The System Measures the Wrong Things

India’s college system is structurally broken. Not from bad intent. From bad measurement.

AICTE rankings reward research paper counts and placement statistics. Quantity, not quality. Final-year engineering students write papers instead of building production software. The metric serves the institution, not the learner.

The talent gap compounds this. A competent engineer earns ₹50,000+ monthly in industry. A college teaching position offers ₹35,000. No incentive for instructor excellence. No competitive pressure to improve.

And there is zero market accountability. A student with a poor experience cannot switch institutions mid-degree. Cannot change instructors. In any other market, customers leave when a product fails. In Indian higher education, they are locked in.

“If you measure the wrong things, you will do the wrong things.”

The fix is obvious in theory. Measure colleges by how many students land well-paying jobs at high-growth companies. No ranking system does this.

Online education solved the access problem. Enrollment in online UG and PG courses in India jumped from 25,905 to 70,023 in a single year. Globally, 900 universities offer 13,500+ MOOCs enrolling close to 110 million students.

Completion rates remain low. The research tells us exactly why.

Isolation is the default state. Surveyed MOOC dropouts cite the same reasons: not enough social support, feelings of isolation, lack of interactivity. Online learning stripped away the one thing that makes education work. Other people.

Zoom fatigue is measurable. A study of 335 Indonesian university students found daily video conferencing drastically increased fatigue. The assumption that digital natives are comfortable with screen-based learning is wrong.

The belonging gap is existential. Belonging is one of five basic needs in the human genetic structure. A sense of community is critical in online classrooms. Without it, students will not take the risks that learning requires.

Online platforms gave students a screen. They took away the corridor, the study group, the chance encounter that becomes a collaboration.

Every MOOC platform built discussion forums. The research shows they do not work the way anyone hoped.

Instructor-to-student interaction on forums helps persistence. But student-to-student peer interaction is not a significant contributor. Even in smaller cohorts, familiarity, emotional connection, and trust remain low.

Text threads do not create belonging. They create noise.

Meanwhile, gaming solved something education had not. Roblox had 202 million monthly active users. Fortnite had 350 million registered accounts. Players formed real relationships through shared challenges and cooperation. Gaming communities cracked social presence without ever naming it.

Researchers identified four dimensions of social presence: community, mutual support, open communication, and affective connectedness. Students who score high on social presence score high on both perceived learning and satisfaction.

The problem is not content delivery. It is social infrastructure. Online education needs what a campus provides. Community. Embodiment. Serendipity. Delivered through technology that actually creates presence.

Most edtech companies start building on day one. We started reading papers.

In 2020, we surveyed 211 online learners with a single open-ended question about what makes online courses work. No preconceived categories. No leading questions.

The findings were published as a peer-reviewed paper at a Springer conference in 2022. It won Best Paper Award.

Then we built. After building, we published again—a book chapter documenting the approach, the engineering decisions, and the deployment results.

Research. Build. Publish. Not the other way around.