Stuck in the classroom — students, teachers, NEP 2020 Premium

To realise the vision of the NEP 2020 fully, a serious reconsideration of the number of courses and classroom time a course in the new four-year undergraduate programmes across India is necessary

Indian students in Higher Education (HE) are spending considerably more time in the classroom than their European Union (EU) and North American counterparts. Yet, they remain at risk of being relatively undereducated. There are primarily two reasons: higher proportion of teaching time in course credits and higher number of courses a semester under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

An average student in a university in the EU or North America takes approximately four courses a semester with a maximum of three hours of lectures a course a week. This brings the total classroom time to a maximum of 12 hours a week. On the other hand, Indian students enrolled in the new four-year undergraduate programmes in Indian universities must take five courses a semester with four hours of lectures a course a week. This amounts to 20 hours of classroom time a week. These extra eight hours in the classroom do not leave much time for essential academic activities outside the classroom such as self-study, reading, or working on assignments, most likely leading to exhaustion and reduced learning.

A casualty of this increased classroom time is the number of assessments that are actually feasible in a course. In the earlier version of the choice-based credit system in the three-year undergraduate programme, where students took only four courses a semester, there was relatively more scope for continuous assessment. Now, with increased classroom time, students find it difficult to work on anything more than two assessments a course. This could impact the diversity of assessments, privileging multiple choice questions-based assessments that are easily graded via phone apps over assessments such as a term paper or a reflective essay that requires more time and effort from students.

Thus, increased classroom time risks incentivising rote learning and perpetuating the school dynamics where teachers are owners of knowledge and students are passive recipients. At least at the university level, students need to be pushed to own their learning. This is possible only if they are allowed time to reflect, plan, and execute their learning, explore learning outside the classroom individually and with peers scaffolded by assignments such as reflective essays, group projects, and cross-disciplinary problem solving.

Addressing this reduction in the number of possible assessments is important because NEP 2020 lays emphasis on continuous assessment. In this system, the final grade can be aggregated from three or four assessment components spread over the semester. Such a system provides an opportunity to design a mix of low and high stakes assessments, incentivising continuous effort and learning, rather than cramming up before one or two examinations. Continuous assessment allows considerable flexibility for faculty to tailor assessment frequency and type to meet the learning outcomes of their courses. It is also a way to receive continuous feedback for faculty to adjust teaching strategy and for the students to adjust self-study strategies.

The increased classroom time impacts the quality of teaching as well. The extra eight-hour a week in the classroom for Indian teachers eats into the time available for research, course revisions, development of new courses, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. This negatively affects the quality and currentness of teaching. The classroom time of two to three hours a course a week in the EU and North American universities, with a total teaching load of two to three courses a semester brings the average weekly classroom teaching load of a typical university teacher in these countries to nine hours. In contrast to this, an average Indian faculty is expected to teach 14-16 hours a week, with time spent in the classroom varying from eight-16 hours depending on how flexible the institutional administration is in interpreting University Grants Commission guidelines.

Teaching a course as per the vision of the NEP 2020 includes designing the course, selection of reading materials, development and administration of assessments, as well as grading. This is in complete contrast to the earlier model where teachers were responsible mostly for classroom lectures with assessment and grading taken care of centrally by the affiliating university. The elite central universities, Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Management could be an exception to this with possibly fewer than eight hours a week in classroom teaching a faculty along with substantially higher resources. But it is important to note that the bulk of teaching and learning in India happens in public universities and colleges, and not in these elite institutions.