Editorial

Techno-Pedagogy Needs Higher Education for the Future

8(1) 7–19, 2021
Mavericks © 2021 The Kerala State
Higher Education Council
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/2347631121989478
journals.sagepub.com/home/hef

Technology and tools have always been integral to teaching, but solely as auxilia-
ries and largely optional. Now, they have become central with the onset of
COVID-19 pandemic disruption turning online teaching as the only alternative
and learning under information communication technology (ICT) environment a
new normal. This has already been there over the last two decades as part of dis-
tance learning run by open universities. Online learning, widely hailed as a less
expensive, quick, self-directed, personal, flexible and autonomous system offer-
ing plenty of choices, goes well with the tang of juveniles. Naturally, online tech-
nological industry has been growing steadily due to the mounting demographic
pressure, commercialization of education, market-driven social expectations,
needs of the career hungry youth and above all the demanding knowledge econ-
omy. Registering a phenomenal expansion during the pandemic lockdown, online
technology is heading towards a big boom worldwide. We deem it appropriate to
consider the technology factor of higher education in this editorial.

Techno-Pedagogy
What most teachers mean by techno-pedagogy is lecturing online. It hardly
involves any tools other than an Internet-connected computer and a platform.
Some of them use a platform with course management systems, asynchronous
presentations, videoconferencing and online evaluation tools. It is important that
they do it web-based using facilities of the smart classroom, reusable content
objects, peer-to-peer collaboration, digital libraries, e-books and other assistive
virtual technologies enabling effective online teaching and delivery of course
material (Courts & Tucker, 2012). In general, the potential of digital technology
is largely under-utilized.
Digital technology has been enabling free online education through massive
open online courses. Printed learning material is being extensively digitalized due
to the growing number of e-learners. Many students store their learning material
in smartphones or iPads or iPhone or tablets (Melody & Ramsay, 2012; Tremblay,
2010). Online platforms and portals facilitate learning anytime, anywhere and
from any source world-wide. Besides, the social media systems such as Facebook,
Twitter, Pinterest and WhatsApp allow broad networking facilities for peer-to-
peer cooperative learning and collaborative teaching (Curtis & Lawson, 2001;
8 Higher Education for the Future 8(1)

Fisher et al., 2000). Information communication technology personalizes learning

through online platforms and transcends the time barrier, institutional space and
tutelage of any particular teacher. Technology-aided education providing such
flexibility and choice attracts the youth. Many of them prefer flipped classrooms,
a self-designed space, more dynamic learning experiences, freedom to apply con-
cepts, make experiments and involve creatively in the subject matter. They are
seeking new ways of accessing knowledge, which offer better learning experi-
ence. However, contrary to these new-generation students, teachers even in rich
countries are not eager to use technology in their classrooms, though they keep
connected to the Internet through chips, sensors and tiny processors.
Techno-pedagogy is changing day by day, and students are being accustomed
to a variety of new tools and apps. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been
increasingly in use in a variety of cognitive tasks probably over a decade now. AI
technology is heading towards designing deeper learning, reasoning and decision
making based on huge-data analytics. It is capable of designing learner interface
devices of interactive knowledge delivery at personalized user ends (Holstein et
al., 2018). Developing user interfaces, beyond apps and tools responding to touch,
tap and swipe, AI is now enabling operation through physical actions, gestures,
body movements, facial expressions and words (Lathuilliere et al., 2019).
Augmented reality (AR), a digital photographic technology distinct in itself, join-
ing with AI creates rare visual experiences of virtual and actual objects coexisting.
AR and AI combinations render this astonishing experience through 3D anima-
tion, modelling and simulation. Using wearable audio–video devices transcend-
ing the confines of screens, one gets the curious experience of AR that provides
immersive feel.
In the higher education field, AR interfaces help teachers in tandem transmit
theoretical knowledge and laboratory skill alike. Through in-context videos, it can
demonstrate how to do rather than describing what to know. Virtual reality (VR)
completely immerses you in a virtual world shut off from the actual. It can be used
in education to give learners the experience of drawing closer to the virtual
objects, personalize and move away from them. Learners feel themselves
immersed in the real world of actual objects. They enjoy the freedom to examine
and experiment with the objects. Indeed, it provides a wonderful learning experi-
ence that facilitates deeper understanding of complex processes for learners of
uneven competencies. This experience is further intensified by mixed reality
(MR) or hybrid reality, which blends the actual and the virtual using 3D holo-
graphic projection giving real-world context and scale to holograms. MR technol-
ogy can seamlessly mix objects of the real and digital worlds together around
learners to give them immersive effect as well as freedom of personalized learn-
ing. AI, AR, VR and MR combined will give students hyper reality of holographic
experiences and hyper immersive feel in the context of learning. Such techno-
pedagogic devices based on extended reality (AI+AR+VR+MR) not only help
save time and reduce the cognitive load, but also overcome learning difficulties.
Imaging science (IS), already in use for teaching medical sciences, is increas-
ingly becoming crucial for techno-pedagogy. It is a fast emerging field of science–
technology–aesthetics combine, addressing the chain of generation, collection,
Gurukkal 9

