Is India ready for the onset of all-digital universities?

On 1 February 2022, the Union Budget of India announced the establishment of the country’s first centrally run digital university with the aim of enhancing access to ‘world-class’, quality higher education. It also proposed the expansion of virtual labs and high-quality e-content.

This move comes after announcements on two state-run digital universities in India: the Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation and Technology set up in January 2020, followed by the announcement of another digital university in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in February 2021.

The decision comes at the time of a recent global crisis when traditional higher education abruptly switched to completely online modes for teaching and learning. It also paves the way for the digitisation of higher education enshrined in the National Education Policy of India 2020.

While we do not disregard the importance of online education, the announcement of the first exclusively virtual university seems a giant leap, relegating to the periphery the actual realities of India.

The million-dollar question, “Are we ready for it?”, lingers on, driven by the country’s digital contours, political decisions, scant quality frameworks and online learning readiness challenges. At the centre are questions about the access and quality characteristics that the new digital university throws up.

India’s irregular digital contours

The success of a digital university is grounded in the access and availability of e-resources to both learners and teachers. Any barriers can broaden learning gaps, as witnessed during the pandemic and as expounded in the recent UNESCO 2021 report, Reimagining Our Futures Together: A new social contract for education.

In India, digital gaps due to unequal resource mapping are a major concern at both the individual and institutional level. At the individual level, we see digital inequalities across three tiers: region, gender and social groups. These disparities, at both inter- and intra-regional levels, force us to wonder whether digital universities will only attract learners living in modern economies.

The dramatic urban-rural divide can be seen in the fact that 23.4% and 42% of urban households have computers and internet access respectively compared with a meagre 4.4% and 14.9% of rural households, according to the government’s National Sample Survey (NSS) 75th round.

Furthermore, we know from the government’s Mission Antyodaya 2020 report that 27,930 villages in India are struggling to get basic access to electricity. Our analysis of 2020 data from the India Cellular and Electronics Association also shows higher digital penetration for states with more GDP.

The association’s own analysis implies that digital universities could exclude learners from rural households and states with lower GDPs.

They could also aggravate existing gender inequalities, as only 7% and 8.5% of women from rural households can operate a computer and use the internet, compared with 37.5% and 43.5% of urban men, as the NSS 75th round shows.

The report also shows that the majority of learners from marginalised social groups rely on public higher education due to their limited financial resources. Expecting them to rely only on e-resources for learning at the new digital university seems to mock the challenging economic conditions they face.

Things become more complex as we move from the individual to the institutional level. Which institutions might be able to contribute to the new digital university? Perhaps, the technologically competent ones. Irrespective of whichever schema is designed to quantify it, what cannot be denied is that not all public higher education institutions are equally funded.

The premier institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Science, Indian Institutes of Management, National Institutes of Technology and selected central universities get a significant chunk of public funds, enabling them to invest in robust IT infrastructure.

These are the institutions which will most likely get preference over the rest when it comes to collaborating with the new digital university and being at the vanguard of the digital wave.

Hence, if the digital university is to be judged the future pinnacle of quality, it may also be a fairly exclusive affair. Is this really how the government envisions widening access and inclusion?

Re-enforcing elitism and hierarchy in teaching

While training teachers is of the utmost importance, job security is equally crucial. Teachers have worried about being replaced by technology, but their concerns have been disregarded to date with the argument that technology can help teachers in the teaching-learning process.

If the digital university is the future, does that also mean that it will provide job opportunities to only a few of the ‘best’ teachers, from the ‘best institutions’? Will they be further supported by artificial intelligence, multimedia resources and a large pool of freelancing or temporary teaching assistants?

These could make teaching jobs less demanding than they are today and could create a stark hierarchy of elite teachers and the rest. There is also the possible risk of proliferating unemployment and casualisation in the teaching fraternity.

Internet blackouts due to political decisions

The symbiosis of geopolitics and education wreaks havoc when political decisions disrupt digital education through internet shutdowns. The Shutdown Tracker Optimization (STOP) Project shows that out of all the global internet shutdowns in 2020, 61.93% happened in India.

We have traced the trajectory of internet shutdowns over the past decade and found that the Jammu and Kashmir region tops this list, accounting for more than 80% of shutdowns, followed by states such as Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Given that these regions have disrupted and rudimentary IT facilities, how are digital university learners living there supposed to learn and teachers to teach amid the internet blackouts? Or will this new digital university not cater to this group and the region(s) that are worst affected by such internet shutdowns?

Concerns over quality frameworks

The new digital university requires a well-designed curriculum, sound pedagogy and trained teachers. We cannot simply push the same content and pedagogy from traditional classrooms into online modes. We need empirical research into digital pedagogies.

Resorting to online teaching during the pandemic was seen as an emergency solution, given that both the learners and teachers were quite unfamiliar with this experience. So applying that experience to digital universities may not be very useful without a well-defined framework for the new digital university.

Furthermore, if both digital and traditional universities run in parallel, would digital universities provide skill-enhancement training of at least the same quality as conventional universities? Would the degrees from digital universities be equally acceptable by the labour market and society?

Online learning readiness challenges

It is difficult to say whether learners would be very keen on learning at a virtual university which does not have any face-to-face interaction.

A recent pilot study we conducted in Indian higher education institutions reveals that nearly one in every three learners feels less motivated to learn online as they get easily distracted due to instant messages and television noise and feel that their teachers are not very competent at teaching online.

Additionally, 73.8% of learners surveyed preferred learning in traditional brick and mortar systems over online spaces. That consequently contributes to ‘virtual learning hindrances’, a term coined by us in 2021.

Online learning readiness issues become more acute in regions like Kashmir, which face internet shutdowns, where 77.7% of the learners felt more motivated to learn in traditional classrooms.

This study was conducted as part of the project on Integrating Teaching, Learning and Digital Education (ITLDE) by the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu (IIT Jammu).

Further probing revealed that learners miss the contact, emotion and interaction that are only possible in a bricks and mortar system. How can the new digital university respond to this?

Towards a blended university?

Given the issues explained above, it is premature to say that digital universities might flourish in India. Intensive research is needed before this can even be contemplated.

The most plausible avenue we can take at this moment is to integrate digital technologies within the traditional classroom system, something various scholarly works have called blended learning, hybrid learning or mixed-mode learning. So, how about a Blended University instead of a Digital University?

Given the strides made by India on the technological front and also the various barriers listed above, the first blended university seems like a more viable solution than a digital university. Any step in this direction should be preceded by sufficient evidence-based research to lay a roadmap for the uneven landscape of Indian higher education.

Sheriya Sareen is a researcher and Dr Sayantan Mandal is an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu (IIT Jammu), Jammu and Kashmir, India. Mandal and Sareen are the lead researchers of the ITLDE project funded by IIT Jammu. The authors can be reached at sheriyasarin@gmail.com and sayantan.mandal@iitjammu.ac.in.