Acumen Global Gateway Summit Sessions: Fireside Chat

With Sanjeev Sanyal & Adrian Mutton

With COVID-19 forcing the hand of many to embrace new ways and more digital/hybrid ways of working, it was only a matter of time before Universities reevaluated their historical framework and operations against the mass of potential that the new digital era has to offer.

Traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ are no longer viable options due to space, location and availability restrictions. The scope to expand digitally however not only removes that roadblock but opens up a University to attract more top talent from around the world. The introduction of a more digitally focussed approach now enables students to access higher education like never before. Sanjeev and Adrian talk about the opportunities that this new digital age presents as well as discussing what the future may look like for Universities and higher education institutions, as a result of becoming more digitalised.

Three Key Takeaways

• The digital age has well and truly begun and Universities/Higher Education Institutions need to embrace it and adapt or face getting left behind as more and more students migrate toward the digital way of learning.
• There is still very much a place for face-to-face Student and Lecturer learning. It’s essential that this way of learning and teaching isn’t eradicated completely as in certain subjects, that practical approach is still warranted.
• Regulatory frameworks in India may not yet be aligned to embrace the digital revolution but preparedness to learn and evolve accordingly will enable and facilitate the necessary changes to be made.

Below is a transcript of the Firechat with Sanjeev Sanyal & Adrian Mutton

Adrian Mutton 

Capacity is a big issue in India, because it takes a long time to build bricks and mortar. It’s very bad for the environment. Land use is a complex issue in India, and expensive and it’s perhaps a misallocation of resources. Currently, the majority, the vast majority of options either lie on campus or online. That’s it. And there’s not very much in the middle. Just talk to us a little bit about your vision. As we got so used to hybrid working and rotating people through hot desks in a corporate environment, same in government now as well, how do you see that playing out and using the existing infrastructure that’s built much more efficiently and effectively to produce greater levels of capacity.

Sanjeev Sanyal

This transition has already happened in the workplace, think of WeWork,right? Same infrastructure, a whole bunch of other other entities, whether it’s startups or various other kinds of economic entities are using the same space.

They’re just booking themselves a spot going, they’re doing their own thing and carrying on. I understand there may be certain areas of science where you have specialised equipment, etc. But remember, for the most part, that is postgraduate education, and at a specialised high science, much of education doesn’t require all of this. So, it is quite okay in my view, to think of this think begin thinking of the to the extent we have face to face interaction, we begin to do this basically, like we work you may even have for higher campuses in the morning, it is Ashoka University in the evening, it is Penn State, why not? And if they want a lab, even there is a lab at IIT Delhi, which can be hired for several hours or piece of equipment or whatever it is, for a certain time you go and do your experiments, or whatever it is you want to do.

Now, at the very cutting edge of very high science, I understand the need for dedicated stuff. For the bulk of stuff, you don’t need all of this. So I think we need to begin thinking of this, you know, people do their lectures, they’ve already understood it, done some tests, they’ve crossed some level of capability, then maybe that’s the first semester and the second semester, it’s, it’s in campus, so to speak. And that in campus could be anywhere on any campus, you could be simultaneously doing this in some work type space, and then you hire a lab and you do your own thing can all be a very disaggregated approach, what this will do is radically lower the amount of bricks and mortar we require. That is the real cost of education. And also, of course, professors. And now what you do is you free up the professor’s from giving lectures because you know, they just watch YouTube. Now all that they’re doing is all hands on stuff. So now suddenly, they can do all the cutting edge other things. So now the same number of professors can bump through a radically higher number of people through the system.

Adrian Mutton

I was on a campus recently with one of the Vice Chancellors from an Indian university who’s in the audience today. And I said to him, “How are things going?” He said Adrian, we were totally full, until I built that tower block over there. I can’t take any more students on board. And I thought that was crazy. You’re delivering quality education, there are people knocking at the door to come in, but you’re waiting for bricks and mortar to be established before you can build it. The purpose of my visit to that campus was to talk to him about using his campus during the summer months for Experiential Learning programmes where the peacocks run wild because there’s no one on campus. And it struck me that there is capacity, but it’s just in a different form. And one of the complaints about the Indian higher education system and I think it’s true for others across the world, which change is that the NDP provides green shoots for it’s just a new way of thinking and perhaps we don’t need this structured term approach. We can use those summer months to run programmes more aggressively and use the capacity that is there already. 

