 topic of the panel discussion is education, technology and state. Let me first introduce all the panelists. Before that, welcome Dr. Sahana, Mr. Guru Murti and Dr. G. N. Dr. Amit. So, Sahana Murti is a professor in the educational technology interdisciplinary program at IIT Bombay. Her research interest is in technology-enhanced learning of disciplinary practices which includes developing students' problems solving, design thinking and inquiry enhanced learning environments. Another area of focus is teacher use of educational technologies which has led to the design of models such as the learner-centric MOOC model which has formed the basis for several online and printed courses on SMYAM and IIT Bombay X platforms. More recently, she has been leading the ECTEC TULNA Initiative, a research practice between various stakeholders to address the quality education of ECTEC products in India. Before joining IIT Bombay, she was a post-doctoral researcher in physics education research at MIT USA and Rutgers University. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Mumbai, master's degree in physics from IIT Bombay and PhD in physics from Rutgers University. Our second panelist is Guru Murti Kasinatham. He is one of the founders of IIT Power Change. He has 32 years of experience in the development and corporate sectors. He leads projects in the area of education including in the research, demonstration projects, systemic teacher education reform and policy advocacy. His areas of expertise include ICT integration in school education, teacher education and pre-service teacher education. He also works in the areas of school leadership and free and open digital technologies. He was earlier with Azim Plainby Foundation where he was deputated to work in the policy planning unit in the Karnataka Education Department. He has been a visiting faculty at place Mumbai and Hyderabad for their education leadership and management and ICT and education courses. Our third panelist is Professor Nagarjun. So he is a retired faculty. He was a former he's a former faculty member here at HBCSE. He was a former professor at HBCSE. He designs and develops educational technologies for learning and mentoring in a collaborative participatory environment such as Chat Shala in contrast with Pat Shala. He's a principal investigator of the Knowledge.org project which designed and developed the infrastructure for NROER. NROER is a national repository for open educational resources and also Metastudio.org. His team contributed to the design and development of the platform for the Connected Learning Initiative in collaboration with Tess and MIT. He is an advocate of freedom to read, write and whisper in the digital world. He does research in the area of history and philosophy of science and biological roots of knowledge and this panel discussion will be moderated by Dr. Amit Dhakulkar. Dr. Amit is a post-doctoral research fellow within the UNESCO chair on multimodal learning and OER which is open educational resources in Northwest University South Africa and has a PhD in science education from HBCSE. The primary area of Amit's work is in science and mathematics education. In his PhD thesis he looked at aspects of graphic aces pertaining to graphs in the context of learning science and mathematics in school. He has also taught and developed several courses and modules in this area and have a special interest in history and philosophy of science relevant for education. The broader interest of Amit's, the broader interest area that he has in the context of technology and OER is the use of technology in education and its political pedagogical and sociological aspects. He has advocated the use of free and open source software and OER at various levels and it's currently doing research in the area of OER. So now I request Amit to take over and moderate the panel discussion. Thank you. Yeah, thank you Vikram for this introduction and it's great to connect with all of you again. I have known the panelists for some years now all three of them and I have been enriched in my own work from inputs from all of them. So the so the themes for this panel discussions are not new. I mean technology has been driver of educational change for a long time but with the present state of computers it makes an unprecedented connections to other aspects of our life as well and technology is often disruptive in nature as we have seen in various contexts and we are I think on the brink of a major change in our educational system or the change has already begun we are get to see the implications of it. So this panel discussion is trying to bring out these aspects of various aspects of technology and its implications while teaching learning processes in general and we will look at some of the aspects in detail in some of the themes of this panel discussion. And with particularly with COVID-19 it acted like a catalyst for all these changes. I mean so things we thought that would not be possible for next 5-10 years and suddenly we're at our doorstep because all the learning shifted to online mode in an overnight manner because all the schools and colleges were closed and so we I mean we are imposed with this kind of change drastically and this last one and a half years has given a sort of talented view of how the future might be with like only online learning or a large-scale implementation of it. So our panelists have worked in this area for a long time and in particularly in the Indian context and would like to get their views on various aspects and particularly noting the opportunities and challenges that are present in these themes. So where we have structured this panel discussion is that we have about five major themes that we'll be discussing and we'll give about 15 minutes for each theme and we'll take a break of about five minutes at the end of the hour and then we'll continue again with two remaining things and last 30 minutes have been kept for question and answers from the audience. So unless the audience has an urgent clarification type of question the questions will be answered at the end of the session. Okay so hope this is all right and particularly so first theme is the broader impact of technology in education and this is particularly very important to the global south which in which like infrastructure is not as good as it is supposed to be or it is not in place at all. So this is the larger theme for the first discussion or first theme for the discussion is impact of technology in education. I mean so what are the broader what is the broad strokes which would paint this impact. While there is a lot of potential for a revolutionary change quote-unquote but it has not been seen. So so my question to the panelists is that what is actually possible in this context of technology in education and what are the major challenges that we face in the Indian context. So perhaps we can start the discussion on this question that what is possible and what are the major challenges of technology in education in the Indian context and then we can take forward the other responses. So maybe Professor Sahana you can start with this and then we can take other opinions as well. Thank you. Okay thank you thank you very much Dr. Amit thanks for the ARM organizers also for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to interact and to be back at HPCSE. So regarding your question about what is possible there is a lot of hype we know all that there's also a lot of potential benefit there's also some vilification so that the you know the stage is very broad but the way we think of it in our department because our department is about 10 years old it's called educational technology it's situated within IIT Bombay and there's a lot of focus the primary focus is on learning via technology so it's always in that order. So I would like to talk about two things here one is that when we conceive of any technology enhanced learning project we think of you know what exactly we are targeting and sometimes these go by this goes by the name of technology enhanced learning metrics and we sort of have four broad categories the first one and these go in the order of easy to recognize easy to measure to something that's really challenging to recognize and challenging to measure. So the first one is efficiency technology we all know that's sort of the easiest thing technology can do for us it can speed up processes it can save resources it can do those kind of issues. So that is what a lot of things in general in the overall in the world the technology is doing this is something we don't focus too much in our department in terms of the R&D. The next thing is the accessibility and this is sort of important accessibility can be in terms of scaling and numbers again that's something which is easy to identify and easy to measure or technology can help reach out newer geographical regions technology can help out reach out to different populations and so on. The third one is what is called attractiveness and this bucket is about engagement of learners. You know how much can we get them to spend more time on something that's meaningful through technology and it's not just the jazz and you know the the hype that comes with it but there are certain things technology can do to engage it could be could be motion graphics that's sort of the most obvious thing but it could also be things more richer and more meaningful for the content. So attractiveness is essentially learner engagement getting them to pay more attention and the last one actually has the name effectiveness which is sort of a catch all that's about actual learning you know it's the hardest to measure hardest to identify. So when we think of technology and health learning we sort of design when we design it's very hard and it's not at all a good idea to design for all four together. So the people who are doing research and development in this area it's very important to have clarity on which one of these we are targeting and one advice that I got a long time ago is that choose one as your primary and at most one as your secondary don't try to attempt all four and that's what we tell our students also. So maybe we can go around the table I do want to talk of one more new initiative that Vikram mentioned called Etik Thunna but maybe I'll come back after the other panelists have responded. Yeah sure thanks thanks Professor Sahana for that thing. Guru would you want to pitch in for this question? I can't hear Guru. Yeah it is very low actually I mean the volume is very low if you could amp up it a bit it might be useful. Is it better now Amit? Yeah definitely better than what yeah yeah it's better now. I'm little conscious because people have complained that my volume is very high so and that hurts people here so I try to keep it low if I'm audible now I'll start. First of all thank you so much Tomewavavas Pain Center for having me on this panel and I'm so looking forward to listening to Dr. Sahana who I have not met and equally to Jien who's a old friend and co-conspirator if I may say so. I'm happy to be here with all of you and sorry once again for not being able to turn my camera on due to some hardware glitch. In terms of larger potential and challenges I would like to take one step back and say that the purpose of any technology is to make life better I mean that's a definition of technology and education technology has to be situated within that so and education technology by and large we usually talk of only computers or internet but any technology even you know a very simple thing like a duster in a classroom has a very important role to play because that's only way the person teaching can keep writing again and again and that's the purpose of the duster so every technology's purpose is that it has to help and simplify and make the job of learning easier. When it comes to education technology one of the challenges that we have is that it seems to be able to do so many things so it seems to be able to enable content to come into the teaching learning processes much easier we can go to the net we can access materials and that you know is an important element of teaching it also seems to enable pedagogy to be much better by allowing teachers to bring in videos and you know in the previous session we were looking at astronomy and of course you can bring astronomy into the classroom using tools like stellarium so there is a lot that one can do in content and pedagogy and that is what you know dr punya misra has conceptualized as the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework which I invert all the people in the audience if you're not heard of the framework that's a very useful framework to look at how technology can be useful in teaching learning it's called the tpck framework technological pedagogical content knowledge framework so that is if you look at the area of teaching learning per se but when