I, V, M. But we are working on that. Yeah, that's why we are an audio only podcast. Yeah.
So, yeah, we should have a grooming sort of part like what to wear. Because I think the four of us, we can make our terrific negative list. So, like, don't look like Shriek K, don't look like Shriek K, don't look like Tony. And you'll probably look really nice.
Yeah. I mean, my hair is full bird's nest. Chuck looks like a Flipkart child. Thanks, my wife.
Yeah. Tony also, he looks like a bad version of the Viratkullia at the back. Having known Tony for a while, I must mention that Tony's sartorial sense has improved dramatically over the last few years. Yeah.
How much of it is you and how much of it is you all of it? All of it. I know what you ask all of it. What?
My case, I'm a body image issue. I'm a body image issue. I don't know if I had to go somewhere. There's a thing like too much selfish or so.
A little bit of insecurity would end. In my case, I walked off B-School and joined a hospitality company. I was still the day I left, I was still the shabby sdrecer, except that in my own evolution, I started wearing multi-colored socks and all. Yeah.
Yeah. When I think of all my friends who... Yeah. One of the things I felt very strongly about was socks.
Like, why do they have to be of the same color? I can see them. Yeah. So, all your concentrate on is socks are just to keep your feet from what about damaging issues.
My wife's just know there would be not just the same color, they would be the same pair. So, we are the podcasts for good looks apparently and not the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. ...in culture.
The word for listener is also auditor. So, our listeners are our... ...for the curators. Yeah.
So, it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Since we are actually on clothes, we can say that we are a satire podcast.
So, tailor made is a satire tailor made. Okay. So, today I wanted to... I haven't done any of the usual deep research that we do for these topics, so that listeners know for each simplified episode, we spend the previous Friday doing research.
No, we do a lot of research and... I mean, the... Maximum research is done in the very sophisticated area of profundities. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And research in general, the real point of mining is to the real mining. Yeah. Without the returns. So, we have done a lot of...
We have done a lot of deep research and, you know, our... This is what our staff of, like, 100 people who... Yeah, our writers. ...some of the profundities are...
...monkeys with typewriters. Yeah. And here is the profundities. There is nothing called darkness, right?
Right? It is just absence of light. Similarly, there is nothing called problem. It is just absence of idea to find solution.
Good morning. That actually makes me think actually. Like, was that profound or like... I don't know.
It sounds like... Are you a part of the solution or are you a part of the precipitate challenge? I used to always be very public. The one thing I used to enjoy in my brief and event pool say in the scientific field was organic organic chemistry.
And I was always very sad because it used to work that hard in entire practical sessions to arrive from beyond the color precipitate which you would have to show the prof. Yeah. And like, literally after the prof side and looked and said, Hi, I put a bar that precipitate would go down the ladder. I'm like, they're going to precipitate by the time I get to it.
It's a very valuable... So, when I was in, I think, 11th or 12th, we used to have those chemistry experiments, right? In the lab and the most challenging science experiment was to figure out which the salt was. You know, they'll give you some...
The thing and you have to do a series of experiments to see what it was. So that was the most challenging thing. You get it wrong, means you get it wrong. You don't get step marks or something like that, right?
So you get the whole thing where they say, you come in. And this is a tribute to our younger bodies and bravado. There were people who knew what each of these damn things tasted like. So they would end up working on all of them during the sessions.
So they would actually take the lamps off and they would look at like, okay, barium chloride or whatever it is, face like this. So during the exam, when they see it, they're like, they're like... And then... They would...
They would... The math therapist would look at... I'm a gula business, I'm called barium chloride gula. They would look at the math.
Oh, man. This is my math. This is my math. It's my math.
It's my math. It's my math. Anything got it? No, the original profinity.
I think Johnny Walker had a campaign which said, reality is an illusion under the absence of alcohol. So... Wow. Wow.
Okay. I think we're going to go. I think we're going to go. Okay.
Today we are going to have a discussion topic which I just thought... We were brainstorming on topics yesterday. And I had just finished teaching a batch at a university that I teach at. So I just thought I would like, we'll just talk about this new state of online learning and stuff and Tony's already laughing.
No, I want to say what the brainstorming had did was Jack posting on our group saying, I will come up with a topic during the course of the day. And I said, what course? And Jack said, Hey, let's do e-learning. So...
