Pratham for QTIME

Sort of pratham – the first step for the QTIME learning framework to take off was at Pratham, Mysore. After presenting the essence of the framework to the Trustees of Pratham, I am excited. Pratham may one day take pride in the first step it to introduce QTIME learning in India.

I am hoping that we soon hear QTIME learning framework making a difference in learning. Please don’t confuse this with Montessori or Kuman or any such learning methods that we hear quite a bit, or, Khan academy, Tata Interactive, and many such pushes making a difference in education. But why QTIME now?

Education that one gets must be consumed by the society that had indicated its desire to consume it. If not, the society has partially failed to set goals properly. Education has taken such a dramatic turn in India, when it looks back past few years it may not recognize itself. It may see the litter that it has left behind turning education into a commercial product which has taken a whole new meaning pushing the efforts needed to instill learning into the minds of seekers to the back seat.

Each and every person, I have met and discussed, says that the education system in India must be changed. What is the point in setting up exams in the year-end – letting the entire student community learn to answer questions through tuitions than to let the students learn to understand the subject that is being taught? Education is ripe for a constructive disruption. Disruption has to become a global phenomenon! I have heard similar remarks from other educationists in USA saying the same thing, but for different reasons.

It goes to show that something has changed in the recent past to accept that the current way of designing the curriculum is not working and delivering it has become prone to failures. Big IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and others recruit graduates in thousands but need weeks to orient them to workplace conditions incurring enormous training and re-skilling costs. Can this be fixed somehow?

There are pushes towards e-learning amounting to certain extent self-learning. It takes learning out of the four walls of brick-and-mortar institutions and to make it available in an open-ended environment to provide flexibility and to reach workforce that needs to fine tune its skills every couple of years to keep pace with the changing times.

But who is changing times? How fast? And how drastically? It was initially blamed on automation and automation was blamed to take away jobs. Automation was successful in doing things faster and avoiding human errors to creep up otherwise.

The times changed again and the blame was shifted to Internet. The speed at which the errors could propagate, the distances to which it can propagate became uncontrollable. The very connection was misused and abused and hackers attacked the systems that were connected to propagate viruses instantaneously and hurting the very core of the automation process.

The times changed again to deal with this by way of designing preventive and defensive systems and forging security around the core processes. This was again misused and the fight took to newer heights to design much more robust security systems to protect the increased use of internet for commercial transactions than to do research.

The attacks increased and varied from phishing to pharming, worms & viruses to regenerative hacking systems that pervaded  the newly created mobile platforms.

24/7 services provided were no longer limited to operating three or more shifts at one location, but connecting to three or more locations working in the same time frames, exploiting the time-zone differences to provide the service. The same concept was used to manage supply chain requirements to ensure manufacturing never stops.

The QTIME learning framework has learnt from all that to predict that a learning process that can ramp up skill development and can increase the capacity of institutions providing skilled training is needed to combat an ever-changing landscape of the connected community. By enabling the quadrants of the QTIME learning framework and capturing the essential information from each quadrant, a systemic thinking can be initiated to predict how the landscape will change and which learning dimension is going to be under attack and how do we need to prepare while we see the window of opportunity is continuously decreasing.