Nimmi Rangaswamy The SIGCHI paper
Scaling Classroom IT Skill Tutoring: A Case Study from India
India is home to the largest under-25 demographic profile in the world, but lacks a job-ready educational system. It requires a wide-spread, skill-oriented educational model, equipping youth to thrive in highly dynamic job markets. As a response to the huge demand for technical education, a large private skill-tutoring ecosystem has sprung up in India but remains geographically limited. This paper, drawn from a three-month ethnographic research conducted in Ameerpet (arguably India’s largest IT skilling hub), probes the pedagogic style and characteristics of tutoring, and offers reasons why learners prefer to enrol into a physical model of classroom teaching over online courses. We make design suggestions for online learning platforms to attract students who are marginalized in the more formal and competitive education system and opt for Ameerpet-like skill-hubs. Our primary offering is to suggest a shift in perspective of online education platforms to include job readiness and accompanying changes in course content and delivery.
DIODE workshop “Development Implications of the Digital Economy: Theory and Methods” International Workshop, 22-23 January 2018, UCT
T Skill Education and Job-Readiness for Millennial India
The past three decades has seen the slow and steady rise of a novel, market-centric IT skill tutoring eco-system in several urban centres across India. These centres are basically a response to the demand for learning basic and advanced IT skills. The IT tutoring institutes can be found in the form of skill tutoring classes, driven and managed by the private sector, which offer short, condensed material that promises job-readiness in significantly less turnover time compared to the formal education system in India. The tutoring eco-system evolved alongside the IT boom in India two decades ago, having ridden the wave and persisting today as a response to the rapidly changing skill-sets in the current Indian IT job market. The marketing and course structure identifies and targets employability as the key goal of tutorial institutes bridging skills learnt and the job market associated with the IT industry.
Ameerpet, our field site, is a dense bustling commercial suburb of Hyderabad city and arguably the largest IT skill tutoring hub in India customised for IT skill upgradation. The increasing numbers of students opting for technical and engineering courses and the dubious quality of a large pool of engineering colleges and institutions in India has created a critical demand for quality teaching that remains a challenge to date. The Ameerpet tutoring institutions caters to an extremely varied student populace due to their strategy of designing low baselines for existing curricula and matching it with appropriate pedagogic and teaching styles. It is also interesting to observe the tutoring market adjust course content and delivery for the more ‘intelligent’ and resourceful student.We hope to unpack the parallel processes of market mechanics and modes of delivering educational material to discern the specialized learning environment of Ameerpet.