13 Jun 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

E. Editorials

Category: EDUCATION

1. Streamed education is diluted education

Context:

• The circular issued by the University Grants Commission with respect to online education.

Background:

• Recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University Grants Commission had issued a circular to universities encouraging them to adopt massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered on its SWAYAM platform for credit transfers in the coming semesters.

Concerns:

• Though the UGC circular is aimed at easing the pressures during the national lockdown, the author argues that the online system of education leads to dilution of the meaning of education and expresses several concerns regarding the same.

Policy provisions:

• The policymakers behind the SWAYAM platform have left out courses in engineering, medicine, dental, pharmacy, nursing, architecture, agriculture, and physiotherapy on the grounds that they involve laboratory and practical work.
• Although this move makes sense, it seems to suggest that the pure sciences, the arts, the social sciences, and humanities curricula are largely lecture- and theory-based, and, therefore, readily adaptable to the online platform. This amounts to a gross misconception of the idea of education.

Gross Enrolment Ratio target:

• The author views the above step as an attempt to achieve the country’s target Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education (envisioned to be 30% by 2021; it was 25.8% in 2017–18).
• Instead of expanding the network of higher educational institutions across the country and increasing seats, the government plans to make online degree programmes available for students to enrol and graduate from and add to GER.
• This approach seems like blind fixation on target achievement rather than taking measures meant to truly empower the individual through education.

Hands on experience:

• In education, the classroom acts as a space where skills such as dialogue, debate, disagreement, and friendship are learnt and practised. The classrooms act as a laboratory for hands-on testing of ideas, opinions, interpretations, and counterarguments.
• A diverse and inclusive classroom exposes to the actual world a child would be exposed to when he/she grows up.

Social values:

• Classroom and campus spaces offer the potential for solidarity in the face of discrimination, social anxiety, and stage fear, paving the way for a proliferation of voluntary associations that lie outside the realm of family, economy, and state.

Education as an economic good/service:

• The online education model envisages education as a combination of content and consumption model.
• In the absence of the physical space of a classroom, teaching and learning would give way to mere content and its consumption.
• Without a shared space to discuss and contest ideas, learning dilutes to just gathering more information.
• This goes against the very idea of education and can also lead to low learning outcomes in the students.

Lack of improvement:

• MOOC-based e-learning platforms tend to reinforce a top-down teacher-to-student directionality of learning whereby the teacher ‘creates’ and the student ‘consumes’. This misses the point that teaching and learning are skills that are always in the making.
• The interaction between the students and teachers helps the teacher facilitate the birth of students’ ideas and insights through engaging in critical dialogue. The students also help a teacher develop new ideas.
• Moving to a MOOC-based degree system would rob young teachers and students of these essential lessons in teaching and learning from each other.

Way forward:

• The online education systems being propounded must be seen only as stop-gap variants that help us get by under lockdown situations and complement classroom lectures. It could add value only as an addendum to the classroom.
• There is the need to think of greater value-sensitive and socially just architectures and technologies that further foster classroom engagement and make it accessible for students of various disabilities and challenges, thereby adding more value to the existing meaning of education.

2. Waiting for a faint signal from a distant tower

Context:

• The article discusses the challenges associated with online classes for the Northeast Indian region.

Background:

• Educational institutions across the country have switched to online classes to make up for the time millions of students have lost during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Concerns:

• Students across large swathes of the Northeast are facing many challenges in accessing online classes.

Connectivity issues:

• A large majority of the students are situated in far-flung areas without telecom connectivity or with very poor quality connectivity.
• Hence online classes are not a solution for the region unless the mobile phone or broadband connectivity is made robust.
• One of the reasons for the poor connectivity is the reluctance of telecom service providers to provide connectivity in areas where the prospective customer base is low

Electricity:

• A bigger challenge is to provide electricity for charging phones and gadgets to facilitate online or distant learning in the region.
• Connecting the sparsely populated and scattered villages high in the mountains to the electricity would involve substantial investments.

Economic challenges:

• The parents of only a few students have smartphones while many don’t own a phone.
• Those who have internet connectivity would rather not sacrifice their limited data pack on online classes.
• Recharging for parents beyond the basic need to talk is taxing on the lower middle class, not to speak of those economically weaker.

