“Emergence, dynamics, and future of e-Learning in Pakistan”
An interview with Dr. Naveed A. Malik (Founder Rector, Virtual University of Pakistan)
Interview conducted by Mr. Aqeel Feroze (Chief Editor), Ms. Arab-ul-Mateen (Ex- Chief Editor), Ms. Noreen Zahra (Ex-Publisher/Designer)
Interview designed by Mr. Aqeel Feroze, Ms. Arab-ul-Mateen, Ms. Noreen Zahra and Mr. Muhammad Zaheer. Ahmed Saleem
Dr. Naveed A Malik is a renowned personality of our country. His great contribution in launching the e-learning concept in Pakistan in the form of Virtual University of Pakistan has been acknowledged at all levels. Government of Pakistan has also awarded him Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 2008 for his remarkable services for the nation. We fortunately got an opportunity to have some words of wisdom from him over his vision of e-learning future in Pakistan. This interview is being added to the Info-Mag “Entrepreneurial Tutor” on the completion of its first volume.
Q: Before we discuss the future of e-learning in Pakistan, we should go back to 2002 for a moment when the decision of establishing an e-learning based institution in Pakistan was implemented. What was the core reason behind the establishment of an e-learning institution in Pakistan?
Ans. One has to understand the situation that Pakistan’s education sector was facing i.e. only 3.5% of college going age cohort were actually enrolled in colleges or universities, whereas 96.5% had opportunity, but no access. The idea of Virtual University was forwarded in the discussion of the IT policy that was formulated under Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman in 1998 to 2000. As one can build campuses and universities but can’t make professors overnight. That idea was followed by a feasibility study funded by UNDP for an IT institute i.e. South Institute of Information Technology and later on other subjects were initiated as well. By the time the project proposal became a Government document it had been converted into a full fledged Virtual University. It was still not very clear as to what the fine details would be but the concept was that we would use Information Technology as a force multiplier and we would use the talent lying in the existing universities to develop our programs. So we would mentor and teach the students electronically.
Then we conducted an experiment to know whether students were conformable with purely written content, purely spoken content or video. And it turned out that even at some very advanced institutes where the students’ background was well above the normal average, the students preferred video, they somehow wanted to see the professor’s face. So we decided that we would do the video lectures being developed by very senior practitioners and we would support them by interaction over the internet through a Learning Management System. So the basic model was devised and this happened in the last month of 2001. So towards the tail end of 2001 we had outsourced the recordings to an outside agency, hired an auditorium and sourced a few professors who were Dr. Surriya Shaffi Mir, Mr. Mujahid Eshai, Dr. Altaf A. Khan and Mr. Faisal Shah Khan. These four people started their recordings and we were learning as we went and simultaneously written content was also developed. That is basically how we got started and after that it was an evolutionary chain of learning as we went and made modifications. One thing that we had discovered very early on the proceeding was that there was no equivalent model anywhere in the world especially from the perspective of what national needs were. So there was no other country that was using distance education for this purpose in this way. The focus of distance education in the west is much more towards adult and mature learners who are looking for a mid career change rather than full time young students going from higher school to university. And that in a way is also a norm for almost all of the open universities around the world that they are not looking at high school leavers joining university, rather they are looking at adult learners and professionals who are working and decide to change their field of expertise so they come back to school. However, the Virtual University’s perspective was formal education to supplement the capacity of our existing universities and we do that with the best available professors that we can lay our hands on.
Q: What was the initial reaction of the people with whom you discussed this idea when the project was launched?