duplication, analysis, modification and visualization of images that increasingly

include imaging objects not visible to the human eye.
Everything that is indicated accounts for the indispensability of cross-discipli-
nary collaboration at intra as well as inter-university levels for the development of
multimedia educational tools production. This is a much wanted twenty-first cen-
tury field of multi-disciplinary teaching and research. Imaging is going to play a
major role in teaching any advanced science and technology. Imaging the invisi-
ble is an enterprising research task of vast possibilities of IPR and patents today.
Instructional methods, educational spaces, time and learning experiences change
radically through 3D VR based on IS and technology.

Edu-Tech Training
Our discussion of techno-pedagogy in the previous section shows how this com-
bine of technology with pedagogy demands expertise in different fields of spe-
cialization and skills to apply multiple tools. It underscores the inevitability of
faculty training in educational technology. Most teachers in the colleges and uni-
versities are experts only in their fields of specialization and hardly trained in
pedagogy. Even the trained among them are not adequately exposed to techno-
pedagogy. Of course, teachers of open universities are accustomed to online
teaching. By and large, teachers in higher education institutions need to undergo
training in online instruction methods and models of communication to run online
courses effectively (Repetto & Trentin, 2011; Stephenson, 2001). Converting a
conventional course into online mode is not an easy task, although many teachers
are forced to do it under the pandemic health crisis. They have to formally learn
how to design online courses using the instructional system design based on the
generic five phases—analysis, design, development, implementation and evalua-
tion. However, it is not easy to design a balanced curriculum for training teachers
to be effective in the fast rising technology-enhanced learning environment. What
extent of technological content should be combined with pedagogy to prepare a
content framework for training teachers in techno-pedagogy by balancing the
overlaps has been an unsettled issue (Harris et al., 2009).
Utilization of online tools is not optional anymore. Design, transmission and
assessment of courses in online mode are gaining precedence over the campus
mode. Computer, Internet and ICT have become undeniably decisive in today’s
higher education. They are already integral to the university curricula, syllabuses
and courses. Online mode is being incorporated as a complementary part reinforc-
ing the actual classroom practices. Techno-pedagogy requires teachers to use
online instructional techniques/tools such as software-driven course designing,
web-based instruction, computer-mediated communication, mind mapping,
administration of videos, imaging technology, infographic visualization, collabo-
rative learning, hosting audio/video podcasts and digital content management
(Lee, 2015; Trentin, 2010). Various visual tools/apps representing ideas and con-
cepts in graphical or pictorial ways make comprehension, analysis, synthesis,
evaluation and generation of new forms easy. Opposed to a linear text, mind
10 Higher Education for the Future 8(1)