you say education education is much more than teaching learning and the problem that we have as far as technology is concerned is that the sector and that's not only the tech sector the entire tech sector is very much driven by large corporations and large corporations dictate what the discourse is what we will understand as what technology can do and obviously these large corporations are only primarily concerned with their commercial interests so unfortunately a lot of the hype that we hear comes from a tech corporation's desire to have more and more users more and more consumers more and more customers for that product and that can take away from the possibilities that technology can actually be used so then what can it be used for I would like to say in a broader sense technology has to help achieve the original goals of education so what are the goals of education empower learners empower teachers decentralized power structures so in India for example we have an extremely centralized bureaucratic hierarchical system can technology be used to actually empower teachers and learners can technology be used to empower disempower bureaucrats so disempowerment of bureaucrats is extremely important because that's how we can empower the grassroots can it help in decentralization can it help resist the privatization of education that we see happening actually it's the contrary you know technology is helping privatization of education greatly but we need to resist that so I see that there are possibilities but there are even bigger challenges and dangers that we need to be aware of we need to our educators at I think too often we are enamored by technology and we forget the basic principle of education which is to empower learners and teachers if you keep that in mind then I think we will be guided in how we can go about using technology this is what I would like to say as my initial comments I'll comment later thank you Amit thanks guru for that comment Jayan would you like to pitch in and this question so you see there are I mean the question is mostly posed as what is possible and so if we can't answer this question without saying what was difficult earlier or what was impossible earlier which has become possible now you know one important consideration that we need to keep in mind is that this is the specific technology that we're talking about is in general media you know we were already using media even before the technology came in which could mean the books the language and whatever we are using inside the classroom like you know you know the blackboard or the projector and things like that so the specific change that happened is the nature of this media and as a result some important things are possible you know cognitively and as Amit mentioned the this particular media has a very disruptive role in the society and for example the need for example to have the old model of classrooms you know the architectural plan of the school or a college and a classroom with one person speaking and the rest of the people listening and the way how these structures actually have been put together is being challenged by this medium and that is one most important change that we have to see within the structure of how the practice of education itself actually has to be done because now for example you know in the olden times when as soon as the teacher comes you know the first thing that the teacher requests everybody in the classroom is to remain silent and now if you really use this new technology you really don't have to ask anybody to remain silent because there are alternative ways in which people can continue to communicate with each other whether it is related to what's happening in the class or otherwise so this is a very interesting possibilities because and in many of the interventions that we invented are used in our own interventions actually used this particular model quite efficiently the point is that it's possible to communicate and why it's so important is because that's the contrast that I usually draw using the pun of part shala and chat shala is that you know if conversation is one of the core practices that makes education possible and earlier because of the media limitations we were not able to encourage conversation in the classroom but today we not only are able to encourage conversation whether it's in the classroom or outside the classroom because the classroom doesn't have to be synchronous that means the teacher and the students do not have to be at the same time they can be distributed asynchronously and across the time so this is a major possibility which was not which is very difficult to implement in the in the world technology this particular feature itself alone has enormous ability to disrupt the existing things but unfortunately as you know I think Sahan already mentioned this point about the access to this new media so access to new media in particularly in Indian context is I can say almost almost nothing except in some of the expensive schools the device accessed in every children's hand is impossible like you know in the olden times when we always said that you know every student must have a notebook under pencil or a pen or a slate in his hand to say that he's a learner and if you really want to transform that into the current model it is important to have this new slate whether you call it a tablet or a netbook or a laptop or whatever it is that kind of an access is a very important thing to talk about and that is not there and as a result what we saw is an abuse of the education technology rather than the use of this education technology in the classrooms for example the most prominent abuse was what I sometimes call it as you know the you know PPT being used because that is what you call it as a presentation device and as you can see this particular model is the convenience of the teacher but not something that actually enhances pedagogy we have no evidence that the PPT enhances learning but still you know it has been pushed into every classroom and every teacher training included training them on a very teacher-oriented administration-oriented technology instead of using child-centered technologies being used so these are some of the problems that we see that is without understanding the affordances of the new technology if you start using them in the classroom what are the new possibilities what are the new affordances that the technology can actually give you I think it will cause more harm than good in the future. Thanks for that input so the related to what you said actually I would like to continue this conversation in relation to collect your peer learning that is possible in the realm of with the help of technology because that is one area that earlier was not possible because communication between peers or community members was limited to physical access but now we have technologies with which you can communicate with people across the world and so how does it so what kind of future do you see in the collective or peer learning aspects of technology? Maybe Sana would you like to go first for this? No, let JN or Guru go ahead. JN please would you add something to this line? Yeah see the peer learning happens when as I mentioned earlier when communication is possible and as you can see now with one of the major themes of modern pedagogy is collaboration trying to do things together, learn together and also particularly in the again I wanted to refer to the older architecture the older architecture was to keep all the people of the same age in one class and then you expect to have peer learning to happen but some of the models actually suggest that it is very important to have vertical kind of structuring of the classrooms in the sense of multiple age groups in a similar inquiry you know the engagement needs to have people with different learning abilities and that actually offers when communication and collaboration is enforced or being part of the design then a lot of communication happens between them and this is one of the lessons that we learned is to the advantage of for example having a school student interact with a college student for example I would call it as a very important context of peer learning because there's a lot that college students learn while answering the questions of the school students etc and I mean because you know and also it also disrupts of course the one-sided communication that used to happen from teacher to one to many kind of things rather than you know many to many kind of conversations and I want to add one more point before I stop talking about on this issue is that the new technology actually allows you to have an archive of all the conversations that happen of all the you know pictures or images or videos etc that are actually possible are shared across times and this is actually a very important aspect even in peer learning and people learn at different phases and therefore this is a very important dimension that is added and of course peer-to-peer learning is very difficult in a regular classroom because it will be very very noisy and we can eliminate that noise and encourage peer learning in this modern technology because of alternate ways in which communication can happen. Thanks Jien. Guru would you like to pitch in for this particular aspect? Yeah there are two points I want to make I mean Jien has spoken a lot not so much today about the way technology should be designed so that the communication is more decentralized and peer-to-peer and I think he has several times also shown architectures of networks which will permit and encourage that kind of a you know peer and peer networking rather than it being the conventional hub and spoke mode that we always think of when we think of technology. Traditionally when we think of technology we think hub and spoke and that's why there is another database in Delhi and everybody has to submit their information to the single database but we don't need to think of technology as only supporting centralization which is the problem but it can actually support the non-hierarchical or the peer networks. One thing I want to add to what Jien said is see one of the problems with technology and we know about it in the social media space even more than any other spaces what we call as creation of eco chambers. Eco chambers is basically everybody is talking only to the people who agree with them who believe in the same things that they believe in and these eco chambers are greatly responsible for increasing stratification of society we are in a paradoxical situation I see new digital technologies actually enable better communication possibilities then society should be more coherent than it was before but we actually see in front of our rise that WhatsApp or all these social media platforms are greatly pushing for more and more stratification more and more you know eco chambers of people so my thought would be how can we enable and that is also visible in children who go to schools so we have a very stratified school system in India we have the elite government schools they can do the alias and our devils we have the elite private schools and we have schools across the entire social spectrum how can we get children to talk to one another across these spectrums how can like for me if you take my background as an upper caste upper class you know male I grew up with particular perspectives in my schooling environment there are very few Dalits there were no Adivasis there were very few people from other religions in the group that I was learning together with how can technology break through these kind of social cultural barriers that exist amongst people in society and definitely amongst children and learners also I think that kind of a learning will be very different from only cognitive learning that we focus on today so I would look at technology as enabling reduction in the social stratification that is happening I'm of course I'm I'm dealing because that's not what is happening but this is what I would like to see happen thanks Guru for that thing Sahana please go ahead yeah Amit I actually want to pick up the other question you had in this impact of technology in education that how can we distinguish exaggeration from the actual substance and I'd also try to touch up on some of the points that Guru and G.L. made so we all know that this is actually a big problem that if we talk of technology and ethics one of the key issues is that there is inadequate and varying understanding of what constitutes quality in educational technology I'm sure this is true in other technologies also I'll focus on ethics now and when people say good often we see these operations like Guru earlier mentioned you know they're the ones who are driving the adoption we know that is an issue there are lack of standards for quality both in terms of evaluation which means it needs to adopt decision-making