The best Pakistani universities will soon be getting their online programs up and running!

The online degree in Pakistan saw a tumultuous last few years. The scandal of fake degrees scams did not augur well for Pakistani graduate students. Those who wanted to invest in graduate education found the entire scandal demotivating and demoralizing. The highest court took a suo motu notice of the fake degrees scam which was first exposed by the New York Times in 2015 and has been further investigated by the media and courts around the world.

Then there were physical schools and diploma houses that seemed like legitimate institutions of higher education but unfortunately mispresented their credentials. In some cases, their reputation was well-earned but many of the diploma awarding institutions became the target of government investigations due to their fraudulent practices, which included charging outrageous fees and promising jobs they can’t deliver.

Without concrete education quality, many of such diploma awarding institutions are being driven out of business. Today, online degrees and certificates are becoming more popular with students and employers in Pakistan and much can be seen from a raging success of Digiskills.pk. Why suddenly online programs are becoming popular again?

Prestigious schools

World over, famous, top-tier schools have embraced the online education including prestigious schools such as Ivy Leagues Yale, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth all offering either online degrees or short learning courses. Some of the many other top-tier universities with online programs include the likes of MIT, Stanford, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and Penn State. When students see top tier schools accepting a new model, their apprehensions subside. Many students expect that time has come for top-ranked Pakistani universities to take their degree programs online and delivering high-quality content that is equivalent to, if not in some cases better than, what they’re delivering on the campus.

It’s great for the universities also. For starters, universities now increasingly see online education to broaden their reach and more effectively fulfill their missions. Online education also results in reduced cost per student. There is already growing evidence that when online programs are done well, they can be as effective as in-person education.

Millennials are more comfortable with technology

As digital technology takes a stride with growing number of 3G and 4G consumers in Pakistan, graduate students expect their learning options to diversify as well. More students in Pakistan are now comfortable with the on-demand nature of technology and the quality of product or service it can deliver. When everything can be done online – why can’t education be? With millennials increasingly convinced about technology in every walk of life, from riding a cab to ordering food online, then why can’t they learn in a way different from the way people learned in the past?

Introducing a convenience model of graduate education in Pakistan

Technology has produced an expectation of convenience, giving leverage of time and resources. From Pakistani student’s perspective, there is a massive appeal to being able to pursue a desirable degree without having to pick up and move across the city or commute long distances from Karachi to Lahore or from Gilgit to Islamabad. The online degrees are flexible in terms of where students can be while completing the work, and they offer access to the same high-quality resources and faculty that students would receive if they were in a physical premise.

Learning Approaches

Online programs are as diverse as the schools that offer them. The courses range from mental health awareness to financial and risk modelling. The learning modules to cater to students’ requirements are also evolving. The focus now has been on the engagement part without any long, drawn-out faculty-led lectures but instead learners engaged throughout the learning process through interactive chat rooms and discussion beds. Interactive exercises like spot on quizzes, polls, interactive demonstrations of concepts are other ways online degrees now utilizes active learning space. In some cases such as Coursera and Edx, students take advantage of technology platforms to ask and answer questions among themselves and engage with each other and their faculties.

Skills training or just in case learning

Online degrees don’t just lay out programs, they can also offer advanced vocational and skill-based trainings. In Pakistan, this area is still under development but has the potential for students to venture into other areas learn a specific skillset, rather than going back to school for a second master’s program or bachelor’s.

The Ministry of Information and Technology has already expanded upon DigiSkills, an online platform to teach digital literacy, freelancing (design, content production, data entry) and eBusiness (clothing, tailoring, tuition, Quran learning, handicrafts, errands). The program uses AI and predictive analysis to match content with trainee profile, trigger manual interventions by online coaches and give content improvement suggestions. The impact has been phenomenal with 100,000 registrations in 4 months, 10,000 graduates across country with many now earning dollars in remote poverty-stricken districts in Balochistan, Punjab, Sindh and AJK. Digiskills is also believed to be 50x quicker scaling and at a 1/50 cost per trainee compared to traditional digital skills training programs. With real time data analytics and AI based predictive analytics that can allow monitoring, learning and adaptation on daily basis, Digiskills has the potential to be a game changer for online learning space for graduate students of Pakistan.

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