India Education Summit Day 2 HIGHLIGHTS: While the day-1 has focused on Educating Bharat from discussions on NEP, asynchronous learning to creating digital content. In case you have missed it, we have got you covered. Here is are the key takeaways from India Education Summit Day 1 2021. On day two of the three-day summit, the focus is on 'as grassroots approach' where Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Aayog, Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia will be delivering their addresses. Stay tuned and join us again on Day 3, the final day when we cover 'journey towards a new world' talk about gaining digital proficiency, creating modern thinkers, and several insightful discussions.
This brings us to the end of day 2. Join us again tomorrow. The theme for the third and final day would be 'journey towards a new world'. The day would begin with Supreeth Nagaraju - Head Education, Digital Media - India & South Asia, Adobe. There will be discussions on 'creating modern thinkers' , journey from education to employment, and a closing remark by Sapna Chadha, Senior Director of Marketing Southeast Asia and India, Google
-- Infrastructure buildings ka mudda nahi hai (infrastructure is not the issue of buildings) but is issue of diginity and equality
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-- The IT industry will have to prepare itself for the post-COVID schooling system. This would need another level of upskilling for techno-heads as well as teachers
-- National Capital region is moving away from the annual assessment system where a child is made to sit for a three-hour test after the end of a year to a tech-backed continuous assessment system.
-- NEP 2020 talks about several missing points that were not talked about earlier in the education space. It was very unfortunate to see that the budget commitment which the NEP's vision demands were missing from the Union Budget 2021. The Budget allocated to the education sphere was on the contrary was reduced by Rs 6000 crore as compared to last year.
-- We need to be cautious of not building a digital divide, as we move towards digital education
-- We need additional 33 million seats in higher education to achieve the 50% GER aim set by NEP 2020. This cannot be fulfilled only through the bricks and mortar model cannot achieve this task alone.
-- To formalize the incorporation of digital in education, National Digital Education Architecture has been rolled out. This will help streamline digital education
How you help before, during, and after the class - are the three things we need to take care of. Before the class, we need to give support in terms of how to create content. This is where we are helping teachers. During class, we are helping teachers to help assess students better maybe a google form or WhatsApp chat, or creating a lesson plan etc. When we go into the classroom, how to flip it. What to give for home and what to teach in class is different in an online class as compared to physical classes, said Aditya Natraj, Founder & Director of Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF)
The last session of the day begins. The panel will discuss "empowering all educators for digital transformation". The panel will be moderated by Anushree Bhattacharyya, Editor Brand & Marketing FE Online. Panels will consist of Shaheen Mistry, Teach for India, Venkatesh Sarvasiddhi, Senior Head – Digital Skills & Innovation, Industry Partnerships & CSR – NSDC, Aditya Natraj, Founder & Director of Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), and Garima Babbar, Policy Head For Education India & South Asia, Adobe
RCM Reddy, MD & CEO, Schoolnet India explained the unemployability issue in India by stating, "those who drop-out of the system do not have enough jobs and those who pass the system do not have skills." He said, we need to shift from waiting to impart skills post education and imbibe these skills into schools, colleges, and university systems. Such a system is talked about in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
With NEP, govt is not leaving it at the policy level. There have been committees formed to take it from policy level to implementation level. How do you create a standard for people with 1.38 billion people, there is a work in progress, said Dr. Arunabh Singh, Director, Nehru World School. Deepti Sawhney, CEO & Founder, Mahattattva said that there are school managements who are saying "lets not wait but start ourselves". This is what she said is a new outlook towards a policy.
We need to change the way we frame questions. why would you frame a question which can be googled? We need to have questions which force students to think, said Deepti Sawhney, CEO & Founder, Mahattattva
We need to make a digital education map, suggested RCM Reddy, MD & CEO, Schoolnet India. He added we need to standardise the digital infrastructure requirement from internet access, device access to teacher training then only this digital education can be carried forward.
We had more than 5000 teachers trained in the first month of the pandemic, Teachers thought it was their mission to teach these students sitting online, said Deepti Sawhney, CEO & Founder, Mahattattva. Quoting a Harvard pandemic, she said, this was the first time that a pandemic made education the focus instead of health, she added.
