By 2025, India will have 119 million 18 to 22 year olds, which means India will be home to the largest student population in the world by then. India’s education institutes will face several challenges if they are to be able to meet the demand for courses of all types from vocational to academic and at standards acceptable to both students and the government.
Education institutes in India are set for a complete overhaul in the way they offer education to the burgeoning population of youth who want to gain the advantages that a high quality education offers.
Education has never been more expensive to provide than it is today: right now, the amount of student loans issued through banks alone is around 700 billion rupees. Education institutions need to make sure that they can offer real value for money to their students and graduates when they enter the job market. Something they do not always succeed at achieving.
Here are the five future trends for education in India:
- Online learning will move from marginal activity into the mainstream. Today’s youth are happy to use their mobile phones and internet connection for many activities. In the coming years, they will be using internet connectivity to carry out their education from their homes rather than from traditional education institutes.
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning will tend to reduce the role of traditional teaching and mentoring roles. We might expect to see virtual mentors who will, in time, not even be human but will be an interface to other students and electronic libraries.
- Traditional forms of learning such as lectures, classes and examinations will change, probably in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Classes are likely to be disaggregated into smaller units blended together to enable students to acquire particular competencies.
- Virtualised teaching will enable classes to become tailored much more closely to a student’s individual needs and even preferred learning styles. Content can be curated from multiple sources rather than an individual lecturer carrying material to crowds of students. Learning will increasingly move away from the classroom and may become part of an ongoing process of learning whilst in employment.
- Degrees will become much less important than they have been, Instead HEIs will start offering short courses with individual certifications to meet the changing demands of employers and students in a pattern of lifelong learning. Rather than the traditional fixed curricula and credit accumulation students will engage in agile learning, moving in and out of education over many years with courses centered upon competences and skills rather than book learning.
The successful Indian education institutes will be those that are proactive in their development and growth. Success will come from their own innovation. From training their own staff to provide the new forms of teaching and in developing the required, short courses with clear learning outcomes and measurable results.