The APAC Innovation Conclave got off to the rousing start here on Wednesday. In the keynote address, Prof. Sudhir K Jain, Director, IIT Gandhinagar said that education starts with values and the true meaning of education is based on a sound value system. Explaining further he said, “While recruiting staff, values, trust, integrity and a positive attitude is what is required and finally domain knowledge.”
Speaking about the efforts of the Government of Telangana, Navin Mittal, IAS, Commissioner, Collegiate and Technical Education Department, Government of Telangana said that during the lockdown, keeping the dissemination of knowledge was a challenge and the teaching staff was up and running and within a span of two days, 92% of the staff went online and taught.”
In a special address, Dr Pankaj Mittal, Secretary General, Associated of Indian Universities said that the future of education is going to change entirely and technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and cloud based learning would be the order of the day. Also, the Government of India by bringing out the New Education Policy that envisages several changes including Academic Bank Credit that allows students to choose a course and also decide at which pace they would study is going to change education.
Drawing the attention of all, Dr Pankaj also said that there was a need to bring some parity in the number of students who go abroad to study. Reeling out statistics she added, “Every year 46,000 foreign students come to India to study while 8-10 lakh go to foreign universities from India.”
As part of the industry presentation, Shivang Abhishek, AVP, CollPoll explained the initiatives taken by the company that includes developing cloud based world-class technology for higher education institutions and to automate all processes within the campus for better efficiency and to reduce cost.” He added, “One digital campus for all educational institutions is what CollPoll aspires.”
Rajat Goel of Collegedunia also delivered a presentation and shared that every three minutes a student reviews on the platform and 5 lakh downloaded Collegedunia App.”
Two sessions namely; ‘Role of tech and blended learning” Way forward: approaching next academic session and delivering student’s learning’ and ‘Leveraging Digital Platforms in higher education’ attracted good participation and panelists discussed and deliberated on the issues, challenges and the way forward.
The first day ended with the session ‘New Vision for Higher Education in Large, Well Resourced Multi-disciplinary Institutes’. Are institutes ready to allow students to take up multiple courses from different universities? This in a nutshell was the crux of the discussion. Higher educational institutions have been compiling knowledge, now that content creation has now been added with startups developing new content strategy. Universities are in a mode of change and change is the only constant said panelists.
A number of issues grabbed attention but assessment is one of the areas that higher education institutes have been talking a lot about. Dr. Parag Sanghani, Provost, P P Savani University said, “Our higher education system is not able to have a proper online assessment.” Earlier in the day, an e-magazine listing 100 educational institutes of higher learning was unveiled.
