| | 8 NOVEMBER 2018HIGHERReviewIN MY VIEWIN MY VIEWTHE NEED FOR UDL PRINCIPLES IN HIGHER EDUCATION FOR THE DIGITALLY NATIVE LEARNERBy Tannistho Ghosh, AGM - eLearning and New Business Initiatives, Manipal Digital Systems One of my profes-sor-friend was recently complaining about the lack of attention span of his students. `They just jump to con-clusions, skip steps and ask off hand questions' was the statement. `Do they check out your topic on cell-phones?' I had asked. `Well yes, right before the class starts', he had said. As a professional, I deal with adult learners all the time. Even though most of them are inductees in corpo-rate, a large part of them are millen-nials who have grown up with Google as their companion. I could totally relate to what he was saying. The challenge that he was grappling with was not limited to higher education institutions but was also faced by or-ganizations that had a large group of employees who were digital natives. How do you deal with digital citizens who skip the textbook and look for easier solutions not because they like to, but they are used to since they were in school? For the professors, at least some of them, who grew up in a different generation the expectation gap is quite large. I believe the answer to solving this does not lie in academia but in the world of marketing ­ where market-ers are using all kinds of data to map insights about the new generation of digital natives. For example, a food joint trying to market to digital cit-izens knows the value that the social network presents to this generation, FMCG brands understand the need to get their attention through games and entertainment brands like Net-flix understand that a plain jane hor-ror story needs to be set in a dystopi-an world to create the right impact.
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