Looking at the future of learning | T-School

Kids are starting life with tablets, mobiles, and YouTube. The masses will change to adopt to the new world.

During T-School, the first fireside chat on “Bridging the digital learning and talent gap”, the participants were Kirti Seth, CEO, IT-ITES Sector Skill Council, NASSCOM and Yogesh Andlay, Founder, Nucleus Software and Board Member, School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL). It was moderated by Pradeep Gupta, CyberMedia Group.

Kirti said: A lot of hot and happening things have already been brought up. We have realization that all need to work together. We have the entire framework in place for doing this. Industry is also reeling under the perfect storm. We need to think what we need to do from here on.

Yogesh said: It is time for us to look at what we can do. When these go in for implementation, we need to have mindset preparation for every actor.

Pradeep pointed out that only 30% of students coming out are employable. Kirti said: The numbers have not changed very much. We are also getting results regarding what is required. Impact of digital transformation have been huge. We are looking at more evolving skills. We have learning agility. We need to have enough preparation to keep learning on top of what we have already learned. We need to have the fundamentals properly in place. The learner has to now pick up from what we have already learned.

Pradeep noted that we also need to have more people with specific skills and asked what has SOIL been doing in preparing people for the industry? Yogesh said: We started with the help of 34 consortium companies. Industry now wants people to be skill ready, empathy, and behaviour that empowers. We should have the right skill content. The student should also be action oriented. He/she needs to understand the purpose of life. The new education policy has provided people to explore skills. The student needs to understand the entire cycle, he or she will be employment ready.

Kirti said: If a student does a project, it shows what he/she has learnt. The student also needs to describe the why and how the project has been done.

Pradeep added that we need to look at the 'do' part and asked what should be the next steps to achieve that? Kirti said: We all need to sit down together. We have future skills prime platform for digital skilling platform. This is a great resource for starting point. We have programs that the industry thinks is important. It is aligned to national credit framework. Academia become users of the platform. We will have industries that are interested in those skills. We bring industries to do mentoring sessions in colleges. For example, Coursera wants to bring skills that are aligned to the national skills program.

How can we ensure that students are ready for a world 10-15 years from today? Kirti said: Structured platforms are now available on YouTube. Education will be very different in about 10 years. People are now looking for skills. Machines are doing more today. We have to bring more of humans into empathy, etc. We need to keep up-to-date with things.

Yogesh added that today, kids are starting life with tablets, mobiles, and YouTube. The masses will change to adopt to the new world. We need to prepare students the future students. People still need six months training for several things. Using AR/VR, training can become easy. Lot of training material will get developed around this. Institutions need to be ready to add this capacity.