Oh, man. Those are fairly fissure. The standard or the bar for determining what an episode is going like. That is totally...
No, no, no, no. But I need to share this. Like, all of your podcast veterans, I am the new. So, once Picasso was doodling apparently in a restaurant and he finished and he crumpled up the piece of paper or whatever.
And then this person who was sitting next to him went up and said, Hey, you're throwing that away, can you give it to me? And he said, Sure, it cost $10,000. And she's like, Why are you just going to throw it away? And you literally did it in two minutes.
He said, I didn't do it in two minutes. It took me 60 years to get to this point. So therefore, I can understand why we don't need research at this point. We'll just go there.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Did you just paint all of us in a positive light? No, no, no, no. This is weird.
This is weird. Somebody bring us back down to it. I'll do it. Don't want to be honest.
Okay. Fair enough. Nice. You do the positive affirmation after everyone's left.
But bottom line is that whatever we go on, ramble about, we'll probably segue into something possibly interesting. So let's go with it. Let's do that. So I have, so I've had a pretty interesting, I guess, one year or so.
I was in, you know, everyone's been working online and all that. I'm not only, for example, I've been doing Zoom call after Zoom call or teams call, depending on your platform of choice. choice. I have actually been conducting a few courses like one of my own and one for university.
It's pretty interesting as an experience actually to be teaching online during this time and I've been reading a lot about whether this is the future of education in some way. There are advantages and disadvantages to it obviously. And yes, we started, we put it out there and see what everybody thinks about this. Before we start though, I have to say the first time I ever taught online was in 2011 or 2012.
So, Micah, the university that I studied at, they had an online for a really long time, 2010 or 11 or something. But obviously there was no Zoom or Google Meet and all that during that time. So, I remember still going from my home, I was saying, Andrej, at that time, going to a center, going to a center with a special video setup. They had a camera, they had a dedicated console and software.
There was a team of two or three people who were there as technical assistants to help me set up and do the whole thing, answer questions that came in on a very rudimentary console. Then from that, then it was 2020 on Zoom directly. That's the same way it's way back in history. I don't know if you remember when we all used to go to a studio to record a podcast.
So, yeah, studio studio. I was talking to my wife this morning. I was like, I wonder if everything goes back to normal, which obviously is not a dirty search. But if everything goes to reset also, I wonder if a lot of these things would go back to the way they were, including recording at studios because we've been doing the podcast.
Now, at least some of us have some of you guys have pretty industrial strength, mics and video setups and all that stuff. And with the recording stuff that's there, now, do places, maybe even invest in professional mics, setups and stuff like that. Is that even required anymore? Yeah, specifically, and connecting back to the topic, a lot of universities being able to attract now lectures with the setup, not just from their own city, you can make it over there, but pretty much anywhere around the world, which I did, I mean, we said here to a lecture in B school in India, which sitting on Malaysia, and it was not that they, I mean, yes, it was on Zoom and stuff and the rest of the class was also on Zoom.
But the fact that they now are reaching out to people working across the world. And because Zoom call is the same with whether it's from Malaysia, like the US or the other ones, the same thing. Yeah, okay, you entered there. Back in the day, when I did my MBA, we used to have visiting faculty and you had to actually take band bara to bring the visiting faculty to a place.
Like, there would be really pricey, and some of them, not all, some of them are really nice. But some of them, you know, you had to put mascara to for them to come and sort of, very good. Yeah, don't get too nostalgic, Narsal is ignorant. It just happened last year.
It still happened. We've all been visiting faculty. Yeah, we have all of us back. But yeah, it's so it's kind of interesting.
So at one level, it is easier than ever to get a visiting faculty. Like I did a panel discussion, I was hosting a panel discussion for Micah. I had the three people in mind for it. The hand-bab for instance, when you are at a show, you are fully immersed in the show.
There are no distractions. There's no possibility for distraction. But even I have started fatiguing of online concerts, because it's easy to keep the music playing and then go and read an article somewhere or just step into the other room and do something else or stuff like that. So I guess that sort of risk applies to even online learning.
I want to add a little bit here about a book that I recently read called Deep Work by Adam Kal Newport. What Kal Newport says is that if you really want to put in quality work, most of us, we don't need Deep Work. It is more like you have to manage people or you have to manage your presence on, because not all of us need to do Deep Work. But if you do, then you really need to disconnect from the internet and spend time with yourself.