Sanjeev Sanyal  

it’s not just summer months, you see, we have created higher education or some sort of go and explore yourself kind of thing. This is all very good for relatively prosperous countries, and even in India for the relatively wealthy. For the bulk of people. They are basically wasting their time as far as they’re concerned. This is a privilege. On the other hand, if you think of education in the way I put it out as a largely mundane thing you did, many of these kids may be having day jobs, they can do apprenticeships, they can do all kinds of other things. And I don’t think this interferes in any way with their education, no matter how hard they want to work. For example, one of the toughest things you can possibly study for in this country, is to become a chartered Accountant. Now, it’s set up in such a way that you are expected, in fact, to be working while you’re doing your Chartered Accountancy. The quality of education is not poor. The testing system is rigorous. The people who come out of that are technically highly skilled. So if you can create these highly skilled Chartered Accountants using this mechanism, why can’t I produce other kinds of skills using the same mechanism, let them go and work while they’re at it.

Adrian Mutton 

You’ve talked about disruption and its role in higher education. Many other sectors have already been disrupted beyond recognition over the last five years, and in a way where industrial leaders felt that their businesses were going to be redundant very quickly, but they found ways of innovating and creating new business models. The higher education landscape is yet to be fully disrupted. Although as you said in your remarks, there are early signs that that is now very much underway. One of the biggest fears and opportunities for higher education is the evolution of chat GPT as a major disrupter, just talk to us a little bit about where you see that disrupting the education landscape and how universities can respond to it.

Sanjeev Sanyal

Well, there is the almost trivial thing that has already happened, which is that doing projects, Roger, and asking people to do projects is now pointless, because Chat GPT will essentially write out the essay for you. So that kind of thing has already happened. I mean, whether we like it or not, it gets even better. Now, of course, somebody may try to counter Chat GPT with an anti GPT that can actually check whether this is a Chat GPT generated essay, but I’m quite sure Chat GPT will work that out as well and disrupt that as well. So I’m not getting into the arms race there. My thing is that I think it’s actually more useful to think of it as an ally than an enemy. It’s an ally, because effectively it makes it redundant. The last thing you needed was the lecture theatre for we just got Q & A’s. The lecture itself is redundant anyway, because of YouTube. Right? Any kid who has studied through the COVID period was listening to the lecture online. So you’re going to listen to the lecture online? Why do you need to listen to your professor’s lecture? You can go anywhere in the world and listen to anybody’s lecture. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact my own kids had, in their own universe, swapped the passwords of each other’s universities, because they had amongst themselves worked out which Professor gave the best lecture on the planet. So if there was a great Professor at Khan Academy, they were watching Khan Academy having stolen each other’s passwords. So it made no difference. And now, of course, much of this is on YouTube, it’s free. And all you need to do is go and see how many comments and the number of hits, you can see you know, some of the better lectures get 20-30 million lecture hits. So you can work out if this guy has a good lecture, why would you want to do this, so the only reason you still needed your classroom was to do the Q&A. That is gone. Chap. GPT is good, GPT six will have solved that problem beyond recognition. So you don’t actually need lectures at all, for any of the traditional repetitive lectures that’s gone. So therefore, rather than see it as a problem, I think what you need to do is to simply standardise and simplify the lecture format, and simply turn it into something that people need to go through. And then as I said, the real fun is going to be to devise testing systems that actually test the person’s understanding knowledge and problem solving capabilities beyond what Chat GPT will do for him or her. So, that is, I think the real game rather than wasting our time trying to improve the lecture. Try and improve the testing system, which may have to now be done in multiple other ways, which is good. By the way, I think that will allow for better triangulation and attention now the universities will give to testing systems.

Adrian Mutton

Corporates constantly complain that they don’t get job ready graduates so in your vision of how this evolves? Do you see a different role that corporations have got to take in education? Or where does the evolution of academic delivery meet businesses so that that complaint ends once and for all?

