Experts brainstorm on future roadmap to empower youths of today with digital skills of tomorrow 

Over the years India’s higher education has transformed with a number of success stories making students, scholars, educationists, academicians equally proud. However, at the same time, there is a need to take higher education to another level while addressing the existing challenges and empowering its future. 

Deliberating on these thoughts, Mr Aditya Berlia, Co-promoter Apeejay Stya and Svran Group and Co-Founder and Pro-Chancellor of Apeejay Stya University as well as Ms. Prashasti Rastogi, Director at Coursera, joined virtually for the Wednesday Wisdom webinar, a special episode which is part of the BW Education series, to share their insights on ‘Advancing higher education in India and modernising curriculum to drive graduate outcomes using online learning’.

The insightful discussion began with the session moderator, Ruhail Amin, Sr. Editor at BW Businessworld, asking – what are the key industry trends and implications for higher education that have been observed in the last five to six years?   

To which, Ms Prashasti Rastogi highlighted:  In the transforming world that we see today, an academic degree is no longer a royalty for life and why it  is not a royalty for life (and this is a sad new that we have to break to university graduates when they are doing their commencement), is because the learning has just begun. Because the graduation outcomes are more towards careers and those could be of an entrepreneurship choice or towards an employment – it’s basically enabling the workforce of tomorrow through the degree programmes that they attend today. And the graduates have to be informed how the industry is evolving. That is because if the academic-curriculum does not align as per the industry needs, we create a significant gap.  The digital transformation in the industries has been accelerated by the pandemic because we all move to working in remote environments, working on technologies and technology has also fast-tracked. It means every role today within an organisation will have some technological element to it. And every role today needs some sort of digital skill to be relevant to the industry.

Secondly, if talent can work from home or work remotely, the organisations will go after wherever the talent is. Remote working has also possessed a new need of developing ‘human-social skill’ – how do you collaborate with teams, how is your interpersonal communication , what are your soft skills, problem solving skills, etc. And this ecosystem has led to the emergence of a new set of skills, which students need to earn to be employable. These range from areas of technology to soft skills. Moreover, the World Economic Forum data states that there will be 40 million new jobs that will be created by 2025 and all these jobs will be in digital capacity.      

Subsequently sharing his views on how academic excellence is being driven at Apeejay Stya University,  Mr Aditya Berlia said: I hold many hats including from the academic side, from the industry side and a bit from the policy side as well and I want to start by congratulating the government for the National Education Policy – it’s something we have been pushing for almost 30 years and to see it finally come in quite a good form is excellent. We had implemented the NEP and gone beyond maybe 10 years ago, at least at the university level, where the regulators allowed us to do so as well. We are very happy to connect the last bit of dots.

There is a raft of changes in how we are going to do work in the next 4 to 5 years. I expect the AI race – the sputnik moment – to come by the end of 2023 and ChatGBT sort of ran off the gate before anybody else was ready to launch.  It has triggered many AI players. We are seeing a dramatic acceleration of AI, which is good enough to scare educators across the world. That leads to a couple of interesting changes.We used to talk about India catching up with some of the best universities in the world and suddenly they are in crisis. But the good news is India is no longer trying to play catch up at the cutting-edge, we are all at the same boat together. When I show the NEP to our counterparts in the USA , Europe , they are shocked. We are a decade or two ahead of their regulators  and how they see the world and they are only full of praise. 

Secondly, when we transition into skilling there is a pathway and the learning curves go very high and we are going to see like low-level coders, low-level content developers, low-level project managers, etc., are going to be punched out.  And that’s good news for universities, who have an approach to create learners for life and something that we have always done. Our university from day one called ourselves ‘a liberal art university’ , which is focused on research and technology. We are literally telling people how to think, how to view the world, how to have fundamental intellectual abilities  , which then translate and supersede any low-level skills that are required. There is also an immense push for value addition. And the next race is that we will see millions of Indians , who have left college  , suddenly realise that they were just skating on the things they learnt in college, and within a year or two, every profession will undergo a phenomenal change. Now it’s a race for everyone to gear up and skill up to go to a higher level. We have an alumni job portal. 

Thirdly, we could not always figure out to explain to the students what the media is covering as a glamorous degree or their relatives are saying do this and you will earn money versus the real job that is out there. The industry must also play a part in explaining parents and students directly about the future skills required.  Lastly, we are running a lot of collaborative experiments on what we are seeing coming in five to six years – new technology, new jobs, new leaderships that India and the world needs.  And one of our big moves is in agriculture and there is a huge demand for that, there is a huge demand for healthcare automation and we are able to bring those courses in degrees but we need professionals who want to dedicate themselves in these sectors.   

Gap between curricula and market demands

Further, Ms Rastogi shared how they are enabling students to align with the changing market landscape to build the right career pathways:   We work at the cusp of industry as well as academia. Coursera has been a platform where industries are upskilling and reskilling their own workforce. We work with about 3,600 corporations worldwide and we do workforce development for them. At the same time, we work with about 3000 campuses globally, and we skill their students for better employability outcomes, connecting curriculums to careers. And we have realised that there is a need to provide guidance on both ends. We also found out  that the industry is very clear that professional certifications are great indicators   of the skills that the students are developing.   This is also where the genesis of New Education Policy lies, that also mentions that scalability of skilling can happen with help of online learning.   The learning should be multidisciplinary.  

Digital economy 

Sharing on how Apeejay is responding to building essential skills and career paths, Mr. Berlia said: Industry needs to go down to the school level for skill development because by the time they come to college level, it’s too late because people in India have already selected their courses. In our university, you can change your degree anytime. This is one way how within the university structure itself , they are able to do it. So our goal at the university is to have the learners at focus. Our markings and credit systems measure students’ hours learnt, not teachers’ hours taught.  There are three levels of digital skills – basic digital skill to survive,  second level of skill is to perform white and higher-end blue collar jobs, and the third level is when you move from being a consumer to a creator. And this is something we figured out in 1998, every student who has graduated from an Apeejay school has had 9 years of software coding learning, mandatory.  Understanding how to be creators needs extraordinary digital skills. The low-level digital skills will be taken over by AI. So our focus at Apeejay Stya University and Apeejay Education, all across our schools and colleges, has been for years – how do we convert followers into leader followers, so the can both lead and follow as well as moving people from just becoming content consumers or technological consumers to actually join creation.    

Moreover, the issue is not about supply anymore, it is about the creation of fundamental demand, where every professional and student in India says that if I don’t continuously learn, if I don’t take responsibility for my learning, I am in trouble , my career will stop. And that mindset is important.

Echoing similar thoughts like Mr. Berlia, Ms Rastogi said self-motivation on learners and how to be life-long learners and the change begins at the school level.  

Mr. Berlia also added on career-readiness in a student’s life and mentioned: We do not see our involvement in a student’s life just for the two or three years they are with us. We feel that once a student is part of the Apeejag family,   we want to be connected with them and support them throughout their life and careers. We just don’t prepare students for their immediate future, but for their third and fourth jobs in which they need exceptional career skills that take them to the next level. 

The session concluded on positive thoughts of implementing more of innovation and digitisation in all aspect.