The rapid pace with which the digital transformation has been adopted the world over has on one hand badly disrupted the conventional systems in all sectors of the economy and human endeavors on the other hand opened enormous opportunities for rapid growth and development.  The world community including India has taken the disruptive digital transformation as a great opportunity to create a new wave of online education, online health services, online shopping, online services, and businesses further facilitated by online banking creating the ease of doing business.

In fact, the digital transformation has created the conditions for the future to be here and everywhere, says eminent academician Prof Pritam B Sharma, Founder Vice-Chancellor of DTU and RGPV who is also the past President of Association of Indian Universities, AIU.

Let us look at the education sector that for a long time was being blamed for its static curriculum and its age-old methods of classroom teaching in an environment of the sage on the stage. The education sector was in fact in a comfort zone despite the fact it was to prepare the human resources and develop innovations and technologies for handling major disruptions that the industries have suffered due to rapidly advancing technologies. Ever-increasing automation that made Industry 4.0 to be fully networked, smart, and automated with most modern digital tools and smart Robotics has already become a reality in almost all sectors of the manufacturing and process industry. Machine learning and AI integration are becoming the rule of the game in industries everywhere including here in India that is rapidly emerging as a leading manufacturing hub in the world.

Thanks to Covid-19, it has caused a major disruption in the education sector from primary to college and university levels. What more it all came so sudden and without any notice. All the educational institutions around the globe in fact got a rude shock where all of a sudden the conventional teaching system came to a grinding halt due to Covid-19. The impact was so devastating that even the high and mighty Universities found it almost unbearable.

But then, the speed with which the education community from schools to colleges and universities geared to online classes and also online examinations, made the digital transformation in education opened a great many new opportunities for revitalizing and even radically reforming the education system to serve the needs of today as well as that of tomorrow.

The positive mindset with which the teachers, students, and parents have readily accepted the online classes and online examinations, online admissions, and online placement interviews, and faculty recruitment is something to be appreciated in a country like India where for a long time the education sector was being blamed for its rigidity and hesitation to adopt technology-assisted systems for improving the efficacy of the teaching-learning environment.

With the wider acceptability of online education and online examination and assessment, new grounds have also been created for collaborative learning, team teaching, and self-learning. In fact, enormous flexibility and choice to learn as per the interest of the learners and that too from anywhere at any time are becoming now a reality. The future of education that promotes the autonomy of learning has thus truly arrived. It is a sign of a bright future for the education sector.

The digital transformation has truly brought the world of learning to be accessible and affordable for one and all. It has also opened enormous opportunities for innovative and enterprising minds to create new systems of massification of education without the need for enormous infrastructure that was necessary in the conventional classroom teaching environment in the pre-Covid times.

However, to reap the full benefits of the digital transformation here in India we must significantly augment our digital communication resources including making a high investment that is required for technology upgradation of the massive digital communication infrastructure that in India today is serving 761.29 million internet users and 1.06 billion mobile connections, and is rapidly growing each day.

Today, the global internet users stand at 4.72 billion and grew 332 million in the last 12 months, amounting to more than 90000 new users per day. Almost 60 percent of the world population today is using the internet. This shall further grow as the digital transformation is now sweeping all sectors of the economy and with wider public acceptability.

So what are the major opportunities and challenges for the education sector? The first and foremost is of course a great opportunity to rapidly expand the education base to benefit millions more in India by quality online education and cause a quantum jump in the learners registered for the degrees and employability courses.

But then the current levels of connectivity and fragile IT infrastructure require major modernization and massive investments. The IT service providers are to be incentivized to provide affordable high-quality internet connectivity with high speed of data transition for mounting online education with a perfect blend of audio, video, and interactive learning portals that are required to take online classes and online training programs truly interesting.

It is heartening that the teaching community in India has responded very well to the use of modern online education systems for which they had hesitated for a long time under the pretext that online teaching is not effective. They need to now upgrade their technology skills to make the online teaching-learning environment even more interesting and effective to cause deeper interest in learning and to make the graduates of the universities in India future-ready.

Students are already highly tech-savvy and have responded very well to online learning and also realized that they now have better systems to engage in learning both in as well as outside the class rooms. The online education environment has also caused a massive activity in respect to online webinars and expert interactions further enhancing the outreach to expertise both within the country and around the world.  This is going to remain a highly desirable feature even after the present wave of a pandemic is over.

We have to however find better ways to support millions of our students from lower-middle and low-income families where the availability of laptops, smartphones, and high-speed internet facilities is not available to the children.

Mobile high-tech classrooms as e-Gurukuls facilitating both self-learning and online classes for such deprived sections of society need to be provided in great numbers both in the urban and rural areas. Here philanthropy can play a great role and so should the Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR and University Social Responsibility, USR. In fact, we require e-Gurukuls at all levels of education and make them an integral part of our education system in the new normal for education hereafter.

In Amity University Gurugram we have taken up the digital transformation with a positive mindset and utilized the great opportunity thrown open for online education during the Covid times without any teething problems. We were already using a well-developed high tech university-wide intranet IT platform for all our academic activities including all student services on Amizon, the in-house Amity customized IT portal. This made the transition from classroom teaching to online classes both smooth and easily adaptable both by the students as well as the teachers.

Further, digitization of all administrative and professional activities has made Amity University future-ready deliver world-quality education and research outcome with global standards.

The online examinations have also facilitated continuous assessment and have now become an effective tool to enhance learnability. Online student satisfaction survey and feedback of stakeholders is also improving the satisfaction and creating trust in the system much more than ever before. Like work from home online classes and online assessment have now become a new normal in education.

Well, the future of education is already here. Let us embrace digital transformation in education at all levels and leapfrog with competence and caliber and say with confidence that the future of education is here, says Prof PB Sharma Vice Chancellor of Amity University Gurugram.

About the author- Prof Pritam B Sharma, Vice-Chancellor of Amity University Gurugram