Chalk and Talk' Colleges Are Challenged by India's Company Classrooms - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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October 3, 2010

India's Company Classrooms Challenge 'Chalk and Talk'Colleges

By Jeffrey R. Young

Mysore, India

The most high-tech classrooms in India are not at a university but at

a technology company's training facility.

At least that's what several experts told me recently, noting that

companies here say they need to bypass the country's traditional

universities, which they view as stymied by old-school teaching

methods and a lack of practical computer education. (Professors at

those institutions, however, counter that their methods are most

effective for what they do.)

To make up for those perceived deficiencies, Indian companies

spent more than $1-billion last year on corporate-training programs

for new employees, according to an industry group that has been

pushing for change at universities.

In search of why Indian companies go to such lengths, last month I

traveled to the world's largest corporate-training center, run by

Infosys, the software company that helped start India's booming

technology sector. The secluded campus, a three-hour drive from

Bangalore, South India's Silicon Valley, is a gated enclave with tight

security and a sense of quiet that's hard to find in neighboring

megacities.

The center's librarian and de facto tour guide, Biligiri Ranga, let me

wander onto the roof of the newest classroom building here to get a

sense of the campus's scale. The architecture is grand and

futuristic—one undulated building is designed to resemble origami,

another is a spherical geodesic dome like the one at Disney's Epcot

center, and another sports a four-story climbing wall on the outside.

The 94 buildings here include a department store, a beauty salon,

and a multiplex (in the dome).

Each classroom bears the name of a famous innovator

—Archimedes, J.P. Morgan, Steve Jobs. In a morning class in the

Benjamin Franklin classroom, I observed about 100 students

learning the Unix programming language. Each seat had its own PC,

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and most students had opened a copy of the instructor's PowerPoint

presentation and followed along on their own screen, sometimes

scrolling back to see what they had missed, sometimes looking

ahead.

The trainees, called "freshers" because they are fresh out of college,

frequently interrupted to ask questions, and most everyone dutifully

took notes and looked attentive. I sat in the back but did not see a

single screen open to Facebook or another diversion.

Later in the day I sat down with a group of freshers and found out

one reason they stay so alert. Every three to five days, they must

take an online test on the "module" of material they have just

learned. If they fail enough modules, they're fired. If they rack up

enough A's by the end of the 23-week training program, their salary

goes up (not a system colleges can easily mimic).

The trainees said that their undergraduate teaching had been

delivered mostly in chalk-and-talk form, with the professorlecturing at the front of the classroom. A few professors had tried

PowerPoint, they said, but even that was unusual.

I asked if they wished their undergraduate experience had been

more like the instruction in the Benjamin Franklin classroom here.

"We thought what we had was actually appropriate, but now that

we've come here and we've been trained and we see how technology

has been used, now we realized actually what we missed there," said

Parul Shlikla, one trainee. "More technology would have meant a lot

more knowledge."Power Chalk

In fact, several of India's top colleges and universities recently

smartened up their classrooms, adding wifi, projectors, and

computers. The colleges I visited in New Delhi and Bangalore last

month were as likely to have such equipment as any college in the

United States.

Professors have been particularly slow to adopt new teaching

methods, though, according to some officials here.

On a tour of a brand-new classroom building at Christ University, in

Bangalore, five out of six professors I looked in on stuck to the

chalkboard, even though they taught in new classrooms. And the

one person using PowerPoint was a guest speaker from a local

business.

But the professors said they had good reasons to stick to a

traditional approach. After washing the chalk off his hands, C.N.


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Kshetragna, an associate professor of management, argued that he

was better able to keep students' attention when he "walks and

talks" at the chalkboard than when he scrolls through slides.

"I have great eye contact, and I prove that I know my topic well" by

lecturing at the chalkboard, he said. He would switch to PowerPoint

if it added value, he said, but he was not going to use technology for

its own sake. (He did note that the department now administers

examinations online using the Moodle course-management system,

to prove the place isn't antitechnology.)

I asked students in two physics classes if they thought their

professors should use more technology or otherwise change their

teaching styles to be more interactive, and the students

unanimously endorsed the status quo (and seemed puzzled that I

would even ask). "The chalkboard is better," said one.

And though most of the students owned laptops, none had their

computers with them. Computers aren't banned, and the classroomshave wifi, but taking notes about physics equations and quickly

writing down facts is easier with a paper notebook than a machine,

they said.

None of this surprised the university's vice chancellor, the Rev.

Thomas C. Mathew. "Indian teachers are really slow to change," he

said. "And when the teachers experiment, students resist."

After all, the students are good at the current system too, which

Father Mathew said sometimes involves asking them to memorize a

host of facts to be tested on. (Then he added that just usingPowerPoint does not necessarily lead to better teaching.) "What I'm

saying is, it takes a little time," he concluded.

A Bollywood blockbuster film last summer called 3 Idiots, a silly

comedy about misfit students, offered a critique of India's top

engineering colleges, the Indian Institutes of Technology. It

portrayed the institutions as stodgy and so focused on cramming

facts that students had no chance to dabble in high-tech pranks or

creative mischief—activities that can lead to innovation.

I asked Surendra Prasad, director of IIT's Delhi campus, what he

thought of the movie's message. He said he agreed that his

institution attempted to teach too much in a given semester,

packing in more material than comparable institutions in the United

States or elsewhere. As dean a few years back, he succeeded in

slightly reducing the number of required credits each term, he said,

and now he is pushing for a further reduction. But he said that IIT


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must be doing something right, considering how many alumni go on

to graduate school at the finest universities in the world.

Paid to Study

Back at Infosys, there were plenty of reminders that companies

think differently about education than universities do.

For instance, at this corporate campus, going to class is literally a

job, and so everyone is in class from 9 to 5. During my early-

afternoon tour of the campus, almost no one was around except

workers cleaning the streets, giving an eerie feeling of an abandoned

city.

And the classrooms were not as wired as they were a year ago.

Because some students were chatting online or goofing off, the

center now shuts off Internet access to the buildings during class, er,

working hours.

Srikantan Moorthy, head of education and research for Infosys, was

not reticent in stating the institution's mission: producing good

employees, not scholars chasing ideas for the love of knowledge.

And he hoped that universities would soon do more to teach the

kind of things Infosys does here, especially "soft skills," like

communication and teamwork, that the training center now offers.

After all, he said, the company would rather not part with the

$184-million that it spends each year on its training centers.

Its "campus connect" program, for instance, brings university

professors to observe the Infosys training so they have a better idea

of what the company is seeking from trainees.

"We would very much like for the education system to fill in the

gaps," he said.

Leading Indian universities are starting to make their own effort to

reform teaching styles on campuses. At the University of Delhi, for

instance, an Institute of Lifelong Learning runs a new project to

help professors develop and use animations, online exercises, and

other high-tech tools. "Some things you can't explain very well on

the board," said A.K. Bakhshi, director of the center, while he gave

me a tour of the facility last week.

It turns out, how wired the classrooms are is not the point—the style

of teaching is much slower to change than the gear in the rooms.

College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges.

Please send ideas to [email protected] or @jryoung on

Twitter.


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The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.


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Chalk and Talk' Colleges Are Challenged by India's Company Classrooms - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education