And it's not easy because we are so wired into the world that it's virtually so your mind disconnecting your mind is virtually impossible. So you have right now all of us are podcasting. We've all got our phones on mute, but they're lying next to us. And if the screen glows, we're going to see what that message or the email was.
And so he says none of that is okay if you wanted to do any Deep Work. That is the minor side of being online all the time. Yeah, I just want to tease out a little bit of difference here. One is a concert or a movie experience, which can happen indoors or in a theatre or an arena versus learning.
And there are basically two different types of learning. As someone who's attended four years of engineering, then two years of MBA, but never paid attention in class. I can very honestly say that the things that I've mostly picked up are out of interest. So the online space allows you to do is not be boxed in by the structure of university learning.
You can practically go out there and learn what you want to. Therefore, the key factor here now is interest because accessibility is no longer a challenge. It's not like you need to choose from a finite set of courses, which is definitely a great thing. But obviously, then that means you need to have so much investment to actually learn on your own.
As opposed to the structured way where you have certain number of credits to attain the papers to fear, where you will somehow, because of that, learn something at some point in it. Also, the way a lot of Indian education is structured, I went to Christ College in Bangalore and we had 85% attendance, you had to have 80% attendance or you can't sit for your exams. Now, what that led to was obviously a whole bunch of people who were there, but somewhere else in their head or say out of the window or whatever else. But I mean, and conversely in that scenario, and that's what leads me to think about what he was saying to me.
There was this one prof, one of our literature profs who used to come in and he, he used to literally walk in the door and say that, okay, guys, I know a whole bunch of you aren't interested to be here. I'm literally going to market attendance for every single person who wants it. I will market attendance and then if you don't want to be here, please go. And I'm not going to hold anything against you.
It's not like I'm being sarcastic or I'm so angry. He used to want to be here. Go out and do your thing in the world. What I did was over the period of time, like, initially there were like a core group of students who stayed and pretty much a lot of them left.
But over a period of time, just not mandating people to stay, slowly grew the audience. I just wanted to stay and listen. I also correlated with the quality of the class because he was really good. And the fact that when you didn't feel like you were compelled to stay to people to pay attention a little bit more, and you have felt that you are the option to do not, but you're choosing to tune in versus being forced to tune in.
But again, it goes back to that, what Tony said, right? It's about that self-interest and motivation. I have a different question. So for those of you who do take online, like who you are teaching people online, you find that you have to make an extra effort to be interesting because online, it's literally like, you can't force anybody's attention.
You're playing tic-tac-toe or whatever the people on the computer, and it's a solidare. And is it harder to keep people permitted to whatever you're saying? Yeah, it obviously is, right, because I'm sorry, I think, Srikit, you will also be able to add to this, right? Since you had one of experience, I'm not sure if you have done a training or you're not a trained participant.
Yeah, that's right. I'll start. See, the biggest challenge I think that is, you don't know what their reaction is. I'm not the type of...
Yeah, it's not visible. And many of these kids choose to keep their camera off. And I don't want to force them to put their camera on because they may not be comfortable doing that. Yeah, sure, some of them will just come there and they will leave the classroom and all that.
But for a few bad actors, I don't want to mandate a rule where everybody was uncomfortable, so she's like, so you can't gauge beyond the point. And yeah, in that sense, you do need to make an effort to keep things interesting. So I'm just trying to compare what I just finished teaching. It was the same course when I used to deliver it physically.
There are some differences. You do try to add more multimedia. You optimize for your face and body language, less and more drama coming through the slide and stuff like that. So yeah, in that sense, and you try to do a few online activities where the students get together and break out rooms on Zoom and do stuff and all that.
But yeah, you do have to make an effort more. I think it's about being conscious of the medium that you're doing what works best, whether you need to convey a piece of gun, maybe whether the way you do it in real life will be different from how it's best conveyed via a Zoom meeting or something. But yeah, this note is definitely a challenge. The other challenge is these students who are from, at least in the form of a university education, where it's a formal regimented structure to go back to Tony's point, is different when you're self-motivated and you go on to Coursera or Udemy and take a course to plug-in gaps in your knowledge.