Ans. When we did the feasibility study by and large the reaction was extremely positive but a feasibility study is a simply question answer interactive discussion session. When you actually get to launch, then you start realizing what the reaction is. There were two major impediments; one was that it was a brand new way of learning and teaching, students and their parents and public at large really did not know how this is going to work. So there was certain amount of hesitation before you are getting into such system. The other one was that there was and to some extent there is still a very negative perception of Distance Education (DE) in Pakistan. Not just in Pakistan, DE has always been looked at as the ‘other’ part of education. It has never been considered as a main stream. I sincerely feel that our approach is opening the doors of the classroom to the world. Like in a conventional university you don’t really know what happens behind the closed doors of the classroom. Here we put the classroom on a broadcast medium. Therefore, it was not too long before people started appreciating the quality of our course contents and realizing the new face of distance education and this went international, not just Pakistan. We received requests for affiliation from Nepal, India, and Rwanda. So our focus was actually the Pakistani environment but opening the doors of a classroom went a long way. It’s a battle that goes on; it has not been completely conquered. It will take a while but the initial hurdle is over. The major achievement is that the VU graduates are accepted at par, at other universities inside Pakistan as well as outside.
Q: Besides other constraints, low Literacy rate especially computer literacy, as well as poor English communication skills, pose a major obstacle for E-learning. How do you think this hurdle can be removed?
Ans. IT literacy right now isn’t that much of a problem as you can easily find abundant students who know IT and can work on the computer. But when we start thinking of the population at large then IT literacy will become an impediment and we will have to do something about it. Now we have already developed the CPL (Computer Proficiency License) and feel that it is quite a useful program. We could probably offer that to the public at large free of cost to become IT literate. The other half is a much tougher deal which is lack of English language skill.
As a nation we have thrown that away over a last decade. Pakistan was truly a bilingual nation and right now we have unfortunately no command over a single language. Students and school leavers of today cannot really express themselves properly even in Urdu. Of course Minglish does exist and you have various distorted versions of the language which suffice to get some basic communications done but the problem with higher education is that almost all the scientific knowledge that we are interested in is phrased in the English language. Few days ago, we had a meeting in Islamabad about the national video conferencing programs and one of the things that came up was: why don’t Virtual University offer English language courses and do that as a national service. So, there are three or four programs that we are interested in doing, first one would be the English language, secondly preparatory programs for math and science and probably a series of basic grounding in the literal arts, for example, critique thought, discussion etc. which we actively suppress in school years in our children. This means when they come to the university they are still rote learners they are not capable of really doing the critical analysis or thinking, thus we would like to develop these programs and offer them, perhaps during the summer, preceding the first semester at university. So you get them to start thinking properly before they enter the university and become curious and serious knowledge seekers.
Q Do you think that before entering the students to e-learning mode, any initial refreshers e.g. computer training should be provided to the students?
Ans. Definitely, it should be, but the nature and the perspective of students in Pakistan is quite different as compared to the students in the West. Deficiency or prep courses over there are treated by students as a serious method to overcome deficiency in their background. Over here they are considered as an additional burden. Students focuses on how do I get a passing grade and they are simply not interested in the knowledge or the skills that we wish to develop in them. Now the biggest problem that we have faced or understood in distance education is the fact that since we do not have any direct interaction with the students, no face-to-face, not even synchronous or real time interaction, it is almost impossible for us to hit them on head with stick and say sit down and study or motivate them in other ways. Which means even if we were to develop or offer preparatory courses or deficiency courses it would be that small tiny subset of students that would be self motivated enough to understand that there is deficiency in my background and understand that taking this preparatory course, I would be in a good position for the rest of my career at university. That would be a very tiny minority. However, by God’s grace we are in a position right now that developing such courses would not be a resource constraint, so we can easily develop and offer them. For that one student who is motivated, we would still go out to help him or her.
Q: Since the teaching in e-learning environment is different from the conventional teaching. Are there any plans for providing training for the capacity building of your faculty?
