 and hope everyone is safe and healthy. Today we have Professor Shashidara with us, who will be talking on national education policy 2020 and the role of teachers in an increasingly digital world. Before we go on to the talk, I will give a brief introduction about Professor Shashidara. He is currently Professor, Biology and Dean of Research at Ashoka University. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, specializes in genetics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology. Prior to Ashoka, Professor Shashidara worked at CCMB, Hyderabad and Aisar Pune. He has served and is serving many apex committees with the government of India and science and technology organization. And is the recipient of numerous top science award. He's an elected fellow of science academies of India and the European Molecular Biology Organization. And currently the president of International Union of Biological Sciences. In today's talk, as I mentioned, he will talk about NEP, which is expected to take the nation towards a development mode that ensures equity and sustainability. He will be dwelling upon two challenges teachers are facing and would continue to face in the coming years. Exhausted by the pandemic. The first one is the need for online education with high quality content and visuals to increase the reach and efficiency of learning outcomes. And second one is preparing the students for this increasingly digital world, which is beyond the imagination of most of the current educators. He will also touch upon the critical need of teacher preparations to address these challenges and to prepare them. Since we are on tight schedule, over to you, Professor Siddharah. Thank you, thank you very much. Can you hear me? Yes, yes. Okay, good. So thanks, Mashu, for this kind introduction and first for invitation to speak to all of you. It's more of a discussion because I'm also a learner. I'm not an educator the way you people are talk about innovation in pedagogy and teachers training. I'm more of a sort of a freelancer in a way you can say, I met you. Trying to sort of organize large number of teachers workshop. Many times the kind of workshop that I organize for teachers are all to enable teachers to teacher interaction so that they can learn from each other rather than trying to impart a particular pedagogical method because I myself not very familiar with all the methods. Many times there are many experts among the teachers themselves who help other teachers. And particularly I'm thankful for many of my friends here who have joined Dr. Ravid, Dr. Jayeshree. It's a privilege to talk to all of you at this time. And I hope all of you stay safe in this very difficult period. And we always used to read in the history of as a biologist, as an evolutionary biologist I always sort of interested in understanding how speciation occurs and how population dynamics change in the context of diseases. Because in many times, geoclimatic changes leading to population changes is what we normally try to study and simulate. It's always difficult to study influence of pathogens in shaping the populations. You know, there are hardly good fossil or archeological evidence for large populations particularly in the older species extinctions or changes in the population dynamics. Those are the ones which are better studied in real time. Didn't realize that human species will go through such a period post-modern molecular biology era because the previous pandemic was close to a hundred year old or more or less exactly a hundred year before this COVID-19. And in that context, you know, it's irony that we know so much about viruses, about immune response, how what are the very different physiological burden when we are fighting a pathogenetic body and how we transmit from one person to another and how it affects the population level. But we don't have much information or strategies or defense mechanisms that the population level to protect lives, you know, of course there are two aspects to this. One is exasperated because of our social interaction, social infrastructure, which is extremely inadequate to deal with such large pandemic. We have seen this in the last one year. So much of the solution come from, part of the solution come from sciences, particularly like biology. A second part of it comes by understanding the complex system which mostly mathematicians or physicists are trying to help and provide by making some mathematical modeling. And the third really come from, you know, a social scientist, you know, economists and bureaucrats and the policymakers. And somewhere all of us not been able to handle this so well in the process we have lost many, many lives. In fact, this pandemic is also a lesson for all of us to learn that how we need to bring in real life problems in our classrooms to help students to learn the concepts better. And so that they actually can, you know, not only the learn basic concepts of any particular discipline and also learn how to apply the knowledge to solve the problem. That's what innovation is all about. And if you learn the concept better and also you learn how to address the unknowns because you will learn, you know, certain methods of research and scientific methods to address those problems. So this is sort of one way of looking at it, how we can address a pandemic. The second is how we can use whatever is happening today to, you know, change our education system so that tomorrow will be better off. But this thinking, while it is sort of made, there's a current pandemic made with thinking an urgency to implement. But the thinking was always there. Thinking was there for the last 10 to 15 years. We continuously talked about that there is a urgent need to reform the education system. For two reasons, one is increased number of students endowing both in the school and higher education. And there is a need to improve the quality. And with the fast changing world, large sections of the society were not being able to cope with the changes and they are left behind. So there's a huge inequality in educational outcomes as well as their, you know, future career prospects and livelihood. So obviously there was a huge demand for change in the education system. And, but as you know, any complex system, the change is always slow and any big change may lead to more problems than actually solving the prevailing problems. So people are always afraid of how much one can change. For example, digitization, which is today's topic. Everybody was talking about digitization of education. There was always a, you know, worry that what extent it will affect the quality of teaching, to what extent it will begin the absence of a teacher, physically present, living, you know, blood and flesh teacher, not