It's another thing when your entire university has mandated, like you said, like credits are there for attending online classes and all that. The one challenge is these are kids who are sitting from eight in the morning to six in the evening attending classes and all of us have Zoom fatigue at work and we still get some sort of a respect. But these guys are just online, online, online and various professors who are at different points of comfort with technology. Someone like me was like fairly comfortable doing stuff online and optimize delivery for online electics.
Maybe there are some professors who are just aren't comfortable doing this. In fact, the university I taught at or I teach at Flame there, they've actually been very supportive of this whole thing. I remember last year around this time was when she'd really started going down. Actually, not right now about the end, the master was when things really started going bad.
Last year we had a sensor that was going to get really out of hand. They locked on the university in the middle, just towards the end of that particular batch and actually they pivoted online pretty quickly and pretty well. They had online training for everybody, all the faculty that is and they even kept the university open in case anybody wanted to come to one of the classrooms and do shoots. So, there were no students, students were all told to bugger off back home, but they kept the university open in case they needed recording facilities which is kind of interesting and the whole thing has posed so many questions.
How much of in class is actually needed? Michael, for instance, the place where I studied their approach is now and I don't know whether it's going to sustain post things going back to some sense of normalcy. It's now they do a half an hour pre-recorded lecture or one hour pre-recorded lecture and then the class fine is used only for discussion. It's a model that's been thrown around a lot and it's existed to some point even before the pandemic struck and in many ways that could be the future where either in your hostel rooms or at home or something you have a lecture period or a semester or a few weeks of just going through content and then you come to class to actually clarify these discussions.
That is education at least a subjective part of education like business or something like that, maybe not the sciences or math. I think that might actually be a positive thing that comes out of the whole thing. This is now quite dramatically different from the way education is. So obviously there are going to be people who got it right and people who got it wrong and in this period of flux nobody knows who that is.
Just to add from one from a teacher's perspective, beyond a point if you've done more than four lectures irrespective of whether you're there physically or online, there will be about 20% max of the class that's paying attention to your best efforts. The one advantage of online is that now you don't see so while in some sense is a physical performance, the other day teaching is performance. It allows you some cues but there is not much that you can do and I think the basic thing is to just trust that the people who are listening are going to listen and then proceed with it. I mean this online window doesn't give you any kind of interaction that is sustainable.
It's going to be extremely draining for both you and the listener. But then again I feel it's also sorry to say that there is a I have a slight counter point over there to building on what Chuck said. There are ways you can bake in interactivity and feedback mechanism in the system which does not require you to just say camera on and ask people to like type in the chat and stuff but also like I mean we're just scratching the surface of this and trying to figure it out but that requires to make it platform innovation further as well. But do things like the action.
So I mean a session that I took recently where I was like you know there are these points that are coming across so maybe use these reactions and like say using a certain thing to kind of add a point over there and as we were doing these sessions and in fact beyond even the sessions we were doing virtual workshops with the clients and stuff where we had our international trainer who was coming in who was experiencing doing online workshops and they said to maintain the level of interactivity we need the video on is not required but when you agree with the point when you're seeing something that was special icons you could use and when you saw those when you were presenting so I was presenting a concept and in that workshop after having trained that I was constantly seeing someone like clapping their hands someone saying that okay I think there is an ability to bake interactivity into this it's just a medium issue and then again it's evolved to it so I think interactivity can come there. Yeah so my point is slightly different right so the one thing that we don't do well in India is three adults adults. If you were to like tease out this education module into two one is to say school and the rest is adult learning and then you say okay as an adult it is you know the onus is on you right I'm going to obviously be as a facilitator or a teacher going to teach to the best of my ability but the onus is not really on you to you know make that interaction or ask a question etc and I'm going to treat you with the respect of an adult like if this is not of interest you fine like there are several courses that I've attended that I've not been interested in right like the one thing that I learned out of four years of metallurgical engineering is cryptic crosswords to be honest so and congratulations on solving one yesterday. Yeah so I think that difference is important which brings me to actually like the one you know angle that I can bring in that is missing here is as a parent of a five-year-old right I've seen I've seen how that learning has been and it's like heartbreaking right because to be honest school education has very little to do with what to start beyond you know reading writing arithmetic too it's all about social interaction and facilitating a place where you can play and pick up