either by parents or schools or by state governments which do large-scale adoption the lack of standards especially in the Indian context also lead to the design of products you know with poor deliberation with inconsistent logic without sufficient attention to learners and teachers let's be these challenges are some things that have existed we're all fairly familiar and there's this big ecosystem which have researchers saying that look this is what is good design then we have governments having their own set of standards then we have the companies we have the decision makers so about a year and a half ago there was a new initiative I've been part of a new initiative if I may just present my screen for a so this is actually a RPP research practice partnership I would actually say RPP research practice policy partnership between IIT Bombay so a group of faculty and students and some staff members also a couple of PhD students from our department we are involved and Central Square Foundation is an NGO which is involved and state governments are involved I apologize for the noise by the way I live in this campus with lots of wildlife both inside and outside so if audio is a problem just let me know so it's a partnership and the idea is to first establish quality standards then to evaluate actual products actual epic products and to empower the decision makers so the philosophy that we came here came up with is that look we need standards to no we which are trusted by all these stakeholders in the ecosystem we have to encourage demand of high quality by the decision makers both individual and government decision makers because governments what happens is G and you brought up this issue of access right they the government state governments are putting out RFPs for for example the most recently that have been involved with Haryana government is planning to give out devices to some 5000 government schools but they don't know what content to put in it and that's where the whole problem starts people may have devices but it's not being used effectively like what we are all saying we also need to seek buying from the product supplies itself to generate high quality products so what this project is aiming to do is one of the things the first thing that our group is doing is to design standards and we've come up with three different constructs content quality pedagogical alignment and technology and design so each of these for example if we look at what is in it it has different subconstructs of criteria and these standards now there are different granularities at which we're within this this is at a high level which can be used by anybody who's doing procurement it's also we have a set of very detailed rubrics internally where our evaluation team is getting product companies to sign on to be evaluated and we come up with a report which is going to be put up in a public portal so the reason I just I'm just going to stop sharing the reason I wanted to just bring this up is that there have there are beginning there's beginning to be efforts and the some of the state governments have agreed to use such standards in their procurement processes some product companies right now we have about 10 odd product companies on board saying that yeah we will let you evaluate our product design and put up the evaluation report in public so the evaluation reports these will be launched in about two months time or so so at least what we hope is that there'll be more of a conversation between all these players in the educational and educational technology ecosystem to try to go towards some understanding of quality and try to meet those standards yeah thank you Sahana for showing us that new project that you're working on so two of the take home points for this particular thing that I mean I would like to sort of summarize or bring forth one is that what you just showed us that there has to be some standardization in terms of the quality of the content because as you know also mentioned that just presenting PowerPoint slides is not actually using the technology to its fullest extent or it's like rather abuse of it so this is a very important idea to standardize or to create a framework in which the tech products can be evaluated and the other aspect that both JN and Guru touched upon is a possibility of peer learning or collective learning in which age is not a bar or geographical location is not a bar and that I think is actually a way of implementing the idea of zone of proximal development at a very large scale because you will have learners at different potentials and a lot of vertical learning can happen in that regard so with this note I think we can move on to our next theme of discussion which is yeah would you like to add something yeah one very short response yeah see I think content is not something which has a standalone you know particularly in talk about school education content is outside of the teaching process that somebody will make some good quality content and then be provided to the teachers I think that's a very problematic perspective on education itself if we have our perspective on content cannot be a commercial provider you know whatever be the so-called quality of the content we have to necessarily think of content as a participatory teacher created process within that quality standards have to come there has to be curation and that curation is best done by teachers communities so I think the more we keep ed tech vendors out of the whole education technology space there is some dim chance that technology can be useful the minute commercial interests are allowed to come in it will be the death knell of education I think I've absolutely after all you know 15 years of working in this space I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that commercial considerations, proprietary considerations in terms of content production and content supply is very much the wrong direction to take but quality benchmarks frameworks all that is important the process of engaging with one another on content issues is what will make teachers communities of learning flourished so we need to think of content from that point of view as a by-product of teachers conversations with one another and with students rather than as some externally mediated artifact yeah thank you Mick can I just add one point to that they're responding to you yeah yeah please yeah so a guru I completely agree with you and especially that education is a public good I think we all are on you know we all have that stand at the same time if you take technology in any other sector there is a coexistence between the public good between what private players do between so there is a coexistence and I don't think we can wish it away the next best thing we can do is to see how the coexistence can be healthy towards the goal of you know strong learning strong teaching teachers must be a part of it so part of the standards that we are developing is along is you know what how can teachers be empowered how can they be how can they play a role it can start with you know what sort of support can be there it can bring them more central into it so I don't think we are sort of saying that look we are only looking at the private players but I don't at the same time I don't think that private players can entirely be sort of you know waved away in this whole conversation yeah I think some aspects of this will also cover in the copy left theme of our discussion because I mean there is a growing consensus that all educational material should be in the open space or openly licensed and that is where like even if it is produced by commercial interest but if it is openly licensed we can still make some progress in that regard we'll come back to that in the next theme next to next theme in our discussion so let us now switch to the second theme of today which is the teacher education so as all of you have been working with teachers in some aspects so teachers are very crucial to like whatever policies or whatever plans we have to get implemented at the grassroots level and the quality of any education system cannot go beyond the quality of its teachers and that's that's like the bottleneck that we are we have been facing for so long so in this I would like to ask you I mean how has the teacher education been impacted by use of technology and what how do we prepare our teachers for such technocentric quote unquote system of education in which like you use technology also not only for let's say the classroom management but also to teach subject matter per se so this I would like some insights into this uh who'd like to go first yeah please so I think that you know I've had this whole debate in my own mind as to how does the teacher and the technology how do these two relate to each other and always the danger that exists that digital technologies particularly can be used to disempower teachers I mentioned in my initial remarks also so I would think that the way we have to visualize digital technology is how can it empower the teacher and then everything we design about technology should answer only that one question even this new thing that we're calling as personalized learning and artificial intelligence even when we are exploring those issues we need to really think can I use artificial intelligence can I use big data can I use machine learning algorithms in way that the teacher is empowered and the reason I'm saying is that I'm and I'm particularly focusing on school education I'm not an expert at all in higher education so I will not comment on that but having worked for a long period in school education I can say that the teacher-child relationship is the most important part of teaching learning because teaching learning in school education is not simply about imbibing some complex content and then being able to regurgitate it in the exam it is really conceptual understanding that conceptual understanding requires a good healthy relationship between the teacher and the learners and it may not be again up and spoke it has to be collaborative classroom environment and to the extent digital technologies can be used by the teacher completely in a free and open manner so it should be open resources like you mentioned in terms of content it has to be free software in the terms of the digital tools that are used because only these will provide empowerment to the teacher if it's proprietary content or proprietary software both will not allow the teacher full freedom in deciding how exactly to frame a lesson how exactly to frame a conversation between the teacher and the learner if we are able to stick to these two principles that it has to be free and open and it has to empower then we can find that the teacher will explore and experiment and figure out ways of reaching out to learners because there is no one answer what will work in Beether will not work in Bangalore and what will work in Bangalore will not work in Bombay so we cannot think that there will be some standard ways by which technology can support teacher empowerment of course we need to build the teacher's abilities to not only use technology lot of the conversation that we have is seeing the teacher as a user of technology and tech savvy so the tech savvy means teacher can use applications but I think the real challenge and what we need to do apart from building teachers ability to use applications teacher's critical perspective on technology is extremely important and we can do that in our own work in 84 change we always focus on critical perspective on technology along with the use of technology because that is what will really help the teacher understand that technology can help her technology can harm her once these basic principles are clear I think there are enough number of opportunities in the digital world for the teacher to explore experience and then use them for the teaching learning processes I will give a slightly broad answer but I think I would like to stay at that level okay thanks guru jen would you like to go ahead next see this is a very complex subject for a lot of reasons as I said first of all that you see teacher student is a is a traditional concept and now after intervening with the modern media of course it's not going to be there anytime soon in India but then one most important thing that's going to happen is that education will happen in a space of a community of practice when I'm using the community of practice in a wider sense that it doesn't just include only the teacher it includes the teachers it includes the fellow students it includes the parents it includes the brothers and sisters it includes the society at large because that is the affordance of this new technology that offers that it's possible for you to make the boundaries of the school porous so to speak and that is that is one of the important things and therefore I mean I do think that you need an