Limited coverage:

• Recent studies have noted that not more than 20% of the students have been covered under the online education scheme.
• This would only widen the existing gap between the haves and have-nots in society.

One-way communication:

• The schools seem to be in a hurry to finish the classes through WhatsApp groups comprising the students of a class and some teachers. But the communication is one way as only the teachers can post as the administrators.

Government plans and schemes:

• The National e-Governance Conference organised in Shillong in August 2019 ended in the Shillong Declaration that “binds the government to improve connectivity in the north-eastern States by addressing issues of telecommunications connectivity at grass-root level and formulating and implementing a comprehensive telecom development plan”.
• This was seen as a follow-up of the Comprehensive Telecom Development Plan for North East Region that the Centre had in 2018 said was being finalised through the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).
• Under the plan, a private service provider was entrusted to set up more than 2,000 mobile towers for connecting 2,128 uncovered villages in Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura, parts of Assam and the national highways in the region.

Way forward:

• The lockdown and associated difficulties in conducting online classes could be a lesson for the government in terms of adding subsidised smartphones to its beneficiary programmes, particularly for the poor with schoolgoing children as a way of discouraging them from dropping out.
• There is a need to expedite the infrastructure projects to ensure digital connectivity and reliable electricity for the region.

F. Tidbits

1. Major General-level talks on LAC continue

• The limited disengagement of troops agreed upon by the armies of India and China is currently underway at some of the standoff points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Eastern Ladakh.
• India and China held another round of Major General-level talks to resolve the standoff on the border in Ladakh.
• Indian Defence Minister held another review meeting on the progress of these ground level talks with the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) and the three Service Chiefs.
• A major issue needing resolution is overall de-induction of troops amassed along the LAC by China. Official sources had recently acknowledged that China had undertaken troop mobilisation along the LAC on its side in various sectors in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh and in response India, too, had moved troops forward.

2. ‘Use cashless tech for transport’

• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) advisory on public transport for States, cities and Metro rail companies recommends that Non-motorised transport should be encouraged and revived and touchless and cashless technologies should be adopted to curb COVID-19 transmission on public transit networks.
  • Non-motorised transport requires low cost, less human resource, is easy and quick to implement, scalable and environment-friendly.
  • To reduce human interface, cashless systems like BHIM, PhonePe, Google Pay and PayTM should be used along with the National Common Mobility Card.

G. Prelims Facts

1. Samples from Lonar lake sent for testing

• Lonar Lake was created by an asteroid collision with earth impact during the Pleistocene Epoch some 50,000 years ago.
• It is one of the four known, hyper-velocity, impact craters in basaltic rock anywhere on Earth. The other three basaltic impact structures are in southern Brazil.
• Lonar Lake has a mean diameter of 1.2 kilometres.
• Lonar lake has saline water and is a notified national geo-heritage monument.
• Recently the colour of water in Lonar lake turned pink. Some experts have attributed the change to the mixing of Dunaliella algae with halobacteria, forming a beta carotine pigment and turning the water pink.

2. Reserves surge $8.2 bn in a week, exceed $500 bn for the first time

• India’s forex reserves have increased by $8.2 billion in the first week of June 2020, marking the biggest weekly jump since September 2007.
• The increase in reserves was mainly due to a rise in foreign currency assets. The sharp increase was due to gains from both currency revaluation (as the dollar depreciated against major currencies) and dollar mop-up through intervention by the central bank.
• India’s foreign exchange reserves crossed $500 billion for the first time as the Reserve Bank of India builds up a war chest even as the rupee has been the worst performer among emerging market currencies since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic in March.
  • In 2020, the rupee has fallen by 6%, indicating that the RBI has not been aggressive in intervening in the currency market to stem the Indian currency’s fall.
• The RBI’s FX policy has reverted to the Jalan-Reddy policy of building high FX reserves to insure against contagion. Experience suggests that higher FX reserves paradoxically lead to higher FPI inflows by comforting investors.

Q1. Which of the following statement/s is/are correct?

Q2. In which of the following fields does Doppler Effect find application?

Q3. Which of the following correctly describes the term Phishing?

Q4. Which of the following pairs is wrongly matched?