mapping, infographic and imaging tools help structure knowledge along the line
of the cognitive process. Online teaching without its sophisticated multimedia
digital content is a tedious job for teachers and a burden on the students (Major,
2015; Salmon, 2000). It should be well-designed audio–video data transmission,
exploratory enough to teachers and an extremely rich learning experience inspir-
ing enough to students. Teachers need workshops and hands-on training in multi-
media tools for enabling them to professionally rearticulate themselves without
leaving their tasks to substitutes. Every university should build in-house excel-
lence in handling tools of multimedia production, for which professional training
is essential. Online teaching without necessary tools and professional competence
compromises quality. It makes training in techno-pedagogy inevitable as a part of
quality assurance in higher education.
Quality teaching adopts blended mode, which is being widely defined and
practised as a hybrid mode combining offline and online (Bonk & Graham, 2006).
Online mode partly replaces face-to-face teaching. A blended programme is either
a combination of online and offline courses or an ensemble of blended courses.
This engenders discrimination between theoretical courses amenable to online
mode and the hands-on or laboratory-dependent courses. Actually, blended mode
should be understood and practised as seamless use of digital tools in face-to-face
teaching. There is no online–offline binary over there, but technology-aided
teaching how to learn under new learning experiences. It is smart classroom
teaching taking benefits of technology for enabling students to achieve intended
cognitive levels effortlessly and quickly. Such a blended mode of web-based tech-
nology of advanced knowledge transmission makes teaching effective and learn-
ing easy especially for students of uneven capabilities and diverse needs (Kumar
& Turner, 2006). Needless to say that teachers adequately trained in techno-peda-
gogy alone can practise it effectively.

Future Evaluation System

Like teaching, the field of evaluation also needs technology optimization ensuring
reliable and rapid assessment of student performance. It is particularly significant
in India, where over 300 universities and around 40,000 colleges affiliated to
them follow the centralized evaluation system. Largely dependent on questions
seeking descriptive answers serving the purpose of checking narrative ability, fac-
tual understanding and memory, it is utterly unsuitable for assessing the student
achievement at higher cognitive ends. As an outmoded system with a number of
limitations, the centralized system had been discontinued since long back in most
universities in the world, where a combination of various methods of assessment
with the primacy of continuous evaluation is in vogue. Incorporating some such
good practices, the evaluation system in the country’s higher education has under-
gone various reforms.
Nevertheless, the affiliating system has not been allowing the universities in
India to give up centralization in evaluation, which is notorious for malpractices,
Gurukkal 11

secretarial overload, corruption and inordinate delay. All these problems have
forced some universities to go for computer automation. But hardly going beyond
the tedium of pushing the secretarial drudgery into technology, it amounted to
technology’s misuse as luxury. Technology-aided proctored examinations, elec-
tronic distribution of scanned answer sheets, online tabulation of grades and
announcement of results are examples. This is not technological optimization,
which means using technological potentialities for maximizing efficiency by sav-
ing cost, energy and time. In the context of evaluation, efficiency means quick and
accurate assessment of student achievement at all levels of cognition. Technological
adoption has to be sophisticated enough to be in alignment with the system of
outcome-based education, which follows Bloom and Anderson taxonomy for
defining student achievement. Most universities hardly frame questions with
action verbs appropriate to ascertain higher cognitive levels such as application,
analysis, evaluation and creation. There are soft solutions for designing questions
with knowledge categories and cognitive levels tagged to them. Many universities
make use of them to conduct examinations strictly guided by the stipulations of
cognitive taxonomy. Some institutions have established technology enhanced
proctored centres assured of reliability and reasonable quality.
Technology optimization necessitates new devices. In fact, they are quite fea-
sible with the existing electronic tools and software solutions. Internet-connected
e-ink pads (ICEPs) with facilities of personal identification, verification, online
delivery of questions, reception of handwritten answers and software-based sur-
veillance measures enabling non-proctored conduct of examination is an exam-
ple. ICEPs can be loaded with key answers and the necessary software for instant
assessment. Computerized question banks can generate the question sets and
deliver them to the ICEPs at the required time as scheduled and port the answers
to the server. Unlike paper sheets, ICEPs can be reused for ‘n’ number of times,
persons and examinations by uploading the necessary data. It is even possible to
set up non-proctored evaluation cubicles (NECs) in all institutions as necessary,
enabling the best decentralized conduct of examination least expensively, most
effortlessly and avoiding the secretarial and bureaucratic hassles. ICEPs with nec-
essary database can be arranged in NECs to make easy for students to register and
do the examination during their preferred slots out of the flexible period as decided
by the university. If so provided for in the setup, the students can obtain the results
of their examination at the click of a button.
Such technology-driven solutions alone will save the universities over-bur-
dened by centralized examinations, incredibly large in number, variety and clien-
tele, managed by a huge army of people. Either they must discard this dubious
system and go for continuous evaluation by the teacher and the peer-groups or
adopt technological sophistication. The first option reposing trust and responsibil-
ity on teachers is the globally acclaimed practice. If technology is the only option,
the university should evolve foolproof procedures ensuring confidentiality and
transparency through cost-effective devices and software solutions already avail-
able. Every university must secure its own institutional in-house expertise in the
technology rather than outsourcing.
12 Higher Education for the Future 8(1)