social cues and you know improve yourself like I don't know if you remember in I think eight to ten standard we learned basically where minerals and ores are present in India and we had to draw it out on a India map and stuff like that like none of that ever added any value but the real value there was obviously making friends spending time in an environment which is safe but also helps you learn from peers and obviously realizing that there is a world outside where you know your parents how your parents treat you versus how your peers treat you etc so that part is really heartbreaking for both kids and teachers because if you're teaching kindergarten you can't you can't take the same approach that I said right you can't read the other person at all you have to make sure that they're learning they're writing their a to said properly etc so that's a that's a very different world yeah and the same thing that you said Tony for kindergarten obviously is more important at a formative age like that the same thing applies to some extent for higher education as well right looking back at I mean you ask anyone who's an MBA and 4 hours over here if we say what the value out of those two years at B school was it's really not about the classrooms that the classes that we had but really the grownup version of what you had mentioned right now is the network so there are two access of education so one is where you you learn techniques right so that's that's very clear and defined and that the teacher is teaching the students those techniques and some of them are simple some other complicated but they are techniques and that's one and the second is where it is completely interactive because the teacher also doesn't know everything teachers are like a mentor and the you know the the game the the learning from the class is as much or you know to a great extent a function of the interaction quality of the interaction as a tool of the instruction yeah so do you think that online detracts or sort of you know is it better equal or worse than a physical yeah so I'm not quite sure about it and I'll just answer this and have a rejoin it over Tony said a while back this is beautiful image beautiful or sad depending on your point of view image that I saw recently I forgot who posted this I think Karthikar I think east of Travar somebody on Twitter my daughter who is around my daughter as a like that was my same my daughter who is I guess around the same age as Tony's daughter Emma right now she drew her friends and the friends playing and chatting and it was basically a zoom window and her I because she's grown up over the last year forming relationships like how we are chatting right now and to us maybe that seems time sad like oh these kids aren't like thinking of you know friendship as being a playground or something but her daughter didn't feel anything different their daughter didn't feel anything different like ah this is what friendship is right now so maybe that is one thing and I don't know whether that's a sad thing happy thing maybe just was this a question linked in I don't know why I mean listen like if you put 35 year olds in a zoom window there aren't very many friendships that are being formed let's be honest I mean I I see how my daughter interacts so like I mean I don't know if it works for other parents great but I mean if there are parents listening to this just don't put any pressure on yourself sorry kids I actually got a report card for my daughter every other day and I'm like why why what is this report card nonsense right like I mean they've they're surviving this is like massive in itself yeah yeah yeah exactly there's one thing like they're honestly from my experience from what I've seen of let's say 10 months of sitting in class with my daughter every day seeing how other kids interact there is no chance of like forming friendship so you're very clear on that that this you know forming friendships are for finding new forms of you know online friendship or all that it's wow that sounds sidey by itself let's ignore right when said this is that's actually interesting side by their 20 because as I differ to your judgment by the way completely I defer to your judgment completely I'm just saying theory you are sitting there with a yeah I mean he's not going to be like model parent for individual so does I mean among I'm not just asking about your daughter but in that age group was like the older age groups are you seeing them having like non non school directed yeah like say JD it's or just catch up on like using online platforms is that is that it all prevalent about English yeah so in the first way we had like basically like bio bubbles with play dates right so like you would have like a trusted set of two or three parents or kids and we'd like send them over and stuff like that and physically yeah physically so but at the end of it they are like you know I don't want them to go when do I see them again and then the next one six days of conversation is about them right and rightly so because like at that age learning is not important at all it's just about like interacting with the world and like you know seeing pushing buttons seeing how things work and like so that's a point extremely poor or not at all a substitute absolutely not just even how do all these mediums get and all that no that's a fair point I think unless unless like you're one of those parents who are okay with homeschooling their children I think that is also a model that is present but I mean I am not one for that right because I very strongly believe I used to be like a proper shy introverted person and it took me a long time to come out of it and it wouldn't have happened if there weren't like you know if it's one for yeah it makes sense it makes sense yeah and then I wait so much so that like what you don't see for introverts of people like especially it's just social anxiety like if I first time I walked into a restaurant I couldn't just like place an order with a waiter or attract his attention or something as basic as that right so these things happen only with you know the social aspect of things which can never come through online yeah so one of the things about you know