present or not mediator of learning. How would a student who is another human being would learn only using the digital methods? So these are the kind of issues we are always confronted with when we are discussing about education. Now there are certain things which have become inevitable. For example, in the last more than a years of experience of trying to do digital learning, we also understood so much of inequality to access, you know, digital learning resources, internet signal, bandwidth and inability to understand through digital methods. And now the divide between, you know, the have and have nots in terms of digital access to inequality in educational outcomes is increasing and that's why we need to worry about how to improve this. And teachers are back in the center stage now because without teachers in mediation, these problems cannot be solved. Only using technology, these can't be solved. So that means teachers need to train themselves to bridge this digital divide. So that's sort of way I'm going to sort of reach the today's discussion. Let me share my slides. So for this particular audience, Omibaba, you know, science education, Omibaba Center for Science Education, I don't think I need to sort of explain most of it because these are all you are the experts. In fact, you may correct me, there are anything missing or anything wrong in what I'm going to discuss. So based on variety of discussion that I was involved in in the NEP and also in the later another policy document was prepared for by the government of Punjab which I was involved in each Science and Technology Innovation Policy 2020. And one side is the education for masses and to help them to understand the world, help them to take up a livelihood, improve their career opportunities, improve their, you know, living conditions and so forth on one side. The second side, of course, education also about equality and sustainability. And the second side is to what extent science and technology innovation can be used to address both the problems in education and the problems in wealth creation in a sustainable way and also equity in the distribution of the wealth within a country. So in that context, you know, both are sort of complementary and using sort of information from both sides I'll try and bring out some salient features. I'll be very quick. Much of it already you know, you are the real experts or you can actually go and get into more discussion. So I'll try to sort of use these slides in about 20 minutes or so. So one is of course the school education. One is the still large population is not fully sort of have access to education. School education is somewhat better. But when it comes to higher education as you can make out as of 2017, 2018, the data was released only in 2019 late of the 2017, 2018. We don't have the data for subsequent the last one or two years. Last year anyway is completely washed out. So we are about 26% of the eligible students can come to higher education are coming which is compared to the world, world average is 30%. And you know, average GR in place of cross involvement ratio in developed countries is somewhere between 60 to 70%. And China is somewhere perhaps 40% or so. It's definitely above the world average. And so of course, one can always ask to how much of the higher education is really important and to what extent school education should be proved in such a way that the end of the two 12 years of schooling one will have sufficient learning and training to lead a comfortable and prosperous life, sustainable way, environmental friendly and so forth. These are the some of the points that we can sort of take this forward in our discussion. But still assuming that a country like ours considering the so many societal problems, inequality problems, we need to improve our agriculture, we need to improve our health system, we need to improve our air quality, water quality, so much of networking we need to do amongst ourselves. So there is a huge demand for highly skilled human resources at all levels, at all non-disciplines. So perhaps 26% of GR may not be good enough. And so we need to improve both the number as well as the quality. So obviously I'm focusing more on higher education coming from the higher education systems. Many of you may be working on the school education. Some of the topics which I'm going to talk about later will also be applicable to both school and higher education. This I'll skip because all of you know, increase incidence of epidemics and pandemics. Pandemic was added now in the last one year of these slides but increase incidence of epidemics was always there in these kind of discussions. And increased human migration, exchange of commodities and there is increased confrontation between countries, communities. There are so many different types of problems our students will have to face as they go in the future. And so there is the current model of development is not sustainable in the context of not only inequality in the globe as well as the climate change. Now, from the basically what is that education should be? The students should basically we have the ability to solve problems using knowledge, let's say science and technology but not necessarily should simply know the facts, right? Because that's where the digitization helps that you don't need to remember everything, right? For example, DNA double helix. Today, all of us are doing RTPCR to diagnose COVID. When the COVID pandemic outbreak happened, India had just one lab to RTPCR based testing that's the NIV in Pune. And then they set up three or four, one in Mumbai, one in Delhi and so forth and one in Chennai. And these are about three or four centers for COVID testing. But within a month or two, we had more than 2000 testing center. Most of them were actually academic institutions like ISERTS or IITs or universities and colleges. It's simply because the basic understanding of the RNA to DNA reverse transcription, DNA replication that what happens during PCR. And then, you know, this all technology we always use day to day in our research in our teaching also for undergraduate level when in school level many times people do PCR. So this basically knowledge was already there. We applied this for COVID testing. And that's how India could actually be testing initially for few hundred samples a day. Now we can actually test more than a million or close to about two million tests a day, right? Of course, we should further increase and ramp up considering our population and considering the second search that we are facing. But whatever that could happen because people knew how to apply the knowledge to a particular problem. But most of the people who are doing the RT-PCR phase testing including me who I teach DNA