Critical Barriers
Many universities the world over are struggling amid critical barriers to growth
under obsolete procedures in governance and inadequate expertise in technology.
Since technology being the major transforming force of global higher education,
it is inevitable for heads of universities to keep abreast of its application in the
manifold aspects of their conduct (Kinshuk et al., 2016). Higher education institu-
tions, mainly universities, mandated for the production of new knowledge cannot
afford to be away from technology. They have to immerse themselves more in the
process of creation, preservation and application of knowledge by using the latest
technology. A critical barrier over there is lack of fast, efficient and hassle free
accessibility to accumulated knowledge and its sources.
Technology of online education, which has already been there, but more as
optional and fashionable than essential, is almost entrenched as the most impor-
tant complementary to the face-to-face method. Pandemic imposition of physical
distancing has turned it into an alternative to the actual teaching learning system.
This shift is only a passing phenomenon. Nonetheless, a potential technology
used fruitfully for some time will not let itself go, instead remain inevitable by
demonstrating new uses and attracting more users. Technologies bring about
transformative changes in education, its methods, ideas, perspectives and objec-
tives. They reconstitute the concept of competence, outcome, teaching, learning,
evaluation, quality, access, equity and excellence. Competence will be e-compe-
tence, outcome will be computational, teaching will be ICT linked, evaluation
will be online based, quality will be e-competency related, access will be technol-
ogy dependent and equity a mere rhetoric. Such changes put up a critical barrier
to progress combining equity, access and excellence. Universities have to fruit-
fully encounter such barriers contingent upon the introduction of technology
enhanced higher education.
Technology-induced flexibility and choice in education do help the youth per-
sonalize learning (Hart, 2016). Students get relieved of institutional control and
bureaucratic procedures. Web-based learning allows them access new sources of
knowledge and let their academic enterprises flourish. This prepares them
resourceful enough to respond to the twenty-first century challenges of knowl-
edge society (Kumar & Turner, 2006). However, it is a fact that many of them
need institutional guidance and control to be on track, which necessitate compli-
ance with regulatory norms of quality assurance. New institutional roles and ped-
agogical strategies have to be invented for ensuring flexibility and choice essential
for personalized learning, without upsetting the university’s principal objectives
and functions, viz., equitable production and transmission of new knowledge
through sustained social engagement. Students of eminent universities have the
freedom to do web based open online courses along the regular in-face interactive
campus learning distinct for criticality and creativity. This technology-aided facil-
ity of personalized and self-directed education combining online and in-campus
modes demands certain level of socio-economic resourcefulness, which is exclu-
sive. Technologies seldom resolve inequalities, rather than intensifying them.
Gurukkal 13

