Dr. Nimmi Rangaswamy published a paper on Scaling Classroom IT Skill Tutoring: A Case Study from India at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018), Montreal, Canada held from 21 – 26 April.
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. Dr Rangaswamy and her team made 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. Their 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.