replication to evolutionary biology and genetic variation and so forth I cannot explain anything about reverse transcriptase. You know, it's biochemistry of river transcriptase or biochemistry of DNA polymerase leading to function of DNA polymerase and DNA replication. But now most of those facts I don't need to know. I can always refer to a digital resource and then try and help understand some of those points which is required to design an experiment, right? So that's why we don't need to remember all the facts. As long as we know, that takes any conservative method of replication of DNA as a concept, right? So as a teacher, my job is also should be that rather than teaching what I, whatever I learned yesterday or long, long ago to students who are tomorrow's citizens and for a career that even doesn't exist today. So they may have to prepare themselves for a career which may get created later. So what's the point in certain kinds of, a certain method of teaching or certain content of that we teach today for the students' purposes? So this understanding, if you have, then we can actually simplify the teaching as much as possible, right? And make sure that students have fun in learning at the same time, learn how to learn rather than continuously worry about what to learn. So in that context, these are obviously again, the good old, maybe even more than 100 years. In fact, I'm sure Ravi and Jayashri, some of you may have read, there is this speech of Max Muller, it's available, text of that speech is available on internet. He spoke to a batch of ICS officers, the Imperial Civil Service officers who were selected in UK and they were supposed to go to India and all of them worked for the first time going to India. So Max Muller was basically was trying to explain to them about India before they land in India. And in the first 10 minutes of his speech, he only speaks about whatever you are learned, you should unlearn before you go to India because none of you are learned here will be useful to learn a complex system that India has. And one of the things he says is, these are the good features of a good education and Cambridge has failed. He's talking about more than 125 years ago, which we can still consider Cambridge University as the number one university in the world. Cambridge has failed to impart good education to our students. So analytical ability, critical thinking, solving problems and so forth, right? These are the issues that he was talking about. I'm a audible to all of you, in case there is any internet issue, please someone has to flag this. Mashul? Yes, yes, you are audible, I hope. I'm also visible in a small box. Yes, everything is fine, slides are also perfect. Okay, thank you. So when NEP was sort of framed, none of us are thinking that in less than a year, there would be a pandemic, right? So NEP had, looking at if there is an higher GR, then the inclusivity and equitability access will be an issue, how to ensure that there is both inclusivity and equitability in your campuses, how to improve the quality and integrity of educational resources, and how to make sure that your pedagogy is learner centric rather than sort of some kind of an examination centric and so forth, right? Skills, values, other things, but values are all, anyway, relative. Each one may define different values. I think there are certain kinds of skills which are universal and transferable across disciplines. Now, as a teacher's role, again, many people have talked about it, most of you already know about it. As a teacher, a teacher's job should be more as a facilitator because it's a lifelong learning for any student. So students should learn how to learn rather than certain specific topic that they have to learn during, in their education, whether in the schools or in the college, but school education, the particularly early school education purpose is very different than the higher education. Early school education, the purpose is a student should know what a social world would like because typically a student would be always, before coming to the school, would be with parents and with the immediate family member. They may not know how to deal with an external world with the alien people, right? Anybody who is outside the family is an alien person. So how to deal with this, how to do numerical, how to get the numerical skills and so forth. Then they start learning how to understand the world, which is complex and beyond our understanding of using our sensory perception. For example, how do you know whether the earth which is moving on the sun or the sun moving around? Because our sensory perception says it's the sun which is moving every day from east to west. But the science, which is trying to understand a true world beyond our own sensory perception has taught us that it is the other way around. So how to discover or how to understand a world beyond our own perception? Much more than how to understand the world, at least the reality that the world is beyond our own sensory perception. That reality, if it comes to students during school education, you have done a fantastic job. I don't think we need to do anything more than that, of course, other than the early middle school level, whatever the learning outcomes that I spoke about at some time ago. High school level, I think if students understand that there is a world beyond our own perception, like for example, how much of the behavior, inappropriate behavior in the context of COVID-19 is simply because most people cannot comprehend that how viruses can move from one person to another person because it's indivisible, right? And it's very difficult for them to comprehend how from one person it can get into a geometrical progression to hundreds and millions of people within a short span of time in a crowded environment in like a city, right? So these are the kind of understanding students should gain from the education that there is a world which is beyond our comprehension, but there are methods to understand the world. There are mathematical methods. There are some experimental methods. There are other rational methods to understand the world. That's what a teacher need to impart on education as to her student during education. So teacher job is again, more as a facilitator. So that students learn how to learn rather than trying to sort of do a more, you know, a top-down sort of approach to learn. Okay, I'll skip this. This is finally once you do all of these things and they will learn, you know, how to solve the problem in their own way. Now, until about four or five years ago, all of these thoughts were there amongst all the good educators who are thinking about this and particularly, you know, many, many, many hundreds of teachers at school and