agency I don't want to call that agent a teacher because you know teacher has the traditional connotation I would better use some kind of a catalyst for enabling engagement promoting learning and I mean I'm just using these terms a little carefully so because you know engagement is crucial now what are the ways in which the engagement can happen and I know how do you seek the attention of the the people around and also to make sure that why is that the other people have attention on engagement elsewhere and so it is to understand that all students do not need the same thing but I mean when we have been talking about diversity you know celebrating diversity is an important thing and we also have to celebrate epistemic diversity different people have different skills and different appreciations have to be done so you know the moment we talk about in the traditional teacher education models you know we are only talking about how do you support the educational infrastructure so teacher is shown as someone who is going to support the educational infrastructure that means who is going to sustain the existing infrastructure he is supposed to complete the curriculum complete the syllabus you know deliver the content and give them the grades you know graduate them you know assess them you know this is the way how we have been traditionally talking about this whole thing and I have a feeling that all this is going to take time as the new media is going to disrupt this whole space and and then it might also involve new definitions new models of how schools colleges and you know all these things actually have to come about certainly think that you know you know some some agent will have to be authentic and given more power to provide this this you know very important education but I am a little thoughtful that you know if you only empower the teacher then I have this problem in my mind I mean I'm just responding to also Guru to look at it a little more critically saying that it might actually lead to sustaining an existing I mean you're also sustaining the problems that we are facing with as well to continue to keep up the same way and so I have a lot of doubts on just making teacher as more powerful and I would think that the learner should become learning should become more and more authentic and for that I really don't know what it takes who is required to do this I would just say that we have to catalyze that process the whole system should be catalyzing the learning and not necessarily because the learning doesn't happen unless an engagement is there so I want to look for an engager and not a teacher I just want to use a different word just for the sake of making it critical okay thanks Jen for that input Sahana please go ahead yeah Jen so thanks for bringing up this point about you know technology is sort of amplifying certain problems that we see all the time and rather than changing it forget the drastic change but it's actually amplifying the the detrimental parts of some traditional aspects of the education so we saw this a lot in the last one year right in COVID time suddenly everybody on Mars had to become skillful at using using as in just the usage of the tools we are not talking of you know using the affordances more strongly more powerfully we are not talking of bringing learners on board we are not talking of equality and justice and all it just sort of became that so we heard a lot of stories there so I just want to share a case with you that came from one of the interviews of one of my students one of my PhD students who's working with the government school teachers in Kerala and then you know I don't have answers but I want to share the case and pose a question at the end so what my student is trying to do is to see to try to study in what way teachers are using these technologies now that we're sort of on the edge of moving past COVID it's still there but it isn't a crisis it's at least perceptions are not that it's a crisis like it was say here and three months ago so he has been doing long interviews and in one of the interviews there was a teacher she's around in her mid 20s and what she said is that look I'm kind of halfway okay in using tools because I have a mobile and all that but I'm not very comfortable and what I started doing what I found is that my students are a lot more she teaches fifth and sixth and seventh grade they're a lot more adaptive using these technologies so in one of the classes you know there was a lot of chatter there was some disruption so I just paused and asked them can you tell me how to use that and that sort of changed the discourse in her classroom and this was at that point it was an online class I mean like it was even today so I think this this initiative is from something like February of this year or so or maybe even much maybe even a month ago I don't exactly remember which interview this is so once she did that her students started teaching her how to use the technology much better where they could participate in the discussion it soon turned to the learning so the conversations flowed from how to use the technology to the actual content that they were discussing and the learners the students the students became co-creators of the knowledge the content that they were discussing so when the teacher was reflecting on all this she said that look technology really relax a lot more in a classroom I'm supposed to be the authority I'm supposed to know everything I can't tell the students that look I don't know how to do this and I can't let them speak as much but because we were online and because you know it's something new I was initially not very comfortable but I was okay asking them for help but now I realize that look we are all in the same thing so this was actually a very interesting case for us because this is sort of what we want the teaching learning situation to be and this was one case where we saw that technology was an enabler of bringing about dismantling the hierarchies that we traditionally see between the teachers and the learners what we don't know and we're trying to ponder is you know how can we how can we foster this sort of a usage of technology rather than perpetuating the more traditional hierarchical systems thanks Sahana for that that sharing that episode so I mean one of the things that is coming forth is the open educational practices which which are possible only with open educational resources and in that regard I mean there is some interesting work being done across the world to dismantle this hierarchies that you mentioned and you and also mentioned that like I mean it's the traditional system of teacher versus student in a classroom space that that actually creates a lot of problems so there are efforts which use open educational resources and the freedoms that come with them to remix or to reuse or to recreate the learning material that is there so in this regard I mean I'll just like to mention the idea of what is called as a renewable assessment or renewable assignment so traditionally I mean any assignment that you are giving to students is usually thrown out after it is assessed like you'll have question papers which are written by students and then after they're evaluated they're just thrown out so this idea of renewable assessments actually make sure that it contributes something back to the real world and that I think has a good potential to engage both teachers as well as learners in this regard and it also blurs the boundaries between I mean who is a teacher and who is a learner in that sense so thanks for these inputs so we can either take a five minute break right now or we'll take a break maybe after the next session so I think and some of the questions that that are in the other themes are already being sort of pre-emptied in some of these discussions particularly all of you have touched upon the idea of access that access is essential so I think we can subsume that theme under the other questions that will be answering so next so should we take a five minute break and we'll connect back again in five minutes and then we continue with this discussion is that okay hello I'm okay either way it's fine whether you want to continue or you want to yeah so we'll take a five minutes break and right now it is 12.01 so maybe we can connect back at around 12.05 and then we'll continue with this discussion to the end yeah one small request why it will be from the break if Ravi is on this call he had a he posed a point on the chat if he wants to just talk about it if he is free in the break if he doesn't want if he doesn't mind missing his break can he share his thoughts I would like to listen to him I agree it's Ravi here I mean I kind of agree with you I think there's work to be done in terms of evolving regulations etc I don't know much about that so that's why I asked the question and in the interest of people taking their break maybe I'll come back and put some other things which I had for GN in the chat after the break yeah thanks thanks hello everyone welcome back I hope all of you are still here so we'll begin the next theme of our discussion and which is regarding copy lab and open educational resources so for the last decade and a half let's say starting from launch of MIT's open course where in around 2006 open educational resources have been increasing in quality and as well as quantity from across the world and particularly for global south they actually present a very good opportunity to level the playing field in a way because the access is sort of provided to all people who have access to devices I mean that being the catch there but and this allows for a completely different approach to creation and dissemination of learning resources and like its impact has been like throughout last last decade I mean it has been felt very prominently because let's say Wikipedia is a form of open educational resource which would not have been possible earlier because of the copyright restrictions so and so one of the major overarching questions that I want to ask is that what is the impact of copy left movement in terms of open educational resources or open educational practices and free and open source software will have in the coming decade or so we already have some impact of it but let's see what the future holds for us and what are the major challenges in this in the Indian context and also related questions are about privacy and freedom which Guru has already touched upon several times earlier and so how do we sort of reconcile with the rise of technology in all aspects of our life and what sort of implications are there for democratization of education so let us begin this session Guru would you like to go ahead first I've spoken a lot on this maybe I'll come in last okay sure Jane perhaps you can add okay so let me see you know the the issue is there are multiple issues out here you know copy left being one of the methods of granting freedom you know to make sure that the resources are accessible to to everyone and you know the lot of changes have happened you know because of this particular character in fact I actually also want to sort of elliptically sort of take the opportunity to also respond to one of the question which you know asked by chaos in the chat about you know how professions are changing I for example see a very important example so as you know that about 10 years after copy left became popular that is the general public license that was 1984 and after 10 about 10 15 years we saw that that has now been extended from software I mean it's being used in software initially to you know knowledge that is the documents that we create so which essentially would mean that the various you know technical documents textbooks and most importantly the encyclopedia the Wikipedia being rewritten now most important question that we have to ask is this particular question so who wrote Wikipedia so how many teachers wrote Wikipedia how many professors wrote Wikipedia you know when the media is accessible to the public and and and there is a public space where people can negotiate with what is right what is wrong and how to make it and there is a wonderful historical technology being used to document what happened at what time what who did what at what time and and and that is an important effort and that has actually transformed the profession the traditional professions because earlier Britannica encyclopedia for example was written mostly by university professors or the people who are known to be the technically expert people but today I don't think that is happening in fact there is a there's a bank manager who writes about natural history because he happened to be a bank manager but his interest in his heart is in natural history so he continues to write the excellent Wikipedia pages on natural history but while his profession is something else and and and there are engineers who write about