The closing down of classrooms due to the Covid-19 pandemic has given new impetus to online education and instruction. As universities, colleges and other higher educational institutions were forced to close campuses down, instruction had to move to the digital mode. This emergency shift has opened up an opportunity. Indian educational institutions and companies should seize this opportunity, global as well as national. The economic contraction resulting from the pandemic will squeeze the fiscal room to step up public investment in education. This provides education entrepreneurs and institutions an opportunity to bridge the education deficit by creating content.

Monetising the opportunity creates a revenue stream for educational institutions to improve their infrastructure and their brick-and-mortar and virtual offerings. Online education can supplement, not substitute, classroom education, and, in the process, transform the traditional offering. Online coaching will flourish but, that apart, going digital would help traditional educational institutions and educators to significantly augment their efficacy as well as teaching resources, whose nature would evolve as access to cloud computing increases, say, to make use of virtual or augmented reality for rich educational content.

This push to create quality content, to digitise classroom teaching, should be leveraged for the global market as well. This can be a critical tool to improve educational outcomes in countries of the developing south, particularly countries where the medium of education is English. India has an edge in science, engineering and mathematics, and the digital content that has been developed can help Indian educational institutions and companies access the overseas market for supplementary education.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Economic Times.

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Seize the online education opportunity - Economic Times