at college that were across the country. They were all genuinely concerned about the educational system and how to improve education. Many teachers are trying on their own way how to improve the quality of education. There are many, many experiments, in particularly in many NGOs run schools and also in many colleges. And there are many programs for teachers training in these kind of things. But in the absence of a curricular or structural change, most of them became a passion of few people or a curiosity for some people and then they forgot about it because it's simply because it's not implementable because you are demand on, you know, part of the curriculum and syllabi was so much that you couldn't do anything from your new learning. So what NEP has sort of suggested is a structural change, the curriculum and syllabi and pedagogy all three such that, you know, many of the good practices that we are always preaching could be brought in as part of the system, right? And obviously when you say part of the system is so large and so complex and implementing overnight it's going to be either almost impossible and at some time if you don't implement properly it's going to be disastrous. So there is always an implementation issue. So right now NEP is still at the, you know, some amount of, some part of NEP is being implemented but still largely implementation is on hold. Of course because of the pandemic there's not much discussion happening on some of the issues of implementation. So one aspect of curriculum is of course bringing liberal arts and then second one is the, let me change this. And the kind of, you know, syllabi that we use the kind of, you know, skills that we impart on the students and the kind of, you know, advanced information we ask students to learn should we have a sort of contemporary and has to have a global acceptance because we are now global citizens. Irrespective of whether you work in India or anywhere in the world you would be working together with the rest of the world particularly in the context of pandemic it has become much more evident that what a global community means, right? So we need to align our education to the global level and obviously then our comparison of education is not within India who is number one or number two who is good, who is bad. We should compare with ourselves and the rest of the world and see how good our standards are at the global level. Of course there is a lot of local connectivity we should have. So we should be locally rooted to deal with the local problems and local need for local solutions with the help of knowledge within science and technology otherwise. But should be globally relevant and based on the global standards and global knowledge. Now, coming to the digital aspect because of the increased number of students and because there is so much to know and not everything can be known and also a lot of solutions to the problem come from the very different knowledge resources and those knowledge resources should be accessible to everybody and all the time. So the democratization of the knowledge and ease of access to knowledge is something which is again is part of the digital learning and digital pedagogy, right? So today most of the time a teacher need to tell the students not only how to learn using certain pedagogical methods the second is how to even find out which is the most reliable resource for any piece of knowledge. You cannot be a WhatsApp, it cannot be a Twitter or it cannot be even Google or Wikipedia. How do you query knowledge whether it is true or false whether it is reliable or not reliable. Itself needs to be taught to students because of the increased transmission of unsubstantiated source of information and many times information can also be fake, right? So while we need to teach students in using digital methods, I mean digital divide itself is a separate topic, I'll come to that in a minute. What is there in the digital resources itself is there's a big question mark, right? That we all need to be aware of when we are talking to students because we are talking about now so many different digital repository of information. We are talking about making digital lesson plans giving links to very different source of information and in the process we ourselves should not give it to a wrong place to the wrong source and at the same time, it's impossible to always find a correct resource, right? So there must be a way of verifying what is the right source and students should learn how to verify it, right? So I can give you an example. I'm sure Ravi knows about this, right? You were part of this discussion once when Mohan initiated, you know, some time ago there was, I'll not mention the, some, you know, private, the chain of private schools they had their own notes, what are called notes for the 10 standard examination, sort of a summary of everything that students should know before they go to the board exam numbers, notes. And so there is something about Big Bang. It's a completely wrong information. So it starts with, at the time of Big Bang, you know, the whole world was small. That's all they say. It was only had a hydrogen and helium. And from hydrogen and helium, you know, everything else sort of came out kind of some information. There was fundamental, you know, many, many fundamental mistakes in physics of Big Bang in that notebook, in the way. And if you just take the paragraph and do a Google search, it basically went to a website of a creationist created in which they had talked about this in a negative way, saying that this is what scientists claim, but it is not just so the world was like this or the world was never like this kind of thing. And so neither the creationists use that as a real world, nor scientists use this as the beginning of the, you know, current universe. Somewhere this was picked up and it went into a part of the school education, right? Although it was not supposed, not within the NCRT textbook, but somewhere it was there circulating. So this is the problem of sometimes, you know, digital learning, one has to be extremely careful how do you source information? Because all of us, we may have to do lesson plans, either at the school level or undergraduate level as a teacher, and then how do we actually make a lesson plan on a topic in which we may not be, have done any research or we may not have studied for 20, 30 years and so that we can out of, you know, our own memory, we can write something, you know, but sometimes we may have to source information from a more reliable sources. So if we can do it, why can't students do it? So that means we need to teach our students how to verify the knowledge. Some of these things, you know, the lot of problems in implementation, how you become