine when creating an online course could not agree on how to read test reports (therefore how to teach how to read reports) – the basic assumptions about relationship with patients or their positionality with respect to patients differed so drastically that it was almost impossible to decide the ‘right’ course of action as the students walked through the cases presented.

Social Media, Technology & Education

The thesis writing factory

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I have heard about the thesis writing factories in India and have brushed it off thinking it is not a wide spread problem. However, recently it has come up so many times that I can’t ignore the extent of the phenomenon and the clients not only in India but also in US and UK universities.

A couple of years back I joined sites like People Per Hour to see what was going on there. My profile sets me up as a researcher, evaluator, writer, editor. It has been a pleasure working with some MA and doctoral students stuck somewhere in their research and writing process but most of the requests I get are to write papers, chapters outright. Some openely ask to ‘ghost write’ a journal paper while others use sneaky phrases like ‘major edits’. Some asking to get entire end term papers written are fearless to just post the assignment with the course and university name clearly visible.

It is appalling and distressing to see the number of such requests that reach me when it is quite clear I do not do such work. How many papers, thesis are being written by people who make it their profession? I was told the going rate for a thesis is in lacks.

If you decided to study, why wouldn’t you want to learn I keep asking in bafflement. It was clarified by one simple remark – I am not interested in research, I am doing this only to get the degree as now-a-days it is difficult to get teaching assignments without it. The incentives are all wrong already. The thesis factories are going to just baloon some more with the new UGC requirements for degree and publishing to be an assistant professor.

I am pretty sure there are still people out there who are stuck without good mentorship who will give their best if I can just help and motivate them. I am also hopeful that there are at least some who can be poked and motivated into at least trying before they declare they don’t care enough to work to get their piece of paper.