design and art and and there are poets who are interested in science and things like that so and and this is what I'm actually trying to say that we have to there is a lot of possibilities of restructuring that happens and and and so that is one of the important potentials that we see when making knowledge everybody has a freedom to make knowledge everybody has freedom to repair what is already made everybody has freedom to correct what is already written everybody has freedom to you know recreate the resources and also share the resources and also grant the same freedom to everybody else and that is the essence of copy left and and copy left has done this magic to this whole world and and and of course the whole idea of creating open educational resources is based on the premise of you know giving access to all access to all doesn't only mean that somebody is producing and it is granted to other people that making everybody a producer and that is the key point here and when everybody is a producer and when students are writing some document which the teacher is referring to and and that kind of instances also are known today though not very well documented but a lot of research is going on in those areas and most importantly for example most of the software that is available today on GitLab and GitHub and all these places is actually being used by university professors and most of it is actually written by the students and sometimes some of them are not even formal students so that is where I see that the there's a changing relationship the new professions are being made and unmade and that's going to happen and and and this is not possible without a disruptive copy left idea or disruptive licensing model whether it is public domain or copy left or MIT license or whatever license that is there it is you know inviting everybody to be a producer is going to have a very very different impact and that is one of the reasons why I think that the traditional professions are likely to change. Thanks Jien. Sanna would you like to say something about this? Sure so actually it's more of a couple of questions for the other experts on the panel because I'm not such an expert but you asked about challenges Samet right especially in the Indian context. So the way Jien has talked about copy left it's in a very broad sense where everybody is a producer but Amit you also talked about you know things like MIT OCW or other resources which have which are accessible to everybody in terms of the user we can go and consume it but we are not producers of it. So and that's sort of the more common way of thinking about OERs today at least in our country you know people are more you know they're more likely to go and use something for their teachers or their learners rather than produce it of course we do have the producers but as a teacher you know how often or how comfortable let's say how often would you assign your students to go and use something in Wikipedia versus MIT OCW but there is some sort of a difference today we still maintain in these two. So given this one of the challenges is how do I know as a common person which wants to select how it's again the issue of not one is the issue of quality of course but also of the issue of what is a better fit for me and the second question may be related is that of contextualization that traditionally a lot of the content production has been done by people who are in the elite elite groups could be the colonizers versus the colonized it could be the elite institutions versus the more you know people who are more who are not in such places and so on. So there has been a hierarchy here so now if I say that look it's good I know it's good and I want to use it but it's not suitable I need to contextualize it for my own group my own students what can be done what sort of support can be given for such contextualization I just want to you know pose these two questions as challenges. Yeah thanks for that so actually the quality aspect is one of the major concern for use of OERs I mean there has been substantial research in this area that I mean teachers or educators do not trust quality of the resources which have been created by other educators and which have been released as OER and there is some fruit to it also because many of the OERs really don't have a quality I mean are not polished as let's say compared to a proprietary resource that is released. Other aspect is about the indigenous knowledge system so I mean that's something that's a dimension that is usually forgotten in the traditional educational system that indigenous knowledge systems do not have a presence as such and finally the point that you also touched out of the contextualization that for example it's not only the transition to local languages but also examples which are relevant to the learners in their context that are required so Guru perhaps you could pitch in for these these two questions at Sahanas. Yeah I think there are we can look at it in two ways one is a pedagogical perspective and one is an economic perspective if you look at it from a this whole idea of content from a pedagogical perspective I think we have to agree that quality is not an absolute construct at all and I think this is sometimes we lose sight of it especially in the in the case of content and we think this is quality content and that is not quality content I don't think there is anything like that because absolutely it is contextual so when you are talking about even indigenous knowledge or you're talking about different conditions of learners and different conditions of learning the issue is not whether a content is quality or not and therefore this idea of proprietary good content versus bad OER content I think to my mind that debate is not a very useful debate we should see we should ask ourselves are we preparing every teacher to be able to pick up all the content that is not all pick up the content that's available and then customize it for what she wants we already talked about contextualization all content has to be contextualized for it I have taught in classrooms and I know that every time I go to a classroom I'm contextualizing it for that particular group of children I'm going to be working with so there is no absolute content that I simply keep using again and again once we accept that either teachers abilities are to be built to be able to curate to be able to access to be able to modify it to be able to revise to be able to contextualize to be able to change the language of to acculturize if you're accepting that the goal of education has to be teacher empowerment to use the content that is available and also shape it for the use that she wants to put to then quality of content is irrelevant concept and this purposely pushing it to an extreme to say that that's not a debate the debate is can we empower our teachers so that's a pedagogical perspective the economic perspective is that when the minute we get into a situation where we have non copy left content or we have proprietary content then we see very typically the nexus of the bureaucrat and the corporation and we see it everywhere it's very much so in the digital space also that there's a nexus but the bureaucrat is captured by the corporations to push their own agenda and that is can only harm the cost of education so but that means we have an economic challenges how do you incentivize production the argument is that proprietary models incentivize production by giving a return to the producer open models do not incentivize the producer I don't know whether this argument is very true because as I said earlier if content is seen as a byproduct of teachers conversations teachers and teacher educators teachers and students conversations then the economic model is not so crucial but it is possible that we need to look at new policy environments which we are able to incentivize even collaborative copy left creation of content it may be possible to look at it for example in the medicine space I know that people are looking at pharmacy R&D to go on open models and those models are to be explored the idea of cooperatives is an old idea in you know in the production space corporations is one method of production cooperatives are another and in areas like milk production or many other areas cooperatives have been successful maybe in the whole area of digital content we need to look at cooperatives and how we can incentivize cooperatives the other way of looking at cooperatives in this case maybe simply communities of practice communities of learning and those models are what policy needs to push rather than proprietary models under the guise of quality thanks guru for that insight jean would you like to answer this question actually i'm enthusiastically waiting for an opportunity to participate in this dialogue because see this is the crux of the matter you know what is it that we want to have quality of like sahana asked this question about do teachers know what is or the students know what to select and what not to select now the my question is how do you achieve that ability if you are not a producer yourself in fact all the people who judge content for others are actually the people who are producing are writing content for others now if you don't want teachers to do that but if you only want them to consume the content that you know experts like us write then we are actually not solving the problem we're actually creating a problem so i would like to look and shift the quality aspect from content to culture so let us ask this question of how do we evaluate the cultural aspects of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination and engaging with various artifacts of knowledge and if we talk about assessing the content we are in a wrong place it is better that we talk about for example something like okay what is the evidence that this particular proposition that is written in the text is actually correct now can we talk about the processes of validating knowledge as the syllabus of education rather than you know accepting what is written by experts as accurate so essentially what i'm talking about is processes of knowledge dynamics should be the place and that is what we need to standardize and that is what we need to agree upon and negotiate and work with rather than talk about you know content being you know good quality content and bad quality content we have to talk about best practices and you know worst practices rather than good quality content and bad quality content and in fact it has been a problem with the scholasticism history of humanism the rise of humanism and all that have questioned exactly that and then gave power to the abilities of every human being to learn and that is part of our universal human rights today that we want to accept every human being as a capacity to learn which essentially means that they also are able to construct knowledge on their own they're also able to construct knowledge essentially also means that they're also able to judge knowledge on their own so that is the reason why i want to play this political role and say that let us shift our focus from content to culture thanks jen for that so one of the questions that perhaps we can also ask is at i mean so this because i want to look at the future let's say in coming 10 years so the essential characteristic is also about contextualization as sahana pointed so and contextualization inherently also presupposes decentralization of certain aspects because without decentralization you cannot do contextualization for example let's take textbooks that are used in the schools now textbooks are produced centrally by some agency and it may be relevant for certain section of population but for other sections it is not relevant at all so i mean that that aspect one can definitely work through with the copy with the ors for example so that aspect can be reworked the textbooks can be reworked but the agency has to be there as guru also pointed out that agency to change things agency to do things in a certain manner which is which does not require a bureaucratic intervention at a higher level so that empowerment has to come with because without that i mean even having OERs is not going to change much on the ground level so thanks for this i so sahana i hope that your questions have been answered by jen and guru so let us or would you like to add any add on question to what let's go ahead let's go ahead okay yeah thank you very much so the next theme is about machine learning and AI and so i would like to put it in as a algorithmic kind of approach to our living because behind these there are certain algorithms which run and which make the decision for you and in many cases these algorithms are not known i mean they are like black boxes you put something in and you get something output and it's justified because it's done by a algorithm or by a computer and one