a learning facilitator in a digital one. So first of all, there is a technology thing. That means teachers may have to become a little bit of technology savvy whether we like it or not. So the students should at least learn some basics of digital learning, you know. So that means some amount of technical skills that we all need to have. And so then there need to be a somewhat different instructional design, what we call as lesson plans. You know, it's in a different way because sometimes it's easier. It helps a lot in a digital world than in a regular classroom because taking from the previous lecture to the next lecture, the continuity of lectures is easier in a digital world. You can just show your lesson plan of the previous class and where you ended and which logic, you know, logical question that comes after that. And that's where you are continuing to the next one. Right? So some of these things which typically in a dialogue that you normally do if you have three or four hours of lecture continuously, instead if you want to divide each lecture into one hour at a time and only two hours in a week and next two hours in another week, then you students will lose the continuity. In a digital pedagogy, many times that continuities can be maintained very easily with the help of the digital resources that you have. So more importantly, we keep talking about teachers, learning new skills, teachers development, pedagogical training to teachers and so forth. But in a complex, fast changing world, it's almost impossible to catch up with these kind of training. So no system, whether a UGC or the school in CBSE can continuously organize teachers workshop for teachers to learn how to teach in a changing world. So what is important is you give certain kinds of leadership skills to teachers to be master of their own. They learn on their own what is to be done. They understand the problem in their own way. Also give them, empower them to be autonomous so that they are answerable to the learning outcomes of the student rather than to some management saying that, you know, why didn't you do this? Why did you do this? Why didn't you do this? We are that way. Only measure the learning outcomes, leave it to the teachers how to teach that learning outcome and so forth. And that's where some leadership skills comes to teachers and then teachers can be a lifelong learner in their own way to teach as you can. Last point is in a, all these things can be achieved if you change our examination system which is also MEP wants to implement. So rather than some kind of a, you know, examination oriented we should have a completely different method of assessment and that below examination system should also sort of align very well with NEP and the new teaching methods, right? Now one aspect of Indian particularly the, you know the board level of school examinations 10th and 12th grade and also our UGC mandated university level education examination system. There is a dichotomy in teaching and evaluation. So I teach someone else evaluate. It's actually even worse than that. I use someone else's textbook to teach my student because it's written by someone else. Then students will, you know, write answers to questions asked by a third person and another fourth person is the one who is going to do the evaluation. Though they are all complete four islands, right? And teachers, sorry, students have to jump from one island to another. And easy for them to jump the teachers, you know because they are not bothered about teaching, teachers teaching in the classroom because they're worried more about what examiner will ask the question and how another evaluator will answer the, I'm sorry, evaluate the answer, right? So they are trying to match there and the textbook is anyway the reference for everything that nothing comes out of the, outside the textbook or outside syllabus what the students keep talking about. So the teacher's role becomes minimal. If teachers evaluate based on what they teach then they will become more responsible in their teaching because their evaluation has sold to be, you know and if also know how I'm going to evaluate I also know how to teach. So I think students should be involved in evaluation. Of course there should be a, you know unbiased third-party evaluation but doesn't mean that I don't evaluate my students whom I'm teaching because if I don't do that my teaching will never improve and I will not have any motivation to even improve. So this is what I was trying to see learning how to assess all of our teachers should learn how to assess that's very important. This I've already spoke about more self-learning than taught by teachers students should, you know there are more debate, discussion, peer learning we should involve real life problems like field and laboratory work whether it is in social science and humanities or science and technology, it's all the same. And there should be sufficient infrastructure if you want to do more of digital learning digital pedagogy than infrastructure on the schools and buildings and campuses whether it's school or higher education should be pretty very good. We need to have better internet terms of high bandwidth internet throughout the country. Otherwise the digital divide inequality in education is going to only worsen rather than informatics. Just to in the last three minutes all of these things what we are thinking what we are discussing in product educational policy and change in education system is applicable whether it's pre-corona world or post-COVID world or whatever. It's only that the COVID-19 pandemic has made all these things much more urgent and accelerated the need for improving it. But we also, the future is as unpredictable it was two years ago because we are always talking about climate change and environment degradation is making the future much more uncertain. The inequalities will drive the development in a different way. There'll be more conflicts between economic conflict I'm not talking about war kind of a conflict between countries and that will sort of change the dynamics for every five years if not more frequent than that. So in a fast changing modern world basically we want to customize the education outcome among the students rather than a factory model that will continue even with the post-COVID world. But one thing that has changed is the world has become somewhat more closer to each other. The global village we keep talking about anywhere all the time because of the modern economy and interdependence for in the supply chain pipeline. But you know the modern world post-COVID or during the COVID now you can't think of post-COVID in the middle of the second surge is when the virus was discovered it was discovered sometime in the 