Online classes aren’t the problem. Offline mindset is.

Imagine a taxi driver from London in the year 1980. Lets call him Patrick. One fine evening, Patrick is driving a car full of passengers when suddenly an accident in a nearby science lab teleport him 40 years into future.

Within a split second, Patrick finds himself behind the steering wheel of a self driving Tesla in 2020. He frantically tries to find the gear shifts and clutch pedals in the Tesla in order to assume full control of the car, not knowing that the sophisticated engineering of his vehicle had rendered those mechanisms obsolete, and therefore unavailable.

To add to his fear, Patrick realizes that he is steadily closing in on a car ahead of him. Panicked, he presses the break pedal with all the strength he has. Result: a vehicle fully capable of driving itself comes to an abrupt, screeching halt. This all happened because the driver could not comprehend the new realities that existed around him.

Applying this analogy in today’s scenario, Patrick represents every university management in Pakistan (and the world at large) that is struggling with basic questions like “how to ensure attendance in e-lectures?” and “how to prevent students from using google during online tests?”. The Tesla car in this analogy is, of course, the idea of delivering education through online medium.

In many ways students were already taking online education since at least last ten years. They were flocking to online tutorials and lectures to learn new concepts, or to enhance their understanding of existing concepts. This was the driving factor behind billion dollar valuations of distance learning platforms such as Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and more. Clearly online classes were a popular alternative to physical classrooms.

Why then did it become a problem when universities in Pakistan decided to go online in the wake of Covid-19 lock down? for answer to that we will once again have to go back to our Tesla analogy. While the likes of Udemy and Udacity stepped into their Teslas knowing full well what their vehicles were and weren’t capable of, most Pakistani universities were haphazardly pushed into a future that they were woefully unprepared for, and tried to drive their 2020 Tesla as they would drive a 1980s Toyota.

While most distance learning platforms were experimenting with novel teaching approaches made possible by technology, most Pakistani universities under direction from HEC, were busy trying to figure out how best to emulate physical classrooms in the online medium, including forcibly adopting limitations of physical classrooms that should no longer exist in a tech enabled environment. Case in point: the HEC directive for universities to ensure attendance and punctuality mechanism in online lectures.

That directive would make sense in an offline world where teacher can not be available 24/7 to repeat the same thing over and over again. In an online environment, however, videos of a recorded lecture can be made available and viewed multiple times at no extra inconvenience to the teacher. Any queries and discussions can be held in chat rooms or forum threads over a broader span of time, where each student can contribute to the discourse at their own time of convenience.

The well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempt to force class lectures to be delivered live at specific times can bottleneck the digital infrastructures of under developed communities by forcing everyone to come online at the same time. It also causes problems for students with limited internet connections and therefore puts less privileged students at the very same disadvantage that e-learning platforms promised to eliminate. In short, it brings the Tesla to a screeching halt when it could have driven itself on its own.

Likewise trying to figure out a way to stop students from googling, too, is akin to searching for clutch pedals in a Tesla. Lets face it. A vast majority of students who will graduate over the course of coming months and years will have access to internet for nearly every second of the rest of their life. It makes little sense to try and see what they would do without it. Instead, the onus is now on educational authorities to design exams with assumption in mind that student will be able to search for information. Its about time we get rid of exam patterns where answers can be copy-pasted from wikipedia or course books. Tests should now be based on real life scenarios where not only is internet allowed, but there are even extra points for effective use of online resources for the purpose of extracting, validating and utilizing previously unknown information.

I believe the above examples are enough to drive the point home, although a full list of such examples is too long to be summarized in a single article. For what it is worth, I do not blame the teachers, the universities or even the HEC for this. Not everything has to be someone’s fault. When faced with a situation with a lot of unknown variables, it is human nature to start from what we already know, even if that knowledge has been rendered obsolete due to changed circumstances.

Being an optimist, I am hopeful that as the panic settles we will start to adapt our driving habits to take full advantage of the modern Tesla, instead of trying to adapt the Tesla to our habits of driving a 1980s Toyota.