Technological ascendancy in higher education makes it extremely difficult to

sustain equity and access, for it implies a series of imbalance, collectively referred
to as digital divide (Selwyn, 2011; Wei & Hindman, 2011). Uninterrupted access
through satellite or fibre-optic circuits or mobile networks of sufficient bandwidth
is essential for online learning. Many higher education institutions in the Afro–
Asian countries do not have high-speed and low-cost Internet access. Free avail-
ability of hard and software, network equipment and uninterrupted connectivity is
still a dream for the large majority of people unable to afford them. Compared to
such amenities, AI, VR, AR and MR technologies are strikingly more expensive.
The more advanced the technologies, the costlier they become. It is a myth that
new technologies will drive down costs, enhance access and improve the quality
of learning. Several universities and research institutes are unable to invest mate-
rial and human resources in required quantity for the production and transmission
of knowledge. High-power computing software systems, various automated pro-
cessors and regular access to web-based data sets are very expensive. Techno-
infrastructural distributive injustice intensifies the still unresolved economic and
social inequalities or discriminations. Digital divide is a critical barrier to technol-
ogy enhanced higher education (Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010). How to
democratize the data pool is a big challenge of people-friendly ICT.
Most universities in the developed world have their campuses area-networked
and their institutional administration computer automated through the system of
enterprise resource management enabling perfect academic career accountability
of teachers as well as students from their entry to exit. Whether it is indispensable
to centralize customer relationship manager systems and learning management
systems into a more integrated process is a question often raised with eyebrows
up. Rigid institutional governance is nudged under commercial massification of
higher education, which makes the campus unwieldy and short of facilities. It
precludes ideal teaching/learning ecosystem in the campus and necessitates man-
datory imposition of various quality assurance measures such as centrally admin-
istered learning outcomes. Institutions tend to use technology to impact clientele
behaviour by regulating and monitoring the teaching/learning enterprises. Such
surveillance upon educational processes disables personalization of learning, a
vital facility enabled by the technology itself. Autonomy and technology are anti-
thetical to each other, for the latter is always used more for centralization and
bureaucratization than for democratization. Therefore, who drives the technology
in higher education is of utmost importance. It inevitably needs maverick profes-
sors to drive techno-pedagogy equitably, critically and creatively. The awfully
short number of mavericks among the teaching faculty is another critical barrier
to the development of higher education in the world.

Maverick Professors
A maverick professor, scholarly, critical, creative, rebellious and disruptive, is a
dissenter intellectual of independent thinking. Always an unorthodox among the
14 Higher Education for the Future 8(1)

orthodox and a conservative among the radical, she/he breaks the mould of flawed
teaching. Maverick professors make the soul of a university. Professors dissemi-
nate entrenched knowledge along with its limitations and inspire involvement in
the production of new knowledge in multiple fields of narrow specialization.
Mavericks among them guide their students to become perfect academics of bet-
ter and better holistic comprehension as they go deeper and deeper in specializa-
tion. With so much information available online and access devices on the rise,
higher education institutions demand teachers who are mavericks ready to dismiss
the stale routine of imposing syllabus driven lessons upon their students and con-
centrate on the task of teaching how to learn, stimulating curiosity, promoting
higher cognitive levels and rendering emotional support.
Already oceanic in depth and expanse, the knowledge domain is further aug-
menting exponentially. Retained and stored the least, the domain represents a
bewildering assortment of tacit and explicit information, ideas, concepts, princi-
ples and theories lost in disciplinary silos. Most of the accessible chunk over there
in print is stored in libraries as sorted and classified data. Their quick and mean-
ingful access is being made easier by database technologies, support systems,
solutions and apps. Indeed, various technological means and solutions do help
access the database of knowledge, the key resource. Data overload is a constant
source of stress for knowledge seekers today. Solutions of data mining provide
assistance in sorting clusters of relationships and discern paths and patterns across
the data sets. Technologies enable possession of the knowledge source, ferreting
out the intended knowledge and rendering it to the appropriate users. High-power
computing solutions support to select out of the accumulated knowledge, process,
evaluate and experiment with it to generate an improved version. In short, tech-
nology can instil competencies in theory as well as practice besides various skills,
but under the critical guidance of maverick professors.
What the university provides with is not merely competencies in theory and
practice. It offers a vibrant campus of rare learning experiences, which moulds the
learners into free thinkers, curious investigators, policy analysts, critics and crea-
tive artists as they choose to become. All these attributes do not grow out of tech-
nology-supported database, for it needs a genuine campus environment of
collaboration, interaction and exchange in learning. Maverick professors consti-
tute the critical element of the environment, which nurtures another genre of
knowledge, namely, the tacit knowledge parallel to the objective and rational
knowledge, namely, the explicit. Tacit knowledge is embedded in personalized
and context-specific discourses of the campus community led by maverick pro-
fessors. Involving subjective components such as personal intuition, experience,
value judgement, assumption, belief and so on, it is not easily disentangled and
expressed in a formal academic language. Intelligent and critical, tacit knowledge
is inherently innovative.
A teacher, rigidly methodical, lost in technology-driven teaching and a student
addicted to machine learning make no difference from robots (Fletcher, 2013).
Therefore, what matters more than technology is a maverick professor whose
insights turn adaptive learning systems into intuitive, critical and creative.
Gurukkal 15