of the so i mean and this is going to have going forward this is going to have a impact on how we teach and learn or how the transaction in the classroom or in the any any learning spaces happens of course i mean there are certain aspects of which which might be beneficial like personalized learning as it is called which is a one of the hype words and other aspects are also about pertaining to a certain let's say curiosities of the learner so these can be made or used to justify their existence but when there are some concerns also that like if it is all driven by algorithms then i mean what are the potential pitfalls in this approach so i mean the the larger question that i would like to ask the panel is that how will this technology impact education in the next decade and what are the challenges and particularly in reference to ethics and biases of AI or the algorithms rather i mean AI and machine learning are just two terms but the basic idea is that they are all algorithm based and the algorithms are written by some people and who have their own biases or their own world perspectives which sort of unknowingly would be part of the algorithms as well and not only the challenges but what are the major opportunities with this approach which might be beneficial for the overall teaching learning processes so Sahana would you like to go ahead first okay thanks yeah so this is a very important question because it's there everywhere today i just want to make two points both are based on what others have said one is a talk i heard very recently by professor Jayan Tharitsa who's a computer scientist in IISC and a key takeaway for me from the talk he also mentioned this and you know that that's something which was important for me was AI and ML should support the domain expertise they should not lead it nor should there be a substitute well yes there are some advantages there are certain things that AI and ML can do for example maybe they can lead our health scans the radiation scans they can pick up microscopic differences which human eye can't do as fast there's several other places where they have shown to be of value however they cannot starting with the data first without having the sufficient the corresponding domain expertise that is that can lead to a lot of hype and they can lead to a lot of ugly things so this was one point the other thing which some of you may be familiar with is there is a course offered by the University of Washington called calling bullshit and this has been going on for quite a few years and in 2017 or 18 they actually they call it calling bullshit in the AI and ML era what they do is their point is that yeah like you mentioned Amit there are these black boxes which make the decisions they're very heavily statistical based and not everybody can be expected to learn the statistical methods nor should everybody be expected to do that even though whatever you know these new I don't know new agencies promise that we'll train you to be a data scientist in three months and all none of that nonsense but what they have done and they showed through lots of case studies is by training or by helping people learn how to sift through the inputs input data for buyers for you know for soundness let's help let's have a syllabus to train our students to help the adults figure out whether the input is sound and at the same time to look at the output the results from a more critical eye and let's help people figure out whether a quantitative claim is nonsense or not and we can do it without having to go into technical details the examples they show are actually quite quite accessible and many of them accessible in the sense it can it's thought something that requires several years of statistical training these are examples of published papers from nature they're definitely a lot of other newspaper examples so one thing we have to be very not just careful we have to really promote strongly given that AI and ML are there everywhere is to help everybody learn how to sift what is nonsense what is dangerous and what is actually meaningful thanks Anna for that input yeah so critical thinking is essential I mean no matter what the domain to understand what is relevant or what is good and what is not good so critical thinking abilities like one of the basic premises on which lot of learning is based on and hopefully some aspects of this might be relevant Guru would you like to pitch in some some some some of your thoughts on this yeah actually Amit the last January I differ change published a series of papers on AI in different sectors so we looked at the logistic sector we looked at fintech finance sector we looked at the agricultural sector and one paper was an education so the paper is titled making AI work for Indian education and in that we have really discussed what are the possibilities and it falls as far as AI is concerned in Indian for education Indian education also is explored in some specifics so I think one thing I want to say is that you know there's a guy called Kentaro Toyama who interestingly worked with Microsoft research so at that time obviously when he worked with Microsoft he must have been very bullish about technology and education we all know Microsoft is a very big player in this area but subsequently he wrote a very very interesting article which is titled there are no technology shortcuts to good education and he says in that paper that every now and then we have a cycle of a new technology coming in and when the new technology comes in you know it it's not anything to do with digital also it should do with when TV came we know that you know people said TV is going to change the phase of education in India and all over the world and Humlop as a series you know I'm old enough to belong to an era where Humlop was a television serial which people seriously believed with all the education in the country and he says every now and then the hype comes and after the hype there is disillusionment and the cycle keeps repeating because technologies keep changing and AI is I can see I clearly as one of them where the amount of hype that we see today it's you know it's mind-boggling and the hype of AI is in single phrases personalized learning so personalized learning is supposed to completely revolutionize teaching learning and you know all the failures of education are supposed to be rectified by personalized learning these are some two three very serious issues you already mentioned one Sahana also mentioned one that there is already whenever we talk about a there is bias and simply because there is no algorithm doesn't start from zero algorithm starts from decisions and paths that are laid out by the experts who are designing the AI in the first place and their biases can greatly be harmful and in that paper that we published last January have highlighted that India has a very serious problem in terms of reproduction of biases because we are a feudal society much more than most societies India has is unique for the caste system where every human being is superior or inferior to another human being simply because he was born in a particular family and the idea of using the past to predict the future the sense of AI the sense of machine learning the sense of algorithms can we look at the past and can use the past to predict the future is simply replication of the caste system we are already seeing it happen in schools without AI for example I'm told in Delhi government schools children as young guys in the third standard are you know classified this child is going to learn mathematics put them in one section this child is not going to be able to learn maths put this child in another section in class three and when I'm saying that I'm sure you can appreciate that there's a huge problem here because we know that it is the children of the marginalized groups the Dalit children the Adivasi children the children of the poor who will be the children who will be identified as not good for maths and therefore good for vocational occupations in India vocational means a blue collar job unorganized sector low wages poor quality of life so AI is going to be able to do that very well because AI will clearly judge that the child of a plumber is good for plumbing the child of a bureaucrat is good for liberal education and that is what is the manifestation of in some other space we say bias in education we can clearly see that it will create a problem it was already saying let's use AI to decide who is good for vocational education it was already saying that so that is a danger that we highlighted in the paper that biases lethal in AI and that is one thing second thing this whole idea of personalized learning there there's a very wonderful article written by a couple of authors van dick if i'm not if i'm getting the pronunciation right i can share the link in the chat also they say that the whole idea of technology technologification of teaching learning is creating a process called learnification learnification is atomizing a concept into narrower and narrower and narrower slices because that's how technology can deal with it very well so you go go from number system to you know two digit numbers to addition of two digit numbers addition without carrier so you make it more and more thin sliced and then you create learning path for children and you imagine that the child learns concepts of number systems by simply doing smaller and smaller slices of learning materials experiences with learning materials and that people say is not really the way children learn children learning is not in that atomized way it has to be collaborative it has to be social and conceptual understanding is not so mechanical a process and these are the dangers that are going to come with AI and I think in the next few years we're going to see a lot of hype and the government is also pushing it in a big way I'm told recently that there is a huge DST funding for a lab at ISE Bangalore for setting up personalized learning models using AI so it's already you know some multi few hundred crores have been pumped into this entity so we are going to see that AI is going to create these kind of challenges and of course commercial pressures which are the original one we heard of Google and by juice coming together recently so they are going to push their personalized learning models as the best thing that has happened in education space I can see a lot of danger but what is a good possibility for AI I would simply say can we use AI to help the teacher figure out what are the different combinations possibilities of bringing materials and methods together for constructing learner-centric contextual learning paths so the teacher is driving that process and Sahana said that also I agree with her if the teacher can be at the center of the process then there is a possibility AI can do good but if AI is used to displace a teacher we are going to see increase stratification reduce social mobility of education that's the problem that I see sorry for a long answer thanks crew that was great to hear from you Jien would you like to pitch in for this I would make it very brief since I think we're also running out of time I suppose so see there is I mean since a lot of it is already been said I don't want to touch upon that but I want to touch upon another important thing there is a lesson from that we need to learn from these new terms that are being used called AI and you know machine learning and all that one of the important lessons that we have is that how do machines learn so they give two important aspects to that one is give the machine a lot of experience a lot of data okay to give the machine a feedback okay because feedback is given in the form of you know adding weights and deleting weights and things like that so that the learning happens in the proper direction now this is something that is part of cognitive science as well I mean this is one of the important lessons now the my question is my question to all of us is that there exists you know such machines already in the world and they're called human beings and they already have all those algorithms they only need two things one experience and feedback so you give experience and feedback to all of us and then we really don't need any of these other things so we need sophistication in terms of how do we provide that experience so if you want to use AI to provide that experience if you want to provide AI or whatever technology you know it could be a teacher it could be another human being another sophisticated colleague of mine or a friend of mine who will give me the feedback then you know my learning and my experiences will be directed towards a particular side so I would say I would just simply say this following thing that give a lot of experience to the child or to the learner and provide feedback both positive and negative feedback then we have 1.3 billion