The third session of the day 'educators of the new world' begins. The session will highlight how educators are coping with the new era. Siddhartha Dubey, professor, Ashoka University is moderating the session. The panel consists of Deepti Sawhney, CEO & Founder, Mahattattva, Dr. Arunabh Singh, Director, Nehru World School, and Stuart Miller, Head of Marketing, Google For Education, APAC
The tuition teacher model is the reason how children are able to clear entrance exams. There is so much of (untapped) opportunity, said R V Balasubramaniam Iyer, Vice President, Reliance Jio Infocomm. He said that housewives and retired people can be involved in teaching to bring the gap of teachers. He also highlights that digital content availability is not everywhere. Each state creates its own content in its own language and uniformity and standardization is needed.
R V Balasubramaniam Iyer, Vice President, Reliance Jio Infocomm, and Amit Doshi, Chief Marketing Officer, Lenovo India join Bani Paintal Dhawan, Head of Education India and South Asia, Google Cloud India to discuss the infrastructure aspect of the post-COVID education.
Every school affiliated with the Gujarat state board will have to adopt GET as their digital curriculum norm. It would be a single tech-based education learning platform for everyone. Anyone who wants to subscribe to any other tech company can do it but not as a rule but as a reference. GET will be the e-version of NCERT. GET will also have the role of regulator as it evolves. We will also develop content to ensure that it will be acceptable to every single school, across the spectrum of schools.
Using tech for teacher training will make teacher training more skilled, said Vinod R. Rao, Secretary to Government(Primary & Secondary Education), Education Department, Sachivalaya, Gandhinagar. He informed more than 1.5 lakh teachers have already enrolled and been trained by a tech-enabled platform for teacher training created by IIM-Ahmedabad.
Bani Paintal Dhawan, Head of Education India and South Asia, Google Cloud India moderating a session on infrastructure play. Dr. Vinod R. Rao, Secretary to Government(Primary & Secondary Education), Education Department, Sachivalaya, Gandhinagar sharing the journey of the Gujarat government in providing education to students despite the pandemic.
The IT industry will have to prepare itself for the post-COVID schooling system. This would need another level of upskilling for techno-heads as well as teachers, said Manish Sisodia.
Manish Sisodia, Deputy CM Delhi who also holds the education portfolio said that the National Capital region is moving away from the annual assessment system where a child is made to sit for a three-hour test after the end of a year to a tech-backed continuous assessment system.
“While the NEP says that six per cent of the GDP should be dedicated to education. The sector hardly got about three per cent. The Budget allocated to the education sphere was on the contrary reduced by Rs 6,000 crore than the funds allocated last year,” said Sisodia.
New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 talks about several missing points which were not talked about earlier in the education space. It is a nice document. Having both the education and finance portfolio I understand that when one has to invest in education, the administration has to pull from several other spheres. It was very unfortunate to see that the first Budget after the roll-out of NEP does not give the commitment that the NEP’s vision demands, said Sisodia.
COVID is a blessing in disguise. It has given us an opportunity to not just teachers but each one of us. We have learned a lot. The technical intervention used during the COVID-era will sustain even when there is no case of COVID across the world. This does not mean that physical schools will shut down but we have learned optimum use of technology in the education sphere, said Sisodia in his address at IES 2021.
To shift teaching-learning to the online sphere immediately was would have been a task had we not prepared our teachers beforehand. This preparedness helped us manage the pandemic and we were able to cater to about 97% of students during the pandemic, said Manish Sisodia who also holds the education portfolio. Already a motivated team of teachers was the foundation of our education during the pandemic.
We had not only delivered tablets to teachers but also started delivering content through them. We had set-up core academic committees that mentored teachers. We were working on each teacher to understand how they can give attention to each student, change their assessment modules, said Sisodia. These measures he said helped Delhi manage the disruption bought by the pandemic better. He, however, added that there can also be a lot more in the field.
