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 operating system. Each seat had its own PC, 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 professor lecturing 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. 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 classrooms have 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 using PowerPoint 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 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.
