Indian Film Blames Caste Discrimination for Student Suicides

September 6, 2011, 11:22 am

A recent Indian documentary film says that in four years as many as 18 Dalits—the so-called untouchables of India’s caste system—at India’s top medical and engineering schools killed themselves after facing severe discrimination, reports The Hindu. Death of Merit, the documentary film, focused on three such students, two from India’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the third from one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, who despite scoring well in their tests were given low grades, were taunted in public, and were told they received unfair advantages because they got admitted under the controversial quota system. For instance, the documentary shows that Jaspreet Singh, one of the students who killed himself, flunked a test, but when it was graded again seven months after his death by a three-member team of senior professors, they found that he had actually passed.

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willynilly

Happy Days are here again – for the lawyers who will be filing law suits.
huesman

Please don’t shoot the messenger, but we’ve started using the term “connected learning” to distinguish the intent of investments in technology that look like “distance learning” in the form described by others here.

If the intent of a technology investment is to replace face-to-face in person communication with communication mediated by the Internet or in other ways (and overcome facilities limits and provide access to remote students), I’d call that distance learning. The term “connected learning” is meant to convey the fact that what we are doing is a different thing. We are trying to deploy systems that help multi-tasking, geographically distributed and highly mobile learning communities stay in touch with each other using the best technologies we can find. Maybe the term blended learning is more appropriate, but it doesn’t capture the intent as well.

As e-commerce became just commerce, I suspect distance learning will at some point just become learning.
debbykalk

As an instructional designer who works with many different organizations, I find that some organizations prefer one name over another, but all three are used widely and interchangeably. Each resonates a little differently but the distinctions seem lost on people who use these technologies but don’t spend their working lives thinking about them. I wish we had more differentiation to clearly discuss blended, webinar, asynchronous and synchronous courses, courses that integrate social media, and whatever new thing arrives tomorrow. Many courses are fusing all of these options in various ways, drawing on the strengths of each tool as appropriate. And isn’t that what we all really want?
catlkelley

I think this discussion is a red herring. Splitting hairs about the meaning of different made-up and ill-defined words doesn’t really help the field progress. Instead, we should think about “modality” and “instructional methods” – e.g. self-paced/independent vs. learning with a cohort; learning at a distance vs. face to face; using electronic media such as computers, tablets, mobile devices vs. traditional media such as books; characteristics of text/media/other content; highly interactive vs. transmitting/receiving information (lectures and their analogues); synchronous vs. asynchronous; and so forth. Instructional design professionals can identify where a course (or portion of a course) fits into this multi-dimensional space, and then design the learning experience to maximize learning.

If we want to describe a course to potential students, they will probably want to know practical things such as “how many times do we meet? and for how long? How much do the books/other materials cost? Will I be on my own, or will there be other students learning with me?” These practical considerations will matter a lot more to our potential audience than use of the words “e-learning,” “online learning,” or “distance learning.”

In other words, I think we’ll get a lot farther if we use specific, meaningful language to describe what we do.
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There are more problems to be attended to than thinking about what to call things…
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