Education needs disruption, says Ronnie Screwvala

Everyone seems to be talking about disruption. Like "startup" and "funding", "disruption" has become a part of our daily parlance and evinces a strong sentiment among the entrepreneurial enthusiasts.

We are seeing disruption across sectors and levels, all of which is helping us in reimagining the world around us. Education, meanwhile, is crying out for disruption, but is going unheard. It is a sector that is brimming with opportunities and waiting to be tapped with an innovative approach.

India has the largest college-age population in the world — close to a staggering 125 million — but it is startling to know that less than one in five of them is doing their post-secondary education. This means only 20% of college-age youngsters are doing their higher education as opposed to 90% in the US.

In the face of these statistics, some very important and somewhat uncomfortable questions are starting at us. They are, are our institutions and universities imparting knowledge for a world that does not exist anymore in its old avatar? And are all of us, specially our youth, becoming smarter learners? The answer for both these questions is a resounding "yes". Will India be able to achieve its gross domestic product (GDP) growth targets at this rate? No. Will we need to double our participation rates in higher education the next fifteen years? Yes

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Offline brick-and-mortar college and university models simply will not be able to fill this massive gap. The challenges are four fold. First, it takes 4-8 years to set up one campus/university and at its peak it could cater to 5,000-10,000 students. Second, we need to have enough trainers and teachers to feed into these facilities, many of them in remote areas or away from cities. Third, the cumulative outlay at scale for private or public-private partnership (PPP) models to cater to the entire college-going population will be nothing short of $100 billion. Lastly, over half of this 125 million youngsters, may have compulsions to take up a job very early in life for socio-economic reasons and may not have the flexibility to go back to college after that.

In this scenario, online education can be the big disruptor for India. Of course, there will be myriad challenges, but it offers exponential solutions: it can reach the remotest parts of India, aggregate the best faculty as everyone from the offline world can participate with much less demand on their time and lastly our youth can stay in their jobs while continuing to learn.

However, online will not succeed if it simply copies traditional teaching methodology. Online education should be more focused on professional education and post-graduation as those demographics look for flexibility and augmentation. For early years and K-12, brick-and-mortar schools will continue to play a big role in the holistic development of the child and online education will only be a supplement.

Image Courtesy: Google

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