social dynamics so humans are basically social animals and there is a hypothesis is still like I guess it's impossible to prove but the hypothesis is that our brains grew not because you know not because we wanted to get better at hunting or finding food or whatever it was too it was because social dynamics were very important so yeah so being in a tribe and interacting with the other member of the tribe is a very important survival skill for all of all of humans and for that you need to be in a group so one of the things that I remember when I was in school is you it's comparative so you are in a difficult class and every or it's boring or everything is going about your head and a quick glance around you and you see most of most of your guys are on the same boat yeah you don't panic you only panic when you are the only guy who not understanding your world so on a zoom screen that's not going to happen yeah and the social assurance on the day of the exam where you tell each other oh I haven't seen I haven't seen it yet good basically just yeah I can't imagine how it is virtually right now for an exam that's something that I've not been through and that's another thing that you need to think through since somebody had asked how different is it teaching online this was also the evaluation parameters like how do you conduct exams now online like the university teacher they're they're encouraging teachers rather than to think exam they're actually asking them to as far as possible to try and do the evaluation via group assignments and you know even individual assignments rather than four students who do a three are they also I mean in some sessions some subjects rather you need students to not cheat right like for something subjective like marketing show you go ahead do you see and get inspired from whatever you want but for something else actually how do you stop them from opening up a chrome windows on the and what you're saying right about social impression I guess it just adds on to Tony's point I'm just going to use the other analogy of you know the live stream concerts that I attend as well to me the most memorable shows that I've attended aren't necessarily ones that were musically the best but the one where they were a chat window so if there's something beautiful about reacting to a song along with thousands of fans from around the world saying oh this is my favorite part it's coming up right now otherwise you're essentially just watching a youtube video for which you've paid a lot of money for the real joy really comes in just you know fans from around the world you know from Bombay here hey from check across the year yeah that's a whole yeah in some sense that is recreating I mean some part at least of the concert experience on a not like not that it can ever be recreating to some extent to some extent I guess it goes back to what's recasting some matter of the medium catching up in some ways I feel for instance like zoom is a great tool at what it does but it's not optimized for any one thing in particular I did see it see here so here I forget which the platform was but some startup was working on a basically zoom for teachers with more features that was specific for a classroom apart like a blackboard mode and some advanced forms of polling and assignments I mean zooms like if you see all the language around zoom even if you're taking a class it is still record this meeting or you know it's all still aimed towards corporate discussions so it's not really optimized for one anything right I feel like each of these platforms or new platforms will need to evolve that I mean again it's not going to bridge that there is Google classroom there is Google classroom yeah but obviously none of these are going to solve the other larger problems that we spoke about only obviously you know be it at a school level or be it at a be it at a see a B school level like I know people who are regretting joining B school during this year saying that obviously you're still paying or more or less is different I guess when you are deliberately doing an online course for distance learning at a reduced fee so that you get that you're in it for the certification and that's it you're really not bothered about social interaction whatever if you want to learn techniques that is yeah that's best that's actually interesting that's really interesting you mentioned that you're like I always I went to Simeyas is a science for my my MBA and my lifelong fight was always whenever I was to mention Simeyas is like someone used to take distance learning and I'm like no no no no we're not distance learning there's that there's that taboo and distance learning and I was wondering almost like I mean whether almost like the batches of these schools I mean B school is all about like what you know people the education in the classroom but you pay for whatever the networking or whatever that network is that you have over there so I mean I'm almost like are these guys like what do we refer to as the pandemic batches and they are like the learning equal people who are like who didn't have the networking opportunities who didn't have the opportunities to actually like I mean even with a guest lecturer for that matter like a lot of mean internship opportunities project opportunities used to happen when you finish your guest lecture and you're walking with a guest like a happy lunch with a guest lecturer and then that's why you actually kind of came up with something and they talk about their work and there's a lot of opportunity there and that's why I feel there's a whole that whole aspect and what you were talking about Tony the social and the educational opportunities that are so to say is fortuators like fortuators are circumstantial right which you encounter when you are either you either chance upon it or you are unwillingly forced into it not forced but if you circumstantially got ended up over there and suddenly you discovered something that was really good or learned something that was that you really wanted to so ironic right so while it's easier to get guest lecturers the ability to do this happens done sort of thing is much is less that's kind of interesting the other problem