2019 December by January we all knew what is this virus how it sort of invades human lung cells. And within about a month or so we knew so much about what happens once it's inside of a lung cells and within two months people started thinking of vaccines, drugs and so forth. And within three months sometime in the beginning of March people also knew how our immune system is violently responding to this what was cytokine storm and what are the kind of treatment you have to give why there is a sudden change in the oxygen saturation and so forth. And while a large number of people have died indeed and much of that is inadequate health infrastructure and our lack of preparation sometime lack of attention to the details we should have given particularly now the second surge. To large extent current pandemic also has provided an opportunity to use you know collaboration, cooperation and use of modern science to address the problem. And but at the same time the modern communication methods also spreading a lot of unverified information fake news all kinds of quacks coming out with their own solutions medical solution or non-pharmaceutical interventions. So of course the problem is compounded because of some of those things but at the same time we also have realized where one can solve the problem and what are the shortcomings in finding the right solution or even if you know the solution how to apply the solution to sort of pandemic problem. So in that context there is hopefully these learning which all of us have learned you know most of the time it would be a few policy makers or some thinkers who have thought about some of these things. Now everything is coming inside our mobile phone television at home some of these discussions. So hopefully more and more teachers are going to be aware of the need for customized educational outcomes among the students and the ability of the students to learn and anything from the room. But just to end with some more specifics rather than too much of generalization in the post-COVID world there are going to be certain kinds of not only because of COVID-19 but also because of climate change and environment regulation and the importance of biodiversity and conservation. We need there are going to be huge demand for statistics because economics is also you know quite good number of statisticians. Population studies, epidemiology, public health experts sustainability experts, biodiversity and conservation experts experts in environmental law and climate justice particularly because of the Paris Agreement now which is back in the limelight after Trump lost his election. Then communication expert with again and again it has become extremely important that we need a good communication experts to communicate and disseminate right information. So these are all the kind of domains, specific areas in which we need huge number of human resources and that's where some new career opportunities for our students and all of them are interdisciplinary as you can make out. None of them are very, very specific to our physics or chemistry or math or biology. Now of course, transferable skills in communication cells have running analytical ability, critical thinking are important among all of the students. I'll stop here. Sorry, I took longer than I thought but I am happy to take some questions. Thanks Shashi. Now we will take up the questions. Please raise your hands or type in the questions. We have one in the comment box. Surevi, you want to speak? Since we have very little time I would request everyone to be brief and to the point in the question. So Surevi is asking, during the pandemic time with the digitization of imparting education suddenly the students of lower economic strata relate schools have less access to the internet's smartphone are suffering the most. It's been more than a year. So what are your thoughts on how we can address this issue? Yeah, yeah, it's definitely that's a problem. So now, this is more of a socio-economic solution than there is any specific educational solution to this. As a teacher, how much I can do? My job is only to teach, right? How to learn or what to learn? So one way is almost all the students particularly young students coming from lower socio-economic strata and who have access to education has been a problem should be given some additional opportunity. It's like one or two additional years with fully supported education system so that they catch up with the last time, make up for the last time and also catch up with the people who had access to the internet. We also have realized I'm teaching two big courses in Ashoka University in this semester. Many kids of super-rich people living in metros to the people in rural areas without even having good access to mobile phone or a good laptop. Of course, somehow we created that opportunity so that reduce the gap. But still, the digital learning as a method of learning is actually very poor amongst all students. Even if those who are born, in earlier days we used to say born with silver spoon, these days even those who are born with smart phones or a MacBook Air or Apple, right? I think there is still digital learning is very poor amongst human beings. I think it's unless they are good in learning otherwise, in a regular human-human interaction, the digital learning is not going to make it any more better. So digital learning is only another aid for the teacher. That's what we are always talking about is digital learning is supposed to be an aid for teachers to teach better rather than a student to learn better. We have realized that. Sorry, I don't have a really clear solution to what to do with a large number of Indians who kids who have actually lost a whole more than a year now in the education system. Another thing, you have mentioned the importance of interdisciplinary thinking. Now definitely there are a few people in our premier institutes like ICER, TFR or IIT Sandal who have this exposure in interdisciplinary thinking and talking about that. But how difficult and what are the challenges do you think? This has to come right at the school level at the plus one, plus two level, the silos of physics, chemistry, biology all just being separated. That has to be broken right from the school level. And do you think we have there is a crisis of expertise on how to do this at that level? Of course, I mean, there is a lot of things happening at that level. So it's not really so it's actually much simpler than we thought initially. It's all depends on how you make your lesson plan for the teacher. So if you look at, of course, the interdisciplinary thinking starts only actually, the division starts only in the high school. We really until seven standard, there's nothing like physics, chemistry, mathematics. You