May 30 ,2021

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The Guyana Government has decided to fund 20,000 scholarships for various online degree and certificate programmes, which are going to be housed under the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL). On the surface, the GOAL proposes several interesting subjects that could possibly complement the education services already provided by the University of Guyana and other post-secondary institutions. For example, degree programmes in cyber security, special education, data science, robotics, as well as certificates in food and nutrition, disaster management, rural development and a few others appear to fill important niches.

Several programmes, however, are already offered by the University of Guy-ana or are done in some degree at the local university. In any case, even if they are not taught at all at the local university, visionary leadership involves taking a stand for long-lasting training that will bear benefits decades after the 2025 election season. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, faced numerous immediate problems but he was persuaded to push on with the network of universities and colleges that are known today as the Indian Insti-tute of Technology. A lot is written nowadays about how these colleges produced the fruits that would result in Bangalore becoming one of the world’s technology centres and companies such as Wipro, Infosys Limited, Flipkart, JioMart and so many others.

However, it is much easier to count the 20,000 scholarships for the 2025 general election. This is something tangible and direct that voters will understand, feel and touch. It would be much more difficult to tell voters how government was pivotal in encouraging and funding a master’s programme in chemistry, biology or economics at University of Guyana. Telling voters about the numerous developmental applications of such education programmes will not make for good sound bites. How does one go to Port Mourant or Anna Regina and tell voters that economics is the original data science?

To be fair, some of the schools chosen are reputable and should be partners in Guyana’s development. The Open Cam-pus of the University of West Indies (UWI) readily comes to mind. In addition, UWI St Augustine has a few decades teaching petroleum engineering and they have a lot to offer. This campus has well-established engineering programmes, but one has to be on campus at St Augustine for those STEM-based disciplines. In general, STEM-based areas are not straightforward to teach online because of their experiential content.

While the programmes proposed by GOAL are from several schools, significant doubt remains whether some of them can be done effectively online. I hope someone writes to correct me, but should a degree in nursing be done online? I know several individuals with bachelor’s in nursing and one nurse practitioner. They all went to brick-and-mortar schools, but some took classes in a hybrid online and face-to-face setting. Should robotics – one of the degree programmes supported by the GOAL – be completely online?  The same for data science?

Any developing economy which intends to one day have capability in robotics would also need to invest in the data sciences, at least at the master’s degree level. Sending people to study these fields overseas, or studying them online out of foreign universities, will not be enough. As for data science, the field is broad and has various tracks. However, robotics has to be complemented with the machine-learning track of data science. The machine, here a computer or a robot, has to be trained with vast amounts of micro-based training data.

Let’s digress a little and discuss the state of data collection, analysis and availability in Guyana before we even contemplate the massive micro or granular datasets that would be needed by those who complete the online degree in data science. Unstructured and granular datasets are even more needed for those who finish the machine-learning track of data science. But let’s get back to planet earth. How is the Bureau of Statistics doing these days? Are we ready for the population census next year? Next year, 2022, will be ten years since the last one, no? Do the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bank of Guyana have active research units? One does not need machine learning for these types of applications. Good old applied mathematics, economics and statistics will do. How is quantitative learning these days in the Social Sciences at UG? Anyway, I get that voters are not interested in these things, but I thought that I should nevertheless ask.

As the government rolls out GOAL, it is important that its proponents always contemplate the difference between the accumulation of education and knowledge versus the accumulation of wall-hanging rectangular certificates and accompanying grades.  Those of us who teach full time often observe a big difference between grade or credential obsession versus education. The risk of accumulating mere rectangular certificates is quite high in the full online format. It happens in the face-to-face format, too, but it is much more prevalent in the online setting. Amassing A-grades will not necessarily produce the critical thinking, which I am convinced is important for economic development.

Critical thinking, in my view, means that although one is trained in a specific field, he/she can make connections outside of that field. In previous columns, I mentioned this transferability – in passing – during the debates surrounding the oil and gas contract. It is true that an economist has no business playing geophysicist or geologist. However, it would be a big mistake to assume that one has to be specifically trained in petroleum economics to comment on the contract or analyse oil and gas trends. As a matter of fact, people who are broadly trained in the technical aspects of economics can competently make that transition in a matter of weeks.

This principle also carries over into many other disciplines. Nevertheless, I would use biology and chemistry as two other examples since I alluded to them earlier. Nation building requires that the national university have these programmes, including at the master’s level. These two fields have very broad applications to environmental sciences, agriculture, agro-processing, quality control, water and waste management, park managers and ecologists, zoo managers, manufacturing, numerous medical applications, science teachers, and so on, just to name a few. Sending people overseas to study them should be encouraged – as this brings needed diversity of perspectives – but the local university must also have this capacity. Having these fields at home means that there is a critical home base of faculty researching and searching for local applications. They are conducting the basic science, as it is known. However, I get that university faculties can be pesky for politicians. So, it might be better to just continue the arms-length online programmes.

As I read the programmes under the GOAL, I got the impression that encouraging and nurturing critical thinking is not high on the government’s agenda. Political academia also encourages the politicians by repackaging old core subjects with exotic sounding names. However, I hope Guyanese will benefit from some of the certificate and degree programmes. The question of what role the University of Guyana – especially a decentralised one with independent campuses in Tain, Turkeyen and Linden – will play in nation building is still unanswered.

Comments can be sent to: tkhemraj@ncf.edu