DailyPost 1810
KNOWLEDGE QUOTIENT
While the ranking of colleges has been happening both for commercial and non-commercial reasons for quite some time now. Not much changes have transpired in the institutions both in who appear pretty high in the list and those who are also rans. Has there been any change in the knowledge landscape of the country; the quality of teachers, any trend towards research, better documentation, the number of patents or creativity or even literary caliber? Have the surveys just been an annual fad imposed on the academic world and then life goes not as usual. Have we been able to capture any niche area in the knowledge space? Has the level of academic debate really reached the academically best levels in the world?
Finally, has the Knowledge Quotient of the country improved or increased, or of some sector or in some technology or in some academic pursuit or in some technology or branch of it? Are we able to see any institution or organization or research facility charting out a different future for itself. Do we see organizations like ISRO increasing? The self-propelled organizations who are deciding their own trajectory and that of the nation. Or we have a completely out of world research and commercial organization, enmeshed into one, like the Google DeepMind. *Have we been able to find our moorings in the knowledge world.
Do we know the Knowledge Quotient of Colleges, research agencies and other organizations? This would position each of these in a relational knowledge graph with their peers here and also globally. It would also help us fathom out the improvement in any one organization. Hundreds of decadent institutions cannot take us anywhere? What is then the Knowledge Quotient? It is the measurement of knowledge on the objective parameters of the students and faculty of a college and capability of the college’s functional academic infrastructure to support knowledge growth. It would also factor in the Knowledge Ecosystem of the institution. With its variants, the Knowledge Quotient as a tool should be used by all organizations.
We live in a knowledge-based world and every organization’s prime requirement is to improve upon its knowledge base for its existence. We are finding organizations falling by the wayside for the lack of knowledge and an ecosystem that can sustain and improve upon it. But how can it happen when there is no tool to measure it. The tool should be acceptable across the country and uniformly put into operation. The evaluation will help all. Any organization not improving on the knowledge quotient should be penalized. Maintaining the position can be easy, but improving on the Knowledge Quotient might be extremely difficult. Given the world we are in, this can be the only way and the only tool to transform our institutions to be reckoned with in every arena. Exceptional Knowledge Quotient of the nation is its biggest wealth.
KNOWLEDGE QUOTIENT CAN RIP APART THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE CAPABILITY OF AN INSTITUTION.
Sanjay Sahay