Walk into any university in Pakistan today and you will find three things in abundance: degree programmes; PowerPoint slides, and student anxieties. Students rush from one class to the next, phones buzzing with messages from WhatsApp groups, deadlines looming, family expectations, job worries, and now also the fear that AI may make their education irrelevant by the time they graduate.

What is increasingly scarce is something more fundamental: students' sustained attention towards their studies, and the quality of instructional design by their teachers.

This is not another lament about undisciplined students or falling academic standards. It is pointing to a structural problem in our higher education system: two challenges that are rarely discussed together in our academic settings, though they are deeply connected.

The first is the attention deficit in learning.

Information is now abundant, cheap, and instantly accessible. A student can summon a lecture, an essay, a summary, or an entire course explanation from ChatGPT within seconds. Yet many of our classrooms are still structured as though information were the scarce resource and the lecturer's job were simply to dispense it.

The result is that many students are physically present but mentally absent. They dutifully transcribe slides, but they know that the material is available elsewhere; in fact, they could probably generate a version of the same content themselves. When this happens, the classroom becomes a place........

© The Express Tribune