Technology cannot provide any of these that guarantee student achievement

beyond task-specific learning. Techno-pedagogy focused on pre-planned instruc-
tional inputs and measurable learning outcomes without an inspired teacher goes
utterly insolvent. Teaching is not an artificial transaction of measurable attributes
but a natural exchange of high impact values, which extricates students to the
realm of collective conscience, ethics and morality. Learning is a nuanced, rela-
tional, iterative, recursive, constructive and humanistic enterprise that demands
guidance of mavericks.
Today technology does everything for learners. It collects, classifies, corre-
lates, processes, analyses, organizes, stores and shares. Learners command huge
amounts of data on their fingertips. A handy computer, at once a storage unit and
a processor, has considerably reduced their reliance on memory. Several wearable
brain–computer interface devices are likely to reach out certain other neuronal
functions too. Students shall be using more sophisticated iPads and tablets as their
inevitable tools besides various wearable electronic devices. This is an indication
how the future generation would access, consume and transmit knowledge.
Predictably, future professors are going to be proficient in using advanced
tools of AI, AR, VR and MR technologies in their teaching to put complex knowl-
edge across, quickly and widely. Nevertheless, these tools of advanced technol-
ogy on their own would not ensure the intended student achievement, for the
successful use of technology depends on the professor’s creativity and ingenuity
(Fisher & Baird, 2020). We need such maverick professors to design and use mul-
timedia instructional tools based on imaging technology of extended reality.
Technology cannot substitute them because they are indispensable to drive tech-
nology critically and creatively. Technological sophistication alone would not do
for achieving this. It needs maverick teachers and a vibrant campus environment
of academic reciprocity. It needs academic culture, educational structure and cam-
pus infrastructure. Technological tools and solutions can facilitate quick access to
accumulated knowledge and turn learners knowledgeable. You need creative
teachers, mavericks to kindle sparks in their minds. Multimedia techno-pedagogy
addressing students using advanced devices of future would need the inevitable
presence of maverick professors, who alone would be able to generate the envi-
ronment suitable for technology’s creative application.

Face-to-Face Learning
Face-to-face education is being critically re-appraised today in the wake of the
sudden spurt of online education under the pandemic crisis. Many presume face-
to-face method traditional and age-old, despite dissimilarities in the practices
thereof followed over centuries. A modern classroom teaching has nothing to do
with the dialectical teaching or learning in ancient Indo–Greek traditions. Face-
to-face teaching/learning in olden times is distinct for personal intimacy and
directness of appeal, least amenable to scale. Its forced scaling over the years
under demographic pressure gave rise to new institutions and practices, in which
16 Higher Education for the Future 8(1)