Ans. Yes! we are going to provide training as capacity building exercises and that will not be a one time activity. It will be an activity that goes on around the year, every year. We will probably have small batches 15 to 20 academic staff going into a workshop or a training session at one time one after another in an outsourced activity. But right now it is too early to even find out what type of activity it will be? The realization is very much there that we do need to do capacity building and training. The Wawasan Open University in Malaysia has won all kind of awards in terms of the quality that they are offering. Whenever they induct a tutor, the tutor undergoes a training session before being exposed to the student. But the difference is that Wawasan Open University tutor can actually go and hold conventional classes to the students who wish to get some tutorial. So the students would come to the campus when this tutor would come in front of the class and conduct a session. Thus the training is much more for a face to face interaction, thus is completely irrelevant to us. So if we look at West, in any or all e-learning universities in the United States, the interaction is real time which again means that the training imparted there would not be relevant to us. It is something we learned during the initial phase when we started setting up the university in 2002 that the world does things in its own way but they are not relevant to our needs. Right now what we are trying to do is, identifying the training needs of our academic staff and then developing a training program. So again it has to be a homegrown exercise and let it evolve in terms of quality through feed back. However, going back to your original question, yes there is plan for capacity building, absolutely!
Q: We have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with different universities like MIT, University of Bradford, etc., so what benefits can be drawn by the students and the faculty members from such collaboration?
Ans. Among our collaborative exercises, two of them are very meaningful. One is with the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences Lahore, where through MoU, we are actually offering many courses to their students of Bio-Informatics Program in their four year Bio-Informatics program. Their students are studying 14-15 courses directly from VU and we actually assess and grade them. So that is a big deal. In Pakistan, I don’t think there is any precedence for two universities collaborating like this so far.
As far as MIT is concerned we are linked in many ways. First of all, there is a consortium called LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium) formed by Professor Richard Larson. Virtual University of Pakistan is the founder member of that consortium which initially was focused on best practices in distance education, although, MIT itself is not into distance education but LINC organizes conferences almost once every year. I have been attending those conferences; and have been a speaker in all of them, in fact. In a way appraising the world with the progress that the Virtual University is making and the last one was in fact about our examination system which was in May this year. Simultaneously this consortium gives us an opportunity to interact with other practitioners in the field therefore we have good relationship with many institutions in the West. So, we can actually request trainings and content development exercises etc.
There is a slight problem with the language in which these universities operate, for example, Anadolu University is in Turkish and Payam-e-Noor is in Persian. Even when the Payam-e-Noor delegation came to Pakistan and visited us over here, they required interpreter for conversation and cannot speak English. As far as American and British universities are concerned, the language is not a problem but if you want to source any content from these universities, in lieu of MoU, would that content be of any relevance to us? It really leads to the point that we obviously can benefit from the expertise, content, methodology that these universities have to offer but we have to see with our eyes wide opened.
We cannot blindly take something from an advanced country and plant it in Pakistan and expect it to flourish. In true ‘Virtual University tradition’ almost, always we would have to look at something and then develop our own. But all of these MOUs give you an opportunity for insight into the working of these other universities and they open doors for you. So, that is the way we look at them.
Q. As blossom provides a knowledge sharing platform between the faculty members of different universities but restricted to mathematics and sciences so any such plans for management sciences?
Ans. Blossom is a sub project of the LINC network and so LINC in a way has slightly deviated from its original path of just best practices in DE. The reason that blossom is focused for a moment on sciences or mathematics is that we normally realize that these are the two weak points of students when they come to a university. More and more you will notice that there is an emphasis on STEP (Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan) and Blossom is focused more on the STEP side. And the idea behind Blossom is to promote creative thinking and horizontal integration of knowledge in mid and high school students so by the time when they come to the university they already have started thinking and become critical analyst. They don’t just accept the spoken or written words but they question it. So the pedagogical design of the Blossom if you have seen anyone of them is much more than a duet or a one way delivery, it is about a person on a screen that speaks for about 4 to 5 minutes and then ends up with a problem that the students are suppose to do with their physical teacher in class and discuss ideas and then come back to the video, so it is definitely a duet between a class room teacher and a person on screen, so it’s a different pedagogical model. But the basic idea behind the door we don’t teach anything. Absolutely not, that’s the role of the class room teacher who is supposed to do the syllabus part. Now, for the moment it is focused towards mathematics or sciences, it is focused because these were the two weak areas that we were consistently discovering. Nonetheless, if practitioners or teachers from other fields feel that there is an opportunity to do Blossom type of module, definitely we will welcome that, the only problem is that science and mathematics are exact sciences. So when you challenge the students you can actually solve a problem and come up with answer that is unique. If you take any of the social sciences, you can’t say, or you can’t make a statement saying “this is the right answer”. There could be so many right answers that can cause an issue unless it is simply one answer problem.