machines already in place we don't need any more machines in this place and I mean I just want to call that as a natural intelligence I mean we of course is the pun of the artificial intelligence that's already there so let us promote NI with or without machines. Thanks Jin that answer that's an interesting analogy that you made so here I mean I would like to ask all of you one question which is a recent development very recent development in China so recently China actually sort of made this as a policy that edtech companies cannot be for profit so they sort of in one stroke overnight like cut down on all the edtech companies that are in place in China and some of the edtech companies are quite highly valued in terms of their stock so do you think I mean something like this should be done in India as well I would like to take your opinion on this this aspect that should should edtech be only for not for profit and for profit edtech should not be allowed in following some sort of Chinese model in this. I would include health also in that bracket whether it is health technology or education technology I think health and education for all can be you know done only if you know we reduce the commercial interest as much as possible so we need a strong regulation certainly in that space. Sahana and Guru would you like to answer this question? Yeah so I think my response might be somewhat slightly different it's again not a very easy response but I do agree that education and health belong in one group one sector which is different from say telecom or different from other sectors where commerce is actually is quite you know it plays quite an important role so rather than so I don't think I want to you know be very strong on one side of or the other because I'm not I'm not very clear on it myself definitely not as strong as what Jien is saying but on the other hand what I want to point out is like we all know the pitfalls the problems the serious danger of since this has already been named companies like byjuice going yeah getting Shah Rukh Khan and IPL and all at the same time there are commercial products there is a company which it has its hundred dollar product it has a ten dollar product and it has a 10 cent product as they were saying this was a this is an Indian company they were making a pitch to somebody from abroad it was an international group what they are doing is in their lowest cost product they're using WhatsApp which a certain large fraction of the country has again it's not complete ubiquitous access but a large fraction of the students have WhatsApp have some phone which has WhatsApp and they're using that to for not just not just delivery of content but they're also getting the teachers involved getting helping the teachers you know facilitate activities through that there is it is commercially there is a company involved there is a cost involved but it is at that level I mean I'm not saying I'm not promoting that company that's why I don't want to name it now but it is there there can be models where the commercial entities also have a role and we see how to do it is a very difficult job regulations are clearly required but there is a possibility for that and I think I think it's worthwhile thinking along those lines in addition to just stronger regulations because in so many other sectors it's just not been possible to say that we'll make it completely private this is India it's it's we are not china and how to how to get all these different entities on board towards the same larger group yeah thanks for that different perspective guru please go ahead see I think Saanad really what we need to look at is what is education's purpose I think if we have a common understanding of what is education for for example you're sitting in IIT and we know that the IIT cannot be a market phenomena IIT can only work if a very significant large part of the higher education budget of the government of India is put in the IITs I'm sure you'll agree with that if the market were led to create IITs you will have a gender law school where a student has to be relaxed to get admitted and IITs will only be for the rich people of this country right so we must understand that education is very different from you know buying or selling shampoo where you can have a 10 rupee shampoo you can have a thousand rupee shampoo you can have a 10,000 rupee shampoo doesn't matter whatever you can afford you can buy but education is not a market good I think this is what we need to really understand that the purpose of education is it is a process of social mobility it is the only way by which a Dalit child an Adivasi child a Muslim child a girl child across the country can hope to be able to visualize a life of dignity as much as a upper caste all of everybody in this panel the three of us we are upper caste we are upper class I mean GN and I are also men so we know that we are all extremely privileged people and our privileges has allowed us to come to the places that we are sitting in whether it's an IIT or IIT for change or Omibaba center caste class religion privileges have allowed us to come here and if you allow the market to come in and play any role this will only continue so only rich people will have a right to education why should somebody get a 10 cent product does it occur to you to ask that question that when you say 10 cent product and a 10 dollar product in your mind it is already very clear that the poor child will get a 10 cent product which is inferior to a 10 dollar product and will continue a life of quality marginalization and lack of dignity whereas the parent who is able to afford a 10 dollar product for this sort of child that child will go up in life education is the essential process of mobility for all of us as children and if you are able to accept a 10 cent and a 10 dollar product in education I think there's a very serious problem here and I think every child deserves a 10 dollar why should a child deserve a 10 cent because the parents can't afford it two differences here okay one is we're just talking of some I agree with you when you say education as a large concept okay we're not saying that these companies are going to come and take over education entirely we are talking about some no the minute even if you give them Sahana please understand even if you give them a five percent space you are accepting inequality and the sense of education is not the education cannot take him at inequality it has to aim for equality it has to aim I don't think we are debating that at all there is no question then there is no question for a commercial space because commerce means stratification see if you look at a non-market good and a market good by definition a market good has to be 10 rupee tea for somebody 100 rupee tea for somebody else a thousand rupee tea for somebody else and tea is okay you can drink a 10 rupee tea and not die but the minute to say a 10 cent product you're clearly saying poor people will continue to remain poor because they will be in poor education and one second let me finish I want to challenge this thinking that China can do it India can't do it India can send a person to the Mars India can build nuclear submarines but India cannot make sure that our children get decent education so I think our own our own preferences of policy what is convenient for us of course we can build nuclear submarines we can buy nuclear submarines we can buy Rafale aircraft but education and people have done economics have estimated the cost of good education system it is not rocket it is not the cost of rocket science it is not the cost of sending people to Mars certainly we can afford good quality education the minute we allow commercialization we go away from any possibility that we can have equitable education for all they are completely I would say binaries we need to understand and appreciate that what is politically doable is a political question so that's what I would like to say so in your tea example I'm actually making a much smaller point I think in terms of the larger point and all I don't see I mean I don't see myself disagreeing with you there is this much smaller point I'm making taking your tea analogy the difference between a 10 rupee tea and 100 rupee tea is often in the frills you know the kind of chair I sit in the room whether I'm sitting in Taj or in Badlu cafe in next to my department and all but there is an issue of the quality of the taste of tea I won't even use the word quality the taste of tea now I can get really rubbish tea in Taj I can get excellent tasty tea in Badlu but the cost difference is that of everything else that's coming around so the point I was trying to make is that when if companies are there if you know when companies are there what is what we don't want to withhold from people is this taste of tea somebody has you know wants to go and sit in Taj a lot of people might know that yeah I'm just paying for the frills we're not talking there is inequality yes not you know saying that there is no inequality there but it's actually the taste which is that's the only point I was trying to make here agree that tea is tea is nothing to the market that's all I'm saying you can have any number of taste let that be thousand taste but it isn't a market good Sahana I think you can do some reading on public goods and market goods I think then we will get a call in India it's illegal by the way Sahana let me tell you and everybody else in this call in India for profit education is illegal what Google and Baidu are doing is illegal somebody can go to court there's always supreme court judgment which says unichristian judgment which says education cannot be for profit in India of course we know that there are what is it called people exploit loopholes and all but tea and education are different Sahana that's what we need to understand agree so why aren't we debating the lack of you know the existence of private schools you know schools are not for profit they're supposed to be not for profit so commercial we are not against private I'm not against private and GN is not against private we are against commercial there's a different being private initiative which is not for profit and commercial so there are a lot of differences we need to be very clear about I work in a private agency with this ID for change in NGO but I'm not for profit not for profits can set up schools but not for profit will not have a 10 cent product and a 100 cent product it's against the basic ethics of education I don't know if we still have time can I chip in yeah quickly maybe maybe last so very very quickly very quickly I would like to say this point which has not been directly touched upon and that is why I want to touch upon this subject is the point that if the government doesn't have any responsibility of this kind and say that you know education should be priced then one immediate thing that they have to do is they have to stop taking taxes first of all because why are we giving taxes to the government and why why do we have to do double and triple and trouble taxation at every point if I'm already paying for my mobile or the device I'm already paying for the bandwidth again I have to pay for the content is unjustifiable for every step of the way and this is I think a very wrong economic model for a for a democratic you know distributable justice that our constitution is seeking for and equity in this case has to be taught and this is our right to get equal education for all and and we're already paying taxes for that and therefore we have every right to make sure that education has to be public and it is already been paid for and so we are not demanding anything extra from it and then passing on this responsibility and encouraging all the private agencies which are profit oriented are essentially a way of asking citizens to pay one more tax on that very subject for which the government has already collected tax from everybody thanks Jen I think we had a very interesting discussion going just now I think the last thing that we had of last mile connectivity we have touched upon it several times in the previous discussion so I think I'll pass it on and we'll take some questions from the audience regarding this I think to all the panelists the host the organizers have shared with your document which has a sort of text of all the questions that have been asked in the chat so and some of them have been also answered by you there so is there any question that perhaps you would like to expand upon so I can read out the questions in the chat or I can share my screen so that like we have those questions visible so how would you like to go about it I mean there are some questions directed at particular speaker and some of the questions are of more general nature so maybe we can start with some questions directed towards a particular panelist so I think the first question is by Deepika she