that that the other I'm not sure if there's a problem per se but now since you know learning can happen from anywhere if I had the resources I could get I could learn at say Harvard or NYU stone right now so does this mean now because of the pandemic all geographical borders are broken down etc doesn't mean that there will be few superstar schools or professors etc and the whole middle class of universities are completely wiped out because technically a Harvard if it does not want to necessarily be as exclusive anymore right I understand like there is always a physical limitation that our classroom can have only 200 students and then there is the brand based limitation as well like we don't want to expand from 200 to 300 000 because that'll dilute what our you know brand stands for and there have been some outspoken critics of this whole modeling including our hero squad Galway so it might be interesting to see what happens do people just gravitate towards the few places for instance that are big brands and you have this entire middle class of universities that are just scooped out completely and just do for universities for lecturers I think somebody else I think another someone said you just need to be the world's best at something and now because of the opportunities of the internet and some ways the pandemic based learning and all that you will be invited everywhere so you know I keep thinking about things yeah I mean I mean I can't do it sorry just to complete the research but it's almost like imagine a future where there is like a marketplace for teachers yeah yeah I'm thinking gris gale I'm thinking gris gale gris gale is a professional T20 player no matter which league pays for him right he's playing with rc t's played with rc t's played with somebody in bakistan somebody in bakistan somebody in bangalay some you pay me I come here yeah correct that's all so that's what yeah that's market so it's only your thing no no I would say in the current dynamics I actually think there is an imperative to reduce bad sizes so yeah previously if you could test a class of 60 the optimal class size right now I would say it's 10 then you can actually you know better that quality education but doesn't then it becomes the the constraint becomes the teachers availability right because if you now have to teach 60 students you have to be available across six hours as opposed to one hour so that's one aspect but I think where definitely there is an advantage for you know all of these new B-schools is that now placements can happen online right so you don't have to physically so I studied in iimcote one of the like initial challenges that that campus faced was that there were very few direct flights from you know major corporations bomb really etc so it would be like a three day effort for a company to come into place instead but now like there are like I don't know so many 30 I am I don't know what the number is but basically you can do it all online right so the placement part becomes easier you know we're all talking about subjects that still can be delivered online like I'm like thinking like how mechanical engineering would be taught online I mean I know you're joking but I have all your salt that's a salt tasting please let me know that yeah no I'm just wondering how the last year batches that are very reliant on going to laboratories and all that have been operating or even like theater or physical education yeah exactly yeah physical education I guess to still to some extent you still can do you can have an imaginative enough coach that instead just like how I'm doing online training with an instructor on cult I can imagine that happening but when you actually need equipment not everybody has a late at home right I'm guessing now please correct me if I'm if I'm if I'm if I'm not that said even before so I have been hiring mechanical engineering for mechanical engineers for three decades now even before the lockdown I've seen the practical aspect of engineering declining automatically but people really able to speak it up very quickly on the job so like they don't know for typical thing is you have a word near caliper and you have to measure something there's a way to hold over your caliper if you don't hold it right your measurements are not reliable and almost every engineering graduate okay here's no differential equation but even know how to hold over here but he would take precisely 10 minutes of instruction to know it's not that much of so if you know the principles some of the you know some of the practical aspects are easily taught it's not that it's not I would I would extend that for labs as well if you know for example that reaction A proceeds in a particular way and these are the dynamics of it physically doing it just a confirmation yeah fair enough during the lockdown last year around in I think around June July or so I actually was researching for an article I was writing called is it possible to teach design online and obviously some aspects of design can be taught online like say graphic design for instance but other where you need to be physically in the lab you play with clay and all that industrial design for instance and I so remember speaking to a couple of faculty one from NID one from Flame University another one from IIT's IDC and they are all finding it very difficult because the thing is they need to be in the labs in order to learn itself and make those mistakes look at objects physically yes there's still you can do autocad and all that for some part of it but other is very difficult some some professors have tried to be imaginative like for example one professor I spoke to who teaches material science or something of that sort she I mean they obviously can't come to the lab to play with all the materials that are over there so she just turned the whole thing around and said okay find substances not substances find materials from around your house maybe say substances from around your house or one of teenagers that could be something else or like find materials from around your house and like play with those so she turned the curriculum around a little bit but it's hard to imagine that that happens like that's not sustainable