Q. One of the issues we use to talk about, that management sciences students are supposed to be well-groomed with good communication skills, and that part is so far missing in e-learning. What is your opinion about that? How we can bridge the gap and groom our students?
Ans. This is the other big problem that we are traveling with all along. It is not just for management sciences, all students should know how to dress, how to walk, how to converse, how to communicate, how to sit in an interview; just like that and this is a part of our research program and when we say our program these are the projects that I have headed at the Virtual University funded by IDEA, which is a Canadian corporation. We have asked for the University of Madras to transform their soft skills program into a DE program. So Professor Bharti Hari Shanker over there is transforming all of the material into online study material and then obviously we’ll do a scientific experiment to see how it compares against the conventional classroom. And if it works well, I mean we could very easily internalize it and start doing it for our students. On the same subject you see, one of the basic problem is that our students are speared out geographically. They all over the place and we cannot bring them in to a central campus, talked to them face to face and do the SOFT SKILL training etc. We have toyed with many ideas along the year, thinking in terms of equipping every campus with a video camera. Ask them to do peer-presentations during every semester and we would also post a video of the week or a video of the semester; saying look this is a good presentation made by student XYZ and the reason why we are saying it is good is this. These are the things that we have been toying with. Problem being faced here is that a huge segment of the population is home based. They cannot participate in campus based activities. Secondly, the campuses are not really of very good quality. We are in a way or really starting working on it; starting to establish a network of Virtual University’s own campuses across the country. One of the idea is that our own campus will have a studio; a one room recording studio which actually will be the presentation room. We already are doing VIVAS on video conferencing so the video conferencing is there but now we are saying put in a recording facility because video conferencing is in real-time and we can’t do real time with huge numbers of students. But we will say that look, do your own production. Do your own presentations, do a peer review. First you present to me and I present to you and things like that and try to develop your own capacity. Problem again is going to be that unless we find some way of enforcing it. It will have to be a self-motivated exercise and self motivated exercise for students in Pakistan, at least, means something that is not going to happen. How do we require it? That is question but if we put a recording studio in there then the requirement can be enforced. You can’t just tell me that I did make a presentation; I want to see it, so that is an idea which is floating around.
Q. Are we looking forward to establishing a liaison between industry and academia especially for management sciences?
Ans. Virtual University covers the whole country but unfortunately the industry is not speared out all over the country. It is concentrated in few large towns. Whenever we facilitate the induction either for internship or for jobs for our own graduates, it is going to be a very tough call to provide equal level of services across the country. So students in Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad or may be Peshawar but I don’t think so and Faisalabad for sure would have a huge advantage over there remote city counterpart. But again, we have found a good old piece of paper MOU with a Karachi Chamber of Commerce and one in Islamabad Chamber, Lahore Chamber is still pending, and these chambers should be able to, at least facilitate the induction of a university’s graduates with the local industry. But think about it we are in 95 cities in the country where our campuses exits. 95 cities do not have capacity or industry to induct. So we are looking much more towards local Entrepreneurial Approaches for our graduates so they can setup their own business and become job creator. That is the mode we are looking on. For that we have to think differently and we have to think in terms of helping them; so if somebody wants to setup a new business, can Virtual University assist him with business plans, feasibility studies, guidance in terms of how to raise finance, and thinks like that. These are the things that we could do.
Q. One of the criterions used by HEC for ranking the universities is research publications by the faculty members. Is there any future plan to sponsor/develop research center?
