Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Time: 1:30 – 2:45pm
Location: Room 1302 Ponderosa Commons North (PCN), 6445 University Boulevard, Vancouver
While Blended Higher Education (BHE) promotes sustainability through availability, affordability, and flexibility, it paradoxically also turns out to challenge the implementation of SDG 4 in regions with rugged geography and critical political tensions. It forces us to rethink the concept of sustainability in the context of BHE.
In this presentation, Dr. Mandal throws light on the northernmost Union Territories of India i.e., Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and Ladakh, brawling with difficult terrains, extreme weather conditions, and political instabilities where the ‘emergency online learning’ during the pandemic period aggravated the social and educational crisis, rendering the implementation of SDG 4 difficult. He argues that in the changing modalities of HE due to the pandemic, it becomes important to revisit the term “sustainability” in BHE. He argues that the prevalent understanding of SDG 4 requires incorporating the learning outcomes of students to address the digital outcome divide, which calls for special attention in online spaces. His study provides evidence that certain other factors largely impacting the digital outcome divide include students’ readiness, institutional support, and teacher preparation.
Dr. Mandal references the large-scale study he coordinates on Indian higher education that has gathered quantitative data from more than 3000 learners across thirty-two case study HE institutions in J&K and Ladakh, India, along with extensive qualitative data to build the arguments supported by empirical evidence.
* UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 focuses on education and aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
About Sayantan Mandal
Dr Sayantan Mandal is a senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu (IIT Jammu). Previously, he worked at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA, Govt. of India) and the Department of Adult Continuing Education and Extension (DACEE), University of Delhi, New Delhi. He received a Master of Arts from Aarhus University, Denmark, and his PhD in Education Policy Analysis from the University of Deusto, Spain, both with scholarships from the European Commission. At NIEPA, Dr Mandal coordinated a large-scale study on Teaching and Learning in Indian Higher Education and co-authored the Indian Higher Education Report 2017 on Teaching, Learning and Quality. At IIT Jammu, he is currently coordinating a research project on Integrating Digital Technologies with Digital Education (ITLDE) in the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh region and is part of a pan-IIT research group investigating the impacts of the pandemic on teaching and learning in IITs across India.