face-to-face had to compromise intimacy and directness. Where is personal inti-

macy now in the huge classroom teaching? What we hail traditional is modern
and almost entirely imaginary.
Let us examine the face-to-face teaching/learning engagement in the class-
room distinguished from the same job done online. Although the ideal type of the
personal contact and intimate relationship is not there, it is actual human situation
of academic transactions and hence entirely different even from its video copy put
online. At the outset, a teacher should agree that online education differs from
face-to-face teaching not merely in terms of the medium and environment. There
are various differences ranging across the art or science of teaching, outcome
designing, knowledge communication, learning facilitation and evaluation.
Synchronous instructions using digital tools and asynchronous learning replicat-
ing classroom practices cannot resolve the contrasts. As an asynchronous learning
material, the video copy has great relevance in distance education. But it cannot
be of much use if the video copy of the lecture is bereft of interactions. Even if the
video copy is a comprehensive record of the actual classroom transactions, it can-
not be the virtual. There is no de facto substitute for actual that has irreplaceable
advantages of being real. Nevertheless, we should not forget that the celebrated
real is not out there as an ideal type easily accessible to all. In fact, the real is an
array ranging between the hopelessly muddled and incredibly neat in rendering
knowledge plausible in the classrooms.
What we experience everywhere is online rendering of the face-to-face teach-
ing, a contingent alternative mode of communication, necessitated under the
COVID-19-induced physical distancing. Online education is not mere online
transmission of classroom course material and lessons (Anderson & Elloumi,
2004). Just as a movie is not a novel or short story imaged in celluloid but an
independent composition with its own language and aesthetics; virtual education
is not classroom teaching reproduced online. Instead, it is an emerging new sys-
tem of education with its own pedagogic means, forces and relations. Driven by a
fast advancing multi-dimensional technology, it is the next-generation education
system. Most of what the actual learning situation renders is very much within the
reach of the virtual today and in certain respects more effective (Kolpashnikova &
Bartolic, 2019). Its potential to provide exceptional learning experiences of higher
cognitive benefits is astounding. Interestingly, some of them are not easily obtain-
able out of the face-to-face learning (Kumar & Turner, 2006; Ladyshewsky,
2004). Personal relations, peer interactions, collaborations, making of collectives,
group learning, critical debates and social contacts, often highlighted impossible
online, are being made possible over there with increasing efficiency.

Win–Win Situation
Actually, discussions of online and face-to-face as mutually antagonistic modes,
one competing to substitute the other, hardly have any relevance today. Many of
us would still argue that face-to-face teaching is far superior to online education
Gurukkal 17

and the precedence of the latter has consequences of turning the youth apolitical,
mechanical and apathetic. As long as, ‘a robot or a human teacher’ being not a
choice thought of in the field of education anywhere on the earth, the latter chal-
lenging the former to perform body language or facial expressions is absurd (Lai,
2008; Selwyn, 2019). Robots imitate gestures, postures and facial expressions;
recognize voice; and reproduce it. It is meaningless to challenge a machine to
build emotional relationships, show empathy or hatred. We should not forget the
separation between the living and the non-living. Robots are not going to replace
teachers in the near future because the touch of life will last until extended reali-
ties conquer human senses and synaptic transmissions.
‘One or the other’ is not the question anymore. When the blackboard and chalk
had come into vogue making instructional effect increased, nobody tossed over
‘chalk or talk’, but went well with ‘chalk and talk’. Likewise, now experts seek
how to enrich face-to-face teaching more and more by means of technologies. It
is a win–win situation. Whether any of us wish or not, face-to-face teaching will
draw closer and closer to technology for maximizing efficiency and reducing
time. Its future virtual supplement will be AI-driven imaging of AR and MR pro-
viding immersive learning experience, which is going to be the next-generation
sensibility and medium of communication. Studies in a large number of journals
and other research publications vouch for the development and expansion of tech-
nology-enhanced higher education everywhere in the world during the past one
decade (Xie et al., 2019). Big companies provide several solutions and tools for
quick access to knowledge just at a click distance, and no campus can remain
technology-free. Technology, at once the global economy’s forces of production,
commodity and capital, cannot be stopped (Suarez-Villa, 2012). It is futile to
resist the development and expansion of technology that matters (Nye, 2007). ICT
revolution, which brought down substantially the cost of passing information
globally, is the marker of the fourth phase of the globalization (Baldwin, 2016).
How to use it critically is the only alternative. Borrowing the famous trajectory
from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, we can say that the people who resist technology
first deny its benefits, grow angry, try to bargain, get depressed and finally accept
it (Kübler-Ross, 2005).

Rajan Gurukkal (Editor)

rgurukkal@gmail.com

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