have social science or not even social science. You have basically geography and science is kind of a thing not so much. And then something about civil science or something. But if you look at, if you make a lesson plan in such a way that you can actually bring in interdisciplinary very easy. Let's say I'm an economics and I want to teach, let's say microfinancing or I want to teach something about what is GDP. So in your calculation, you can always give assignments, but you can give an assignment in such a way that assignments yet the students have to learn some data skills or students have to learn certain kinds of mathematics or students have to learn some aspects of dynamics. And many times the complex system dynamics are the same whether it is a physics, you know, nonlinear dynamics or in the social structure knowledge and dynamics is the same for the way you approach. So actually interdisciplinarity can be brought together very easy. It all depends on what kind of problems you bring in. For example, as part of a climate change education, we have a project in which we want to bring climate change across the curriculum and all across all disciplines. So we want to do is the example, whether the rainfall pattern or whether it is climate migration or climate refugees, irrespective of what the problem is, somewhere you talk about the climate change, cause and effect of it. And then you may address different aspect of that problem whether refugee problem or rainfall, increased rainfall or reduced rainfall or increased sea level raising. So you can bring in this narrative by combining in a very nice way in the lesson class. Ravi has a question. Yeah, before that, KS process, Sambat Kumar had I mean, he has sent me a message. Yeah, Sambat here. Yeah, how are you? Okay. So I have two short questions. One question is the digital learning process, particularly these days during pandemic days. How does one, how does teacher ensure that student really learned what has been taught today or this week? I mean, earlier days, you go for assignment, collected they'll correct today. Many people cannot access for scanner. People don't even, how do they ensure that? I mean, only privileged class will be benefited now. You have to ensure the student really understood. Second point is, of course, is that as you and me know that we have so many students we are training, college, school level, when you put them on interviews, hardly one person would answer even fundamental questions. Is there any need to really reduce a syllabus so that the student really learn the bad minimum or whatever they learn, they really understand. They are two percent. Yeah, Sambat, you know, both of them I sort of touched upon both of them. First one is, you know, getting into digital teaching without preparation because of the COVID that happening. We should have have a proper preparation on how you teach, how much digitization in part comes in the teaching and how much is the, what is the valuation method? For example, if you look at the NPTEL or the SWIME, what people are trying to do was to make student go through a SWIME course and teacher will sort of guide them to go through a SWIME course and teachers will evaluate what they have learned, whether they learn properly or not by getting into some discussion. So classroom is time is used for discussion with the student and the student would have already gone through one hour of, let's say, an online learning, right? That was the original thinking about digital transitioning to digital learning, but unfortunately, because of COVID, it happened, you know, overnight and there is no particular solution to this such a problem. But coming to the second part, I, you know, it's already NEPs, you know, talked about it and now more and more people are talking about is reduce the content in the syllabus, increase more discussion on the concepts and let students learn on their own, give them a right references on the loan, the details. I gave the example of the DNA double helix. I don't need to get into the nitty-nitty details of all the, you know, parameters of a double helix or structure. I only need to tell them the complementary after two strands and the importance of the complementarity. Everything else, they can learn the detail. The concept of a DNA that if you like, if you read one scientific paper of 1953, the last two sentences tell everything about the importance of double helix or structure complementary strands, right? So that's the kind of concept we need to teach them. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. So this, my question is sort of triggered by the context of NEP and the talk about interdisciplinarity and so on. But I wanted to ground it if you don't mind, you know, in some specific experiences that you've had, which I think we can all learn from, or at least learn about, hear your insights. I mean, you've been very closely involved in ICER, in fact, building, and now you're with Ashoka University. Clearly, these are, you know, two institutions of great importance for the future of higher education in the country, the young institutions and taking shape. So would you have something to say about, you know, comparing these two institutions from probably the vision of NEP, etc. Are they different today? Will they intake slightly different parts? Or do you think there's some kind of convergence that you see the future of their character and nature? Yeah, yeah. So it's true. In fact, when, when ICERs were conceived in 2003, 2004, all finally they started, you know, opened up in 2006 onwards, it was largely talking about science, natural sciences, basic science and integration of, you know, physics, chemistry, math, and biology, right? It was still in its own silos in a way. It was not, you know, completely opened up. So see the people always think that liberal arts means, you know, humanities and social science or arts and, you know, like performing arts. You know, if you look at the American definition, liberal arts colleges and liberal arts, if one is just you, you know, you are quite liberal in what you want to learn, the art of learning. And what you learn is, is completely up to you. In liberal arts, you basically learn the art of learning. And so you open up your mind and when you open up your mind, you may actually see some poetry or you may see some music or you may see some, you know, planet or, or an act in your brain. And that's what you want to focus later. And so different people, that's all specialized in different ways, but they all started with the very fundamental understanding of the both natural world and the human world. So that to some extent is true, but, you know, in practical ways, very difficult to implement in modern