Education in India

Periscope 5: Future of online learning; Mission10x; Samjho Sikho in Bihar; No uniform school curriculum

• Insightful interview with Mike Feerick of Alison.com on the future of online education. Alison.com provides "high-quality, interactive, certified and standards-based learning free to the individual learner", something similar to the Khan Academy. Feerick also talks about the sustainability of Salman Khan's Khan Academy.

• Mission10X launches Advanced Academic Leadership Workshop in collaboration with Harvard Business School Publishing (Economic Times)

The aim of this programme is to facilitate principals of engineering colleges to enhance their leadership skills and develop them as institution builders who can make a significant difference to all the stakeholders in engineering education, Wipro said in a statement.

It is designed as three progressive levels of workshops, and includes instructor-led training as well as e-learning. During this process of leadership development, principals would enhance their capabilities in strategic thinking, vision building, skills and competency development, the company said.

Mission10X is a not for profit trust created by Wipro Limited in 2007 with a vision of "Pursuit of Excellence in Engineering Education through Innovation." The have conducted over 500 workshops for faculty members across various engineering colleges. One of their goals is to bridge the gap between the number of employable graduates and the number required by industry.

• Bihar shifts focus from enrollment to quality in elementary education (Bihar Days)

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Samjho Sikho’ campaign covering nearly 71,000 elementary schools across Bihar. ‘After achieving success in enrollment in schools, now our target is to improve quality of education in the schools,’ Nitish Kumar said after launching the scheme, also mentioning that the state government has outlined 20 parameters that will be followed by all schools.

The CM has also written a letter addressing teachers circulated to all elementary schools, to be read out to students wherein he suggests ways to improve quality of education. He said that in the last five and a half years, the state government has worked hard to ensure that children are enrolled in schools. “The government’s measures have succeeded to a large extent as only 2.5 percent children are now out of school. When I came to power in November 2005, 12 percent children were
out of schools,” Nitish Kumar said.

• No enforcing of uniform school curriculum, but core curriculum is being used voluntarily, says Kapil Sibal (Indian Express)

“There is no proposal to enforce a uniform system and curriculum at secondary and higher secondary levels,” HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said during Question Hour in the Rajya Sabha.

“CABE has endorsed the need for a core curriculum in science and mathematics at secondary and higher secondary levels across all Education Boards in the country, so as to provide a level playing field to all students to join professional courses,” Sibal said.

Replying to supplementaries, the minister said 21 Boards unanimously decided to adopt core curriculum in science and mathematics at secondary level.

“Accordingly, NCERT has developed core syllabi in Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics at higher secondary stage in collaboration with Council of Boards of secondary education and CBSE,” he said, adding core syllabus for commerce stream too is likely to be completed by next month.

Admission to medical college without having done science

Mount Sinai Medical School tests the waters.

For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.

So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation’s top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.

Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, “I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me.”

Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The program promises slots to about 35 undergraduates a year if they study humanities or social sciences instead of the traditional pre-medical school curriculum and maintain a 3.5 grade-point average.

For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers.

That debate is being rekindled by a study published on Thursday in Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Conducted by the Mount Sinai program’s founder, Dr. Nathan Kase, and the medical school’s dean for medical education, Dr. Robert Muller, the peer-reviewed study compared outcomes for 85 students in the Humanities and Medicine Program with those of 606 traditionally prepared classmates from the graduating classes of 2004 through 2009, and found that their academic performance in medical school was equivalent.

Can we, should we, would we attempt an experiment like this in India today?