Trends are shaping the education system in India

By Kajari Bharadwaj, Regional Manager, ONVU Learning

It is true that any nation’s education system lays the foundation of its future. All upcoming professionals – including scientists, policymakers, doctors, engineers, artists, politicians, and so on – are the products and by-products of the education system of a country. If the education system is not up to the mark, the country cannot expect its future workforce to be of the optimum quality and generate favourable results. In other words, they simply wouldn’t have the capability to drive the nation forward, especially when their global compeers would’ve been trained using a much evolved methodology.

Thankfully, India is pulling all the right strings to bring its education system on equal footing with the developed western nations. So, let us have a quick glance at what are the biggest trends shaping our education system, and by doing so, shaping the future of our nation.

• Smart Education: It is an exciting time for education in India. Things are getting redefined as the current impetus is on making education ‘smarter’ for addressing our ultramodern needs. The individual centre and state governments are singularly-focused to create the desired infrastructure amongst urban, semi-urban, and rural regions. This is providing the much-needed support to the smart education rollouts throughout the country.
• Teacher Training: Teachers play the most pivotal role in all students’ academic journey and shape their future by providing them the right direction and training. Unfortunately, we time and again come across multiple videos of teachers who themselves lack the basic knowledge of those subjects that they are teaching to their students. Apart from this, there is also a need to equip other teachers with better skill-sets and latest data, tools, and guidelines to effectively educate students in this era of digital technologies. Infusion of the AI technology to classroom via surveillance camera-based ‘intelligent videos’ can help us make all the difference. While this approach helps us to identify the teachers giving erroneous training to their students, it simultaneously enables us to create more evolved and personalized workshops for other teachers for their career advancement.
• STEM Demand: With the emergence of a range of new technologies, we have successfully unlocked avenues for new career paths within the industry. A majority of these careers – even if belonging to fields as diverse as finance or arts – are becoming increasingly intertwined with science and technology. So, a trend that will soon become more prevalent is the increased demand of fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics in K12 segment and higher education.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Every student has unique pedagogical needs. This makes personalization in education an imperative. As we move forward, this personalization will continue to increase within our education system. It’s often said that students learn best if learning happens at their own pace and is adapted according to their style of learning. For example, kinaesthetic learners learn best with activities, visual learners deliver more with pictures and videos, and so on. This approach makes learning more meaningful and less stressful for students. Given this, we will see AI penetrate in core areas of education such as assessment, management, analytics, remote exam proctoring, and classroom observation alongside others.
• Active Learning: “Chalk and Talk” style of teaching is increasingly becoming more redundant, thereby making educational institutes adopt forward-looking methodologies. This is bringing video-based content – with animations, visual effects, etc. – to our average classrooms and is giving rise to evolved learning experiences in them.
• Gamification: Game-based learning stirs up self-discovery, creativity, and imagination and enables kids to learn better by making them more engaged and focused; something that has also been proven in research. So, we see an increased influx of gamified learning solutions within our education system in the near future.

These are some of the most prominent macroscopic trends that are being noticed within our country. As they equip our education with advanced tools and technologies while also making our pedagogical training more avant-garde, the future of our country seems nothing but bright. But, as a citizen of this nation, we must also play our part by actively promoting these approaches and hence, secure the future of our students.