Mumbai: Assessment of children should be competency driven and not based on examinations, and likewise teachers must move beyond being just a provider of information and instead help students in learning new things, speakers at a conference said Monday.
"We need to bring about pedagogical changes where one is thinking about a teacher's job as not a provider of information but as someone who can tell you how to learn. Assessing children should be driven not by examinations but their competency level.
"Children should be evaluated differently and not examined so that a great future musician does not end up in an engineering college without his wish," said A S Kolaskar, Consultant and mentor of the Neotia University, Kolkata.
He was speaking at the session on 'Internet 2025 - its impact on research and higher education' - at the 102nd Indian Science Congress here.
He said the demand for good motivated teachers at the university-level has gone up but their supply has lagged behind.
Kolaskar presented case studies of Internet impact on research and education, underlining that textbook structure hasn't really changed as such.
Emphasising on affordable and inclusive access to higher education, he suggested roping in global experts to overcome existing severe faculty shortages.
Bharat Bhaskar from IIM Lucknow said that with improvement in technology, the big data and AI (artificial intelligence) based analysis technique would probably be anticipating our every move.
With wearable devices and augmented reality, early detection of disease risks would become possible, he said.
While BITS Pilani Vice-Chancellor Bijendra Nath Jain spoke about e-attendance being a reality with smart devices and automated attendance in large classes.