yeah yeah it's not sustainable unless imaginative professors wouldn't come up with something like that so are you working towards if you can't go to mica get mica get mica okay speaking as the only humanities graduating this all this group from the humanities part of the obviously I mean obviously you can teach literature and all those other aspects of humanities on zoom but I mean I remember in my course we had a course we had a section on phonetics and for that actually there was one part where our phonetics professor was like a he was a phonetics expert would come and observe how we are rolling our tongue in the shape we are using because I'm out to actually see the physics fanatic there was that level of instruction then we also had like something what was called I mean theater classes where we had theater and proscenium theater and a lot of theater classes and stuff like that's in all of those elements like that's and I was just reading up on how I was reading not here in not in India but in the US and stuff about how theater teachers are like literally losing their jobs and they are switching professions entirely nobody can learn theater online as such and which is where I feel that for a lot of these and the thing is also nobody's in the world where you okay we need to train as many doctors as we can and we need to train all these all these other people if theater is suffering nobody's really concerned right now they're like fine we can manage this out but what you're losing is a solid I mean if this is a particular for another two to even three years of grassroots there will be an entire batch or two to three years of students who have pretty much entirely abandoned their roots on theater and in fact that even extension not just theater but I mean I was interviewing some for another research that I was doing I was interviewing some kids school kids from in Malaysia and a lot of them are talking about how they are transitioning from their kids so take one to is very popular in Malaysia for kids to do and there's a huge this thing of kidsy abandoning take one to and switching to piano or switching to like stuff that can be taught to switching to playing an instrument or something that can be taught to zoom so there's a huge like take one to over the past years there's a huge bunch of take one to instructors who are out of work right and like a lot of these different which is quite physical instruction suddenly has not entirely out and like which a lot of these are a lot of students who would normally take up these which like their friends are entirely abandoning them so which we might even observe a few years from now like how there will be like this lost generation of kids who have never took up any of these things that some of these some of these streams might even die out because of it yeah yeah but to add to your point of like the theater thing while there might be people who there might be less theater classes there might be it might lead to new things like I can imagine people doing courses for say how to create a music-lontic talk which is now not just a thing but something that society itself is accepted so it might I'm pretty sure it sounds ludicrous to us right now but the thought of theater education would have been ludicrous maybe 200 years or so back so yeah so as with everything I guess this is inconclusive and there are many ways in which these are subjective cool I like I just want to say we used to be social animals before now we become social plants so social plants nice nice I thought you were going to go like anti-social animals or social media animals but I didn't think but play on animals that's interesting yeah nice nice yeah no we are social animals who live in a zoo back at him oh zoomology yeah that's a lot of money okay I think we have reached the logical yeah so what have you learned from this I always like to do a wrap up somebody's yeah no way so going back to the our team of going back to the previous episode on the thing about cookies I sort of said about federated learning of co-hosts I still think like there is there is a new medium to be explored where there are fewer students as opposed to the yeah I really like their observation because still now I've always been thinking that the online thing means that you're going to go from 100 students to 100,000 students this is actually quite an interesting point about the other way and it actually might mean that you know it becomes just more bespoke maybe there is an option maybe the middle class over here also gets followed up maybe there won't be 100 plus anymore it'll either be 10,000 or it'll be 10 well the big challenge here is not not the technique teaching part it's the you know the interaction you know how to get something approaching classroom level of interaction on zoom it's a problem that still should be solved in a big way yes wonderful and that we have more or less covered everything and I will send the final exam across to all our listeners please send it to exam department at simplified dot b y and so thank you once again everyone for listening it's been a fascinating discussion I think we should do more of these absolutely completely yeah it just felt like a zoom call I learned a hell of a lot I mean I thought I thought you yeah we didn't have to prepare all right so all the problems online learning by just doing it exactly and that we are inspiration for everybody out there except any of my students if you happen to be ready please go back and finish our assignments okay so Naren shall we say yes so stay safe stay zoom not always with like little asterisk over there especially if you are studying in school then don't stay only on zoom zoom out from time zoom out look at the bigger big space zoom then zoomed out what zoomed zoomed zoomed zoomed out you'll stop and smell the flowers and let's come and come on and cough from them yeah or unless the flowers are actually slightly illegal variety actually in this case you will learn a lot more in that way or also I am told oh like a mess please for advice the two floor that's a plan of social social I think we should stop by we've gone past the logical end now see you guys next week bye bye bye