world, particularly, you know, the liberal arts higher education depends on a strong school education, because much of the early learning is good in the school education, the transition from school to higher education becomes easier, because you start, you know, learning new knowledge the way knowledge is produced. Whereas if the school education itself is at a fundamentally not good, you first three years of higher education goes in fixing what you didn't do in the school, right? And we are facing that problem with respect to what socio-economic background students come both in and Ashoka, I see the problem that, you know, many times what we want to do in higher education, we can't do it simply because they're not ready yet. This is where we need to fix. You don't mean that in terms of their content knowledge, but more about the approach to learning or something is that what you have in mind? Approach to learning, yeah. So it's still in to road learning. Somehow, even after, you know, in Ashoka or in Aishwara after two years, they're still more worried about the remembering certain definitions and numbers and more worried about the kind of question in which the easy for them to answer to an MCQ rather than asking a conceptual question and then to answer those questions. Thanks. We will take one more from, short one from Sambat and then with that, I think we can go into Okay, sorry, one more short question. You know, the fact reminds that it's these days, honestly speaking, but it was poor on college level is very difficult to find motivated teachers given the salary structure particularly private colleges. I mean, maybe the time has come, you know, even the motivator students will lose suddenly interest. That is one of the reasons why we are not getting high quality students. I mean, the way I understand now, now that your education policy now permits go for a digital, digital learning, is it possible that we ask people from all over the globe, the best possible teachers, I mean, ask them come online, give a course online courses to, I mean, to even schools and colleges. So the students really get interested in the subject. I mean, you have to create one generation now who are really motivated teachers, which I think difficult to find. Really scope on that. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if you're interested in a particular discipline, you have certain, you know, sort of passion, let's say I want to learn, let's say, you know, astrophysics or something. Now, then they may actually students may seek the best teachers from anywhere in the world and learn astrophysics, but the job of the teacher is also to inculcate that passion, motivate that students to build as such a passion. Right. Those teachers are not in physical proximity, right? It will be very difficult for the students to seek such teachers from anywhere in the world rather than their own background. So we need a combination of both. We need a large number of motivated good teachers in our own country, in our own schools and colleges, but for the best, you know, discipline specific or interdisciplinary teachers also can be at, you know, come from anywhere in the world. Abhijit Banerjee can talk about, you know, experimental design for economic understanding the economic inequality or whatever, you know, or nudge theory, whatever, but, you know, but that can come from anywhere in the world. But, you know, the initial ability to learn and develop certain interest and passion for learning has to come from local teachers. But, you know, the point that you mentioned about lack of motivation among the teachers to some extent is true because they are largely exploited also by the management in particularly private schools and colleges. And in the government schools and colleges, many times they are not even considered as, you know, anything worth for the system. So they are somewhat neglected. So there's also no incentive for them to do better in a larger system. So they'll get lost in the, in the ocean of, you know, education system. But at the same time, the country is so large, there are good number of those teachers too, but their number is very, a large proportion may be small, but in a country like ours, however small proportion, the numbers are pretty high. My personal experiences, I don't want to sort of claim too much or boast too much compared to what HBC is doing. So, so far in a nice opinion through an education teacher training program that we started after this Pandit Madhavan earlier project started, we have trained more than 6000 school teachers and about 4-5 thousand college teachers. And, and in every time you always thought students or teachers are so passionate and interested in so much, you know, they always talk about their problems. Every workshop they talk about, we can't do this. You know, these are all only talking and it's okay. We are all interested, but we can't teach them. But you slowly merge them, you know, be on your own change. At least one student's life is, you know, good enough for the rest of our life kind of a motivation. Finally, most teachers end up signing back over. We implemented this pedagogical methods. There is some improvement. Some teach students are showing more interest than earlier. So we get a lot of responses and many of them come back again and again. But none of them had any certificate which is useful for their getting their API points in the UGC. All of these are three-day workshop. So, you know, okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Sachi. Sorry, we have a few more questions. But the process that has an important meeting. Yeah, I have a, sorry, you know, some weather genome sequencing meeting that have a national consortium of genome sequencing. I have to rush to that meeting. So in fact, this talk, I agreed a more than a month ago, but this meeting was fixed yesterday. No, unfortunately, less. I hope a discussion can happen through online and all the people can email you some of the questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's perfectly fine. And I'm also happy to come back again in another context or, you know, there is an opportunity. Yeah. Sure, sure. It's such a complex issue, I mean, which can't be resolved by our discussion or one discussion. We definitely have to revisit and hope this is a beginning at the same process, Sachi, that are for giving the talk and all of you for attending. So patient. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. You're very nice. So the talk will also be available on this channel in case if you want to share it with me. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Just three of us. That was. At the last time. And that. You about the country, which is on your way. Sorry.