Sanjeev Sanyal  

I think that complaints will disappear within 10 years, because universities can now scale up infinitely in some ways, see, the better ones that can create job readiness. Graduates can scale up infinitely because you’re now not able to give lectures to an infinite number of kids and testing. Yes, you have to invest a lot in good testing systems. But remember, using AI, you can also sort of do this testing on a mass scale. So now, what happens is I am a corporate, I go and explain what I need. Either the universities will take on what my needs are, and will create testing systems for me, or I find a large enough corporate like if I’m Infosys, or TCS or whatever, I will create my own testing systems and give my own degrees. So what will happen here is a huge churn. Because right now, the thing is that bricks and mortar have limited the gates. So the better ones cannot infinitely expand. But now in an environment where they can be infinitely large. If you cannot, either you provide something extremely specialised in survival, or you scale up massively, or you die. I mean, essentially, what’s going to happen is what Uber did to traditional taxis, that’s basically what’s going to happen.

Adrian Mutton 

One of the benefits of online education, particularly in India, has been that there’s been a greater take up of female students because they don’t have to worry about going over to campuses, they don’t have to be away from home too much. And they’ve been able to learn. Yeah, I think, where the crux of India’s challenges is that it’s not just about the 1% or the 2% it is the entire country that needs a high quality education and access to it.

Sanjeev Sanyal

Absolutely. So our problem is we have 1.4 billion people plus most of them are young. For me, building hostel rooms for so many people is a ridiculous thing. I haven’t been able to prove their pride, but proper primary homes. And now asking building an entire network of hostel room, people now have to travel all over the place, and then give up three four years of their lives waste of time, they should be able to take this education anywhere they wish anytime they want, maybe then they may have to travel occasionally, as I said for short periods to do the interactive parts or the do the tests or do the science and engineering maybe to visit a lab, but even there those things can be brought close to this person as I said there is and you can do it in multiple ways you can cut and paste them in multiple ways I may be working in Chennai, I did the first two years of the course in Chennai, IIT, and my company shifted me to Delhi, I finished my course in IIT Delhi, how does that matter, I just need to get the credits.

Adrian Mutton

I certainly subscribe to the opportunity to bring people together fairly regularly. Because I think those soft skills, the communication, the collective problem solving in person, there’s still a big role for that. And some of our greatest challenges around the world are not technological, they are people to people, disagreements.

Sanjeev Sanya

So let me say here, there are two things. First, it’s not very obvious to me that universities will necessarily play that role. Do remember that the business of going to university as a very common thing is a late 20th century phenomenon. Until the 1950. Only the rich really went to university and the odd really talented person got a scholarship. So it’s not the case that people didn’t socialise, they have other institutions for socialising. So for example, in the West YMCA played a role it’s now disappeared, but it was very important in India there was a network of gymnasiums called Carla’s, which used to play that role. Everybody was a member of a Carla and the neighbourhood. They went there, the young men usually but also sometimes women went there, and so on. So there were a whole bunch of institutions for socialising. So new kinds of institutions. So let me tell you, if universities are banking on this being their reason for survival, let me tell you, you’re in for a shock. Other institutions will come and create that space.

Adrian Mutton  

I think that’s it in a sense, good news for those international institutions who are in the audience who are coming here. Scared of building full campuses, for all the reasons you’ve outlined the cost, the complexity, just the management of it. And many of those senior leaders, who were here for this summit, have said, how do we find a model that isn’t a full campus but still creates value? So I think between some of the levels of anxiety, hopefully, there is some optimism and some ideas out there.

Sanjeev Sanyal

Secondly, there are two things. First of all, don’t assume that that social aspect cannot be taken care of by some other competitor. Because you allow all kinds of other things to happen as well. And the other kinds of institutions which may do it, as I said, if people are routinely working while they’re studying, maybe their companies will provide it. So don’t count on, you know, the traditional view of socialising, providing you with that space, number one. Number two, it’s not even obvious anymore, particularly true of us campuses, that they provide that socialisation given the ideological breakdown that has happened and much of particularly us campuses, but also now in many other Western campuses. It’s not clear to me that one of the roles that universities played is that providing diversity of views, that is not happening, on the whole, I think people are underestimating the impact of this walk, ideological purity that is imposed on Western campuses, has meant that the diversity that you were supposed to be exposed to, isn’t even happening. So why on earth should I waste time getting to a university to see diversity? I’m almost going to see an ideologically pure space where I’m actually not allowed to explore other ideas.