Ans. We have already set aside certain amount for research in this year’s budget. We still do not have a clear idea as to what research would be comprised of because we do not have very active research sources here. We are primarily a teaching university at this time but we are very clear about few things; all of the ranking criteria methodology, accreditation, etc., that is practice in Pakistan is completely based on metrics developed for conventional institutions. They do not know how to rank a DE institution. Then if they were to separate the two and rank them then there are only two names; Virtual University and Allama Iqbal Open University. You cannot start ranking Allama Iqbal Open University or Virtual University against Punjab University or Karachi University because research is only one of the criterions. For example, if you might have seen this advertisement in the newspaper from the computer sciences criterion body which says degree of the following 26 universities in computer science is acceptable to this body and again Virtual University was not in there. I received a huge number of emails from students as kindly tell us, is our degree recognized or not? And I said look, your degree is more than recognized, only they don’t know how to deal with us. Either I went and try to look at the form that they have for application and criterion let’s say in computer sciences, how many PhDs? If I take the screened PhDs, we are far better than any other university, if they say how many computer, we have thousands, so again we are way up there. If they talk in terms of student teacher ratio, again student teacher ratio including the professor over there (video lectures) and tutors over here, we are actually better than most of the conventional universities. Because what they do is, they have 20 people in every department, but a hundred students in one and the 5 in other. So on average the student teacher ratio is the better, but we try to maintain a certain student teacher ratio in all of our departments where come down the nitty-gritty, you should beat every metrics that they set out. And then off course, there can be all kinds of arguments, yes but you know the person on screen is not your employee etc but if he teaches you the course then why can’t we claim credit that the person is PhD. So again we have an opportunity and this will happen eventually. We have an opportunity to occupy a leadership position in defining the criteria for quality assurance and assessment as a DE institution. Again as a part of our IDEA project we have a complete regional project going which all the way from Magnolia to Pakistan, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia, every country is involved. And that is on quality assurance in Asian DE, looking at what the norms are or the best practices are etc. once we get the report we will be able to present all of it or a sub set of it to the HEC that these are the norms and standards for DE, which are practiced in the region so we are not reinventing something brand new. This is how you should measure performance, so universities take the ranking mechanism as someone is doing this exercise, let them do it. If you look at, not Pakistan, outside you realize that the ranking is always being done by a newspaper, or a magazine or publication etc and asking all kinds of tangential questions. So you want to bring that ranking in here so do that you’ll find Virtual University at the top of the hill, and then what will you do? People will simply not accept it. So I don’t really go for ranking.
Q. How the government is facilitating currently in spreading e-learning education and what are expectations or what should be done?
Ans. The government funded the establishment of the university and granted the charter so they were very keen and supportive. As far as HEC is concerned, it is still as keen and supportive as ever and they look at the Virtual University providing quality higher education and because of the way we are setup and the potential that we have, they come to us whenever they think in terms of national needs. For example, the critical need that has been identified over the last couple of year is that we are not producing quality school teachers. As a result, the whole system is rotten because of poor teachers and students who are not doing very well in schools. So they have come to us and said why don’t you start BS Honors’ program? So the battle of honors program is now on the charts as we are, Inshallah, going to develop in 2011. Those are the things that the government does, it does provide recurring budget and the recognition to the degrees, but we have not tapped one source but we are about to do so, provide resources in terms of land, that we will require in establishing our own campuses across the country. So we are going to talk to all of the provisional governments for providing the land. We will not ask the government for the money because that’s something they don’t have right now but again thanks to the Creator we are already in a relatively stable position.
Q. How you foresee the future of e-learning by 2015.
Ans. 2015 is actually around the corner; you should be talking about 2020 or may be 2030. I really feel that there is no way around it. Every university will become a dual mode institution, even in Pakistan it is going to happen. They will have to offer e-contents for convenience of the students. Look at the various things that e-learning or e-content can do for you. Let’s again go back to MIT. American educational experiences are expensive. I really don’t have a figure for you but I think that $30,000 to $ 35000 per year is the cost that is required to get education in an American university.
