higher education
Professionalism Grasps Higher Education India, with a critical mass of skilled English-speaking knowledge workers, a functioning democracy and a massive domestic market, has many of the key ingredients for seizing the opportunity for making a transition to a knowledge economy By Jaydeep Saha, digital LEARNING Bureau
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he trend towards a knowledgebased economy has emphasised the importance of universities as repositories of valuable human capital to help secure shares in the global market. The accelerating shift to high-technology and information technology economy requires sustained human resource development and training. Driven by globalisation and pressures to teach and train knowledgeable, skilled and competitive professionals, universities face a huge challenge to increase access to higher education and improve the quality of higher education against the stark reality of decreasing resources. Fundamental to the creation of qualified human resources is an accessible, effective and efficient higher education system, particularly when governments are counting on university graduates to be competitive in creating wealth for their respective countries. Universities are compelled to be innovative and lead by example in using cutting edge technology to meet these expectations. One activity of the ICT for accessible, effective and efficient higher education project, with the support of the Japanese Funds-in-Trust, is to document case studies of innovative ICT practices in higher education in open and distance learning, blended learning, research and administration and management. There are over 221 universities, 39 deemed universities plus seven open universities in India. Out of 9,703 colleges, 550 are engineering and technical
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colleges, 655 medical and 600 management institutions. The revolution in ICT has been the main stay of globalisation of markets and knowledge systems. Availability of internet based services and communications has allowed distances and barriers to be breached in real time and that too at lower costs than ever imaginable. Choosing the right technological tools
for school or country’s needs is a vital step in ensuring the effective use of ICT in education. This section gives information about technologies that can be used in education and about challenges in using ICT in education. Realising educational objectives of the “information age� requires integrating modern forms of information and communication technologies (ICT) into
Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya, PhD. (Tokyo University), Associate Professor, Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi One of the major challenges for the higher education sector in India is the problem of innovation. There is a need to keep its curriculum / course content and pedagogy updated with the changing educational needs of the students, technological innovations, demographic and socio-economic changes and the consequent market transformations. The curriculum revisions run into bureaucratic bottlenecks; there is very limited use of ICT or multimedia, especially in public schools, although most children do personally use/access to internet related technologies in their daily lives. With rapid urbanisation, rural to urban demographic shift and increasing number of people from the rural sectors aspiring for higher education for their children and rise in employment in the secondary and tertiary sectors, the greatest challenge for the higher education sector in India will be to accommodate the increasing volumes of people aspiring for higher education. This can be achieved only through major infrastructural overhaul of the higher education sector in India.