Adrian Mutton 

Just very briefly, you have the ear of the Prime Minister. What does the Prime Minister see as the role of the government of India is in higher education beyond the NDP over the next 20 to 30 years.

Sanjeev Sanyal  

With technology rapidly changing as it is, we don’t have a view for 20-30 years. Our basic point is this most important thing is change according to what happens, rather than get stuck with having these grand plans about exactly how it will go. We have no idea how technology is going to evolve. I’m going to adapt my game and not predict where technology is going to go. But to adapt to whatever happens quickly. By the way, that’s not just true of education. I mean, you can hear my lectures in many other fields. This is my standing. And this government standing approach to the uncertainty of the world is feedback loop based adaptation will always beat grand plans, whether it is our approach to dealing with COVID, or our approach to dealing with technology or with geopolitical situations, or with education. This is our standard approach to dealing with the future rapid response rather than grand plans.

Adrian

Very good. Thank you. Professor Aggarwal?

Professor Prabhu Aggarwal – Vice Chancellor, Bennett University

Two questions. Your regulatory frameworks are way out of line with your thinking, what you have kind of discussed so far, the government’s regulatory framework. Number two, why can’t you extend this backwards to K to 12 education?

Sanjeev Sanyal  

You’re absolutely right. Regulatory frameworks may be out of whack, but we’ll change them. But first you have got to figure out what it is that you are, what is the environment that is emerging as it emerges? We will change it, there’s nothing set in stone after all, we do this routinely in every other field. We are doing this in the stock market. We are changing. We changed our tax system, introduced the GST system in the economy, we introduced the insolvency and Bankruptcy Code and allowed all kinds of changes in the corporate sector. We are doing this in the defence sector. We’ve gone from being heavily dependent on the Russians to now becoming much more building our own capacities, and so on and so forth. So we routinely change. So if do not for a moment think that we are not capable of changing our educational regulatory framework, we will change it number one, number two as far as K to 12 is concerned, a little more complicated there because there I think at least particularly in the lower segment, you still need perhaps human intervention to bring in kids, smaller kids, and allow them as they get older. You see all these systems require that you know, roughly speaking, your ability to navigate, ask the right kind of questions etc. For medical os 1112 etc may be able to deal with it, but say a class for students may not be may still need to be guided for the time being. And in fact, this socialising issue is becoming even more important. So, I think for lower classes, some of this will happen as well. And in fact, there are opportunities here because, for example, for Indian language education, this is a huge opportunity for me to find, you know, several 1000 teachers in Bengali who can teach science of a certain quality may be very difficult, but it may not be difficult for me to find to such people, get them to do a series of lectures that I can put on on YouTube. And then the local teacher only has to make the kids listen to it, and then answer some questions. So, what I’m trying to say is even there, we can do these things, but I can see that you need an adult to provide some amount of hand holding for an 18 to 24 year old which is basically the year your university education, particularly undergraduate 18 to 22. That basically they are dealing with standardised information, Masters and PhD are dealing with non standardised education. So, information So, there I can see you again need to bring human beings back. But this is a sweet spot. Undergraduate Education, my view is a spirit sweetspot kids are old enough to be treated as adults, but they’re still dealing with standardised knowledge. So this is a sweet spot where you can allow all these technologies to basically free play.

Professor Prabhu Aggarwal

Thank you. Just still, I still think the regulatory framework needs to move faster.

Sanjeev Sanyal

Yeah, we can change it. In fact, the idea of these discussions that we’re having is to leapfrog.

Adrian Mutton  

Yes, I think in fairness to Sanjay for the past year, he’s been pulling me into his office for ideas and more ideas and more ideas. And it’s very much part of the role of you and Nitti Aayog. With Dr. Shah, who has been with us this morning, our driving is to make sure that the NDP is just the beginning of a significant evolution of India’s education landscape. Other questions?

Audience Member

So thank you for sharing your thoughts and giving us a picture where the students have the flexibility of choosing different programmes from different universities and, you know, work with the best of the professors across the world. But given that we are in a country which has got such a huge population, what, according to you, is the biggest challenge in making this a reality. That is number one. And number two, what is the timeline that you see that this can be actualised and can be practised in a country like India.