And what MIT professor stated in the LINC conference in May was that we induct about 1,000 students a year, each student paying $ 35,000 makes total of 35 million dollars and that is the cost either to those parents or students who are borrowing from the banks or working for paying this tuition fee. As far as we are concerned, the faculty of MIT the undergraduate class is like a chore. It’s like the thing we have to do which is distasteful rather being at my research lab or doing discussion with my graduate students. But we have to do this, and when we walk into a class there are 120 students sitting there. So it’s a zero interaction class where we just deliver the lecture and walk out. Given all on this can’t we tell them to spend a year at home? Why do they need to come to the MIT? I am just lecturing to them and I am not interacting with them. So I can record my lectures and they can view that at home. Save that $35000 for a student, save me the headache of having these classes and I spend my time elsewhere. As far as overall MIT budget is concerned 35 million is like a drop in the bucket. So it doesn’t hurt but you are actually saving because, even in conducting a class you are spending money. So it’s a WIN-WIN for society, for the institute etc, so a completely different perspective on e-learning, which is a driving factor over there. Over here it is still a case of, unless, we continue with our human resource development efforts over the next two decades, minimum, the state of a university is not going to change. According to Professor Mujahid Kamran, the Vice Chancellor University of the Punjab, the total number of PhDs in academia in Pakistan, all universities combined, is less then that of a University of Manchester and England is a tiny little island that sits in a corner of Balochistan and that’s about it. This is the difference. So if you think a way, let’s say withdrawing funding from the human resource development efforts and not giving scholarships to our people to do their PhDs, you realize that we are relegating ourselves again and heading fast into the dust bin of history. We just have to wake up and understand the importance of HRD and invest in it, not for a season or not for a year, keep going at it for 20 or 30 years till you come up with the point that when we walk into Punjab University, all the faculty is PhD qualified (i.e. 100% PhD) and they are enough of them. I see e-learning playing a major role for capacity supplement of conventional institutions in Pakistan and secondly as occupying a position in blended learning in conventional universities.
Q. Opinion and feedback of workshop and Entrepreneurial Tutor.
Ans. It is a fantastic activity and it is something I would like to see a lot more of. If you think about one of your earlier questions, this is part of your own capacity building that you are doing. The fact that you sit together and discuss ideas, somebody gives a presentation on a chosen topic, is actually getting somebody to do the work and then educate everybody else, so you are doing internal capacity building and this is critically important in any academic endeavor. So definitely I feel that this is THE ONLY GOOD, not only good but the only activity of this genre happing in Virtual University and we would support it in any way we can. I would like to see many more similar activities as the departments will expand and all the departments should be doing that. Eventually, it will lead into a research culture. Advice here is that instead picking old ideas for presentation/article you must go for cutting edge research being done around the world today. I don’t see any reason why Virtual University can not become the number one research university? Look at the potential for research in VU, first in education itself is phenomenal and that where I feel that we have the maximum promise that we should be able to become a power house in education research, methodologies, technologies, what works, what doesn’t work, instructional design pedagogy, etc., but even in terms of social
sciences, you are sitting on an untapped gold mine which is a network of 50,000 or 60,000 thousands students in 95 cities in the Pakistan and outside the country. You want to do a questionnaire, nobody in Pakistan can send out a questionnaire at that scale and get a type of response that you can do. I would like to see all of you doing some social sciences research, one way or the other, simple marketing research or some thing that actually has to do with the life of people and betterment.
Message
As far as this activity is concerned, this is a fantastic activity and must be continued and multiplied within the university. By the God’s grace the university already has developed a reputation for excellence even in Pakistan and abroad. Talking in terms of independent third party opinion that the virtual university is not just a successful university in Pakistan but almost internationally it is now becoming the best known example. We have several of our graduates already doing their PhDs overseas and we are very comfortable with the quality of our content but the areas that we need to work further on are the issues of SOFT SKILLS, English language and the IT literacy. In terms of a massage:
Keep up the good work and let’s do some multiplication of this work. Do take this concept of
being able to conduct research using this platform seriously and start working in that direction as well.
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