We had started preparing for digital education about 1.5 to 2 years ago. We had given an allocation of creating smart classrooms in schools. There were teachers who did not have smartphones. I had then thought that if they are teaching students of 21st century, they should have a tablet and know how to operate it. We started giving online data through tablets. This helped us handle the pandemic better, said Manish Sisodia, the deputy CM and Education Minister of Delhi.
Deputy Chief Minister, National Capital Territory of Delhi, Manish Sisodia said, the emphasis was given on school buildings in the education budget not because the buildings per se play a huge role. But the masla (issue) is of equality. A student from the same locality, same caliber going to a private school had world-class facilities while those in government schools had rooms with cobwebs. The matter was dignity.
Getting teachers to build their own content is the key to increase GER, said Dr Wagheeh Shukry, Principal Assistant Director, Learning Platforms, Educational Technology, and Resources Division Ministry of Education, Malaysia. He added that having good quality content is "really difficulty". to have new content, he said, Malaysia used help from different organisations including UN and requested for quality but free content.
Device penetration, digital literacy, digital content availability in vernacular languages, data connectivity, and funds for data connectivity are among the key issues, according to Bansal. She claims that most of the data available in the digital education space are available in English - about 75-80%. Followed by Hindi content which is less than 20% and the remaining 1-5% is digital content available in vernacular languages, she said.
Online education's penetration can be perceived based on perception, said Seema Bansal, Partner, and Director, BCG who said she chose to see it as glass-half-full. "25 lakh students who never had accessed digital education on their phones had started using it. What product gets penetration of 10% in about 8-10 weeks?," said. The content was pulled together from different sources in vernacular languages, Hindi and English, and sent out by state governments to their school-going students. This was unimaginable as nothing like this was ever done before, she explains
When the pandemic stuck, in the beginning only 10% of students could get access to online education, said Seema Bansal, Partner, and Director, BCG who has been working with several state governments identifying bottlenecks in their ed-tech initiatives during a pandemic. She has worked in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Jharkhand. Catering to about 2 crore students.
The NEP has paved the way for the adoption of technology in education. Govt has set-up various task forces to implement various provisions of the NEP. To formalize the incorporation of digital in education, National Digital Education Architecture has been rolled out. This will help streamline digital education. We in govt are acting as facilitators by including edtech experts and private sectors in all these areas, said Kant.
We worked with three states to improve learning outcomes at the grassroots level. That (learning outcomes) are the key challenge. Students pass from one class to another, they get into higher classes without absorbing learning, really. Learning outcomes hold the key to India's success. The key challenge for this is quality educators who are able to put in the hearts of students what they are teaching. Teaching should not become mechanical, said Kant.
We need additional 33 million seats in higher education to achieve the 50% GER aim set by NEP 2020. This cannot be fulfilled only through the bricks and mortar model cannot achieve this task alone. Online education will become a necessity. It can bring down education costs and make it more affordable. It will also drop down the need of pursuing education at a cost of not working, said NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant.
Govt, academicians of the private sector have to come together to chalk out a roadmap for an affordable and inclusive high-quality online ecosystem. It's very important that we do not end up building a digital divide, said NITI Aayog CEO, Amitabh Kant stating that access to education is yet to realise its full potential.
To attend the India Education Summit 2021, one needs to register for it. You can get the registration link from the top right corner of indianexpress.com website or via indiaeducationsummit.in and join it via Zoom. One can also watch the live-streaming event at Indian Express's YouTube Channel. For insights, detailed analysis, and key takeaways, keep watching this space.
The National Education Policy has the capacity to make students Atmanirbhar or self-reliant right from the school-level, said Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Minister of Education during his inaugural address at the India Education Summit (IES) 2021. During his address, Pokhriyal said, “By connecting students with the internships, vocational training as a student reaches class 6, we will imbibe atmanirbharta (self-reliance) in a student. By the time these students will complete school education, they will be warriors who can take on any task'... read more
Today, India Education Summit will have Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, a discussion on 'building a strong foundation'. Another major highlight of the day will be a special address by Manish Sisodia, Deputy Chief Minister, National Capital Territory of Delhi followed