Sanjeev Sanyal  

The biggest constraint to mass scaling is that we continue to think of university education as bricks and mortar, large numbers of professionals giving repetitive lectures. Both of these are expensive things to do IE and of course, needing a hospital room. So the mental image of university education still is that some kid goes away for four years doing these repetitive lectures in a bricks and mortar place and spends four years doing it? This mental image is the constraint to mass scaling. And I’m just saying all of this is already redundant. The technology has already gone past this. So we are wasting our time trying to do this, we need to simply bypass the stage. And the alternative happens to be digital, an area which ironically, we are very good at already. So we have this opportunity of literally skipping over the bricks and mortar expansions phase and going directly to digital education. And of course, it comes with all kinds of freedoms that are not possible in a bricks and mortar environment. So if I want to study some random combination of subjects, a digital system doesn’t care. Right? I may be studying law in the morning and English literature in the evening, or simultaneously, how does it matter to the digital system? It doesn’t care. As long as I can then pass the exam testing systems later on, I can do five degrees in five colleges. How does it matter? If I have the absorption capability? I can do it in any combination. As long as I get the credits, by the way the NDP Does, one good thing is to shift everybody’s thinking in terms of accumulation of credits as the route to getting a degree. So if that is the way we’re going to do it, then you know, frankly, we can open this up in all kinds of ways. I mean, you can do one credit in one university and another credit in another university. You can be doing five degrees at the same time. You can do it at any pace you want. Why do you have to do it in four years? Some people may do it in seven, some may do it in two, how do I care?

Adrian Mutton

A final question and then we’ll wrap up.

Audience Member

Societies around the world have the uncanny knack of holding on to redundant concepts. And we’ve seen following COVID that universities because of the demand from students have snapped right back to on campus bricks and mortar universities,what needs to change in society? What are the triggers that need to happen for society to acknowledge that perhaps we don’t need to go to a bricks and mortar university?

Sanjeev Sanyal  

So this may not be a problem in India. Because the university educated population is a miniscule part of our population. So in the next decade or so most of the kids who will be going in for university education, are coming from backgrounds that have never had any university education. Their parents were perhaps the first generation that went to school, their grandparents were perhaps illiterate. So in that environment, there is no preconceived notion of how university education may have to be delivered. So they may actually glide seamlessly into this new universe quite fast. So this is one of the reasons for example, why we have skipped very rapidly into digital payments, because people who never had bank accounts went digital directly into a universe of digital payments. So sometimes there is an advantage of not having a legacy that you have to carry around.

Adrian Mutton  

Well, okay, one very last quick question. And then we’ll have to wrap up because the next panel is eager to come on, I can see.

Audience Member

One thing we’ve noticed, first of all, your talk was very, very thought provoking and very interesting. But when we see people who are taking classes from all over the world, via YouTube, or Coursera, wherever the drop off rate is very high. So unless a student is very, very motivated, are you concerned about a lot of students dropping off and left by the wayside?

Sanjeev Sanyal

So what will happen is, as it is now you’re looking at a world where the free market is going to function, you will see people will drop off or not drop off, as it will also create new equilibriums and setups will happen. Some universities will figure out ways in which to keep students hooked on and they will suddenly expand out. So I don’t think that we are in the very early stages of this transition. So Coursera, and so on are just new, just experiments along the way. And I’m 100% sure that people will work out formulas for keeping people hooked on the system. If traditional universities are relying on stickiness, as their main reason for existence, I think you’re in for a shock.

Adrian Mutton

I’ve seen with my own son, the gamification of his maths classes keeps him engaged for longer than if it was a simple school-taught maths lesson. So I agree that technology will keep up with that. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’ll agree it’s been a thought-provoking, challenging session. With Sanjeev, he’s always got views that are many years ahead of traditional thinkers. And we’ve been very grateful for you giving up your time.

And thank you very much.

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About the Acumen Global Gateway Summit: India

The Acumen Global Gateway Summit, held at the renowned JW Marriott hotel in New Delhi, marked a milestone in the Acumen@15 celebrations. This exclusive invite-only event brought together the Acumen Global Team, distinguished guests, government officials, and experts. Client partners convened to discuss international higher education, exchange innovative ideas, and shape a vision for expanding access to higher education. The summit fostered collaboration, inspiration, and knowledge dissemination among higher education professionals. With its unique setting and thoughtful discussions, the event offered an exceptional platform for networking and setting the course for a future of inclusive and transformative higher education.

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