Schools must learn to co-exist with Covid-19 threat on an ongoing basis: Nandan Nilekani

Mumbai: Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, stated that schools needed to be reimagine itself to become resilient, innovate, think strategically to co-exist with the threat of Covid-19 on an ongoing basis, since the domino effect of the Covid-19 could be felt over many years. Nilekani suggested that schools must learn to synchronise seamless learning between home and school to cope with the flip flops in lockdown cycles over a year or two.

“We have to be prepared for the fact that lockdown cycles will continue. Even if we do reopen schools, there could be a Covid-19 outbreak again and they may have to close it again. We may be in the mode of switching off and on for a year or two. So, schools will have to synchronise learning from both school and home,” he said on June, 6 while speaking at a virtual conference on the ‘Future of Schools’ organised by Ashoka University.

Nilekani felt that we needed to revisit our basics in our new reality where “classrooms were not the only location, teachers not the only facilitators and textbooks not the only medium” in learning. With standard content capsules and assessments available online, he felt that the role of teachers will move on from being content providers to that of being mentors, hand-holders, evangelisers, building self-esteem and self-confidence for students, both physically and remotely.

Also, schools would now have to ensure “continuity, quality and inclusivity” of learning anytime, anywhere and across all mediums – physical or digital, right through external turbulences like Covid-19. Nilekani, who is also the moving force behind India’s digital identity scheme of Aadhaar, asked schools to be as resilient as Aadhaar card based payment systems that facilitated 400 million transactions for 150 million Indians in the peak of Covid-19 crisis in April 2020. 

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Nilekani felt that India was at a much better space, than many other countries, since we had already invested in digital education and the Covid “discontinuity” just forced rapid change onto us. “We don’t have time; we have to do rapid implementation. We need to think boldly and out of the box. We need to deconstruct, recombine, reuse, repurpose and increase the velocity of innovation in the way we do things.

Your (School’s) ability to be flexible, agile and to use the digital infrastructure to accelerate towards the goal of preparing every child for the future becomes very important,” Nilekani opined.

Nilekani is also co-founded of Ekstep Foundation, a non-profit organisation that works to facilitate e-learning in Indian public schools, cautioned that learning must be inclusive and accessible to all students especially the disadvantaged children, who may not have access to mobile phones or internet.

He recommended an existing system in Himachal Pradesh, where students got printouts of worksheets from the local customer service centers and got them uploaded for assessments after a week. 

He did caution that technology could never replace social capital (in terms of  interactions, conversations, serendipity, which was very important) and felt that eventually learning could be a blend of both physical and digital even after the Covid-19 threat was managed. –By Hepzi Anthony