Education's Big Leap

Institutions of higher learning are graduating to new delivery models to engage with students online

- E. Kumar Sharma

On April 4, Professor Anil V. Vaidya, Head, Information Management, SP Jain Institute of Management Research, Mumbai, delivered an entire machine learning session online. “Students were sent reading material, including short videos, and during the online class, we could actually get down to modelling the entire data set already shared with students,” he says. At the end of the class, students were actually able to do predictions, be it around customer churn, consumer demand or supply chain. The session was part of a course for an executive management programme, but according to Vaidya, similar exercises were taking place across the institute.

Elements of the new education delivery model, he says, will have to be a mix of online sessions backed by short videos explaining concepts and webinars and assessing lecture absorption by students based on chat and voice responses. Even examinations will get redesigned. In fact, Vaidya even devised a new evaluation method – students were asked to submit a video presentation of the project and a URL for project evaluation instead of the usual paper presentation. In the process, they managed to exhibit their tech skills as well, since the project required video-streaming services and even artificial intelligence (AI) to create subtitles.

The Big Picture