says that what are the environmental impacts of using new technology and media extensively should we take them into account to have a balance we want to take an education so anybody can respond to the general question Sahana, Guru, Jee and I mean would anyone of you like to respond to this question just started looking at most of those questions so I actually could not listen to you can you repeat with the question that you're asking yeah the question is about environmental impact of all the electronic products that will be generating yeah I actually sort of responded to that in the chat saying that you know I mean whether it is this technology or that technology I think environmental audit is very important and I also think that that is one of the reasons why you know we want to create instead of creating personal machines you know we need to have shared machines you know we can't say no to computers that's a different thing but what we can certainly do is to create community interfaces so that you know people can access machines and they can log into their own personal spaces once they are in the machine but the machine itself should be made in a shareable manner rather than the way how we are doing it because we know very well that information technology whether it's the hardware most of the time it is the hardware and also the machines that run actually consume enormous amount of electricity and the carbon footprint and all that we heard from them and it does enormous amount of damage to the environment and we and I certainly think that we should mitigate that damage as we move on and my answer to that is let's make our resources shareable instead of increasing the need of how many devices a person needs yeah thanks Jian for that so I use them continue yeah please go ahead Guru quickly add to what Jian was saying everything should be shareable not only the hardware but the software the content and that's the whole free and open digital technology space that whatever is that is shareable and that thereby we reduce the footprint I think the other thing I want to add is there is a clear problem about the political and the technological in today's world and there are you know we assume that technology will run in its own space and we are simply following it but that's not true every society makes choices about the direction which society should go so Google is powerful today Amazon is powerful today it is because today's legal frameworks political frameworks allow that so even in the case of environment it's not that technology is running a pace and environment is in danger that's also a conscious choice that we are making and therefore my thinking is that how can the political come back and control the technological how can the political come back and control the economic so that education concerns and environmental concerns are both taken care of and you know in France I'm told there was a proposal many years back to say you should not be allowed to send emails at 5 o'clock so what is the kind of life that we want to live economically philosophically and how can we use policy to regulate that to the extent that we are able to prevent economic interest from creating problems with the environment I'm just saying political has to come back and play key roles but political doesn't mean politicians I mean our collective will okay thanks thanks Guru Sahana would you like to add to this question of aspect of environment of technological devices yeah yeah thanks I changed the tabs I thought I was still speaking so Ayush adds to this question on I think this has been covered a bit on what has been talked about he says that how should we think about the also the human aspect of production of technology especially in poor and marginalized community in low middle income countries so I think some aspects of it we have already covered then Asmita asked one question particularly to Sahana and I think this is about your part of the first theme that we had so she asked that should there be some standardization of cost of product as well I think this was regarding some of the things I think that platform that you have shown to us in context of that platform would you like to respond yeah so I'll just quickly respond to this because there was a lot of debate on this earlier and this is related to one of the much later questions that Aniket mentioned about the hundred dollar product so I have seen both the products okay the hundred dollar and the Tencent product and the difference is actually in there is a difference yes the difference is in terms of the frills in terms of the in terms of the experience whether you know for students and teachers because we sort of just we haven't done a formal study but we just sort of got some data in terms of the experience it was there was no significant difference there is however a big difference in the packaging so that I just wanted to put this out I'm not I'm not advocating for the hundred dollar product but the way it had been constructed was what is the difference is not in some of the core aspects and we're allowing people to be fooled by packaging no is that what we want education to be some packaging that will fool people it's not about fooling people but some people if so are you saying that we should just not have any you can't have stratification the whole idea of education is not money making see people teacher gets a solid so if your stratification you're you're you're getting to unethical ground that's what I want to really caution you yeah I think go ahead Asmita if you want to add to that yeah so sanna this was asked before this the subsequent discussion took place when you said that the content has to be standardized so I just added if the cost and then we had extensive discussion so I agree with your point what you're saying now but I would like to add guru in this case that he made a statement that in India like as China has put forth a step towards making education a free resource India already has that in place but then what do you say about private coaching classes and almost even a I've seen I wouldn't make a statement statistical statement but I've seen even a Dalit trying to put her child in private coaching out of the fear that she wouldn't get enough in the school and schools were closed the other thing that I have recently learned is for last four to five or rather a few more years teacher recruitment has stopped at this school level in some districts of eastern Maharashtra I can say for sure which I have been visiting so while we are talking about you know teacher being an agency while technology has its place what if the teacher doesn't exist and the third point would be like what when the government itself is making free way for private players so if it is illegal how can we stop this happening so like by just taking over schools which are which have no teachers recruited and then so how would you put this so all those hopeful anticipations of equality are good but the reality is there and if the law isn't I mean the law still says it's illegal why what is stopping us from stopping them go ahead with it on the pre way yeah that's my question over to you yeah yeah please guru and Sahana both you can so I think see what Asmita saying is it's a very complex reality so we need to be able to distinguish our arguments in two ways and we need to do both of the same to one is we are to see what is the reality that we are in we are in a reality that the governments are not willing to invest in education we are in a reality that governments are not interested in empowering teachers we are in a reality that government is not interested in the mobility of the marginalized groups this is real and it's not only government I think society itself our political will that every child should get the same kind of education it's not there as I said earlier India is a caste system and the you know the upper caste person is not going to like it if the his drivers children are going to the same school that his children are going that is a real that's a reality of today and that and the reality is also that the Dalits and the marginalized groups are also desperate because they know that the government school is not giving them what they should get and therefore they are going into tuitions and the sad thing is you know in rich families the child may go to tuition in class eight in poor families have seen children are going to tuition from class one because the faith in the government system or the faith in the regular school is very low so this is a reality we need to understand that we need to resist it we need to see what we can do about it but independent of the reality there is also a purpose of education so the purpose of education is not to create inequity create inequality create stratification the purpose of education is a new society in which there is equality there is equity there is justice there is democracy education itself is a process of moving from one to the other moving from inequity and stratification to equality and equity but the fact is while education is supposed to be that process of transcending inequality education itself becomes subject to inequality so this is a complex reality we are living in we need to be able to do both we need to be able to at the normative level clearly argue that something like byduce is wrong coaching classes are wrong because if again it depends on what is the purpose of the coaching class the coaching class is really working on progressive educational processes and not in a you know trying to say your child will become better than my child then coaching by itself may not be a problem if it is confirming to the educational principles philosophies processes of a equitable democratic society but we know that mostly coaching classes are not like that coaching classes are simply to give a competitive edge or to fulfill a gap left behind by the main school system so while we look at realities education is not about replicating those realities so we cannot argue coaching classes are there therefore five cent and ten dollar technology products are okay no coaching class is wrong technology products are also wrong so we need to be able to argue at the level of principle and say this is wrong this is right at the same time we also look at the realities and say how collectively we can get all of us together to resist that reality and bring forth a new reality that has happened you know I'm sure when Sati was being practiced several people have said Sati is being practiced what can we do about it let us burn more women at the fire but Rajagaram on Roy said it cannot be done we have to protest against this we have to change the policy framework so China also did not make it illegal suddenly right they also would have seen a lot of challenges with coaching classes with the way tech companies are going about it and they said we will change the policy framework in a communist country it may be easier in a democratic situation like India it will be much more difficult I don't have any illusions of that but we have to be asking ourselves what is it that we want to do we are working in education as a person working in education do you want to increase that stratification or do you want to counter stratification and like Kishore said in the chat why are we imagining that equity and quality are two different things that equity you know promotion is different but you know stratification can still happen because quality is satisfied by that quality equity go together so we have to be clear about the normative space that education is we have to be clear what we will promote what we will oppose but accept that the reality is not what we want it to be but education is a process of transcending that reality let us understand that yeah thanks guru for that Sana would you like to pitch in one last thing for this point no I think guru has said it very eloquently let's go to if we are still continuing the many questions I think we have almost run out of time now but we had very interesting discussion on all the themes that we could cover and we did not cover one thing explicitly but I think it was implied implicitly covered in many of the discussions that we had about accessibility and thank you very much for all the panelists and also the participants via their questions making it very rich experience to debate on these crucial issues that we face as going forward with technology being a major player in what we do in all aspects of our life and education is no different to that so I'd like to thank for the organizers also for having me here as well as the panelists so over to the organizers if you have to say something please go ahead thank you very much thank you Amit thank you all the panelists for joining and thank you audience for coming with lots of deep questions and yeah so we will be joining at two o'clock again thank you