The cover story of the November 12
Forbes issue will be about Salman Khan.
No, not the one that most Pakistanis are familiar with.
This is not the
action-oozing heart-throb from Bollywood but the founder of the Khan
Academy, a quieter but more effective hero. The Khan Academy provides
free, easy to understand ‘micro-tutorials’ to anyone in diverse topics,
ranging from cosmology to art history, mathematics to healthcare. Over
the last six years, the Khan Academy has made a tremendous impact,
reaching 190 million viewers of its lectures. Among the viewers is Bill
Gates, who often quotes Khan and talks about how he uses these lectures
to teach himself and his children key concepts in science, arts and
mathematics.
The Khan Academy is not the only venture of free, online and accessible learning for the masses. Another endeavour, called EdX,
includes premier higher learning institutions like MIT, Harvard,
Berkeley and UT Austin. This initiative offers university courses,
taught for free by faculty for anyone who wants to take the course.
Whether it is introduction to circuit theory or a complex topic in
finance, anyone can be a part of the experience. Enrolment in these
courses often tops over a 100,000 students. These and other similar
efforts have started to reshape the landscape of higher education as we
know it. A course offered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can now be taken
by anyone in China, Chile, Cameroon and Cambodia simultaneously. How
this may reshape the existing models of higher education, both in the
developed and in the developing world, is a discussion for another time.
Right now, I am interested in analysing what this may mean for
Pakistan, both in terms of benefitting from it and also in learning from
these endeavours.
First, Pakistani students and non-students, academics and
non-academics, can all benefit from quality, free and accessible
education. The Khan Academy provides easy-to-understand tutorials on
topics of fundamental and applied knowledge in a variety of areas.
Conspiracy theorists and water-car supporters
can all benefit from some general understanding of thermodynamics. Same
can be said about students who may wish to take a course offered by
EdX. Yet, there is also a catch. It is important to realise that online
learning can certainly complement but not substitute higher education in
Pakistan. The instructors may not realise the training of our students;
there are language barriers and certainly, most courses do not
incorporate the local cultural, environmental and social context. This
may not be relevant in theoretical physics but advanced topics in a
variety of disciplines, including public health, agricultural sciences,
economics and certainly, policy and humanities need to keep context in
mind. The tendency to jump on the online learning bandwagon without
analysis of the content of the course would be counterproductive to say
the least and can be disastrous for our already struggling higher
education sector.
In addition to benefiting from the content of these courses, there is
also a lesson and a tremendous opportunity. We cannot deny that we have
an education crisis in the country. Our universities are overcrowded,
yet a large portion of society has no access to quality education. But
we also have entrepreneurs, innovators and certainly, a fair share of
scientists and engineers who believe in a better Pakistan. I believe
that there is a tremendous opportunity for our institutions to think
outside the box and create opportunities for access. I believe that it
is high time that our institutions can engage and encourage their best
professors, with the help of entrepreneurs, mobile phone companies and
field experts to create content in Urdu, English and regional languages,
aimed at general and field-specific education at all levels, including
higher education. Many universities have a national outreach programme
but let’s not just focus on bringing the students to the universities,
where we have little room and only a select few make it; let us also
take the university to them.
We have to recognise both the importance of education and the
educational crisis we are currently facing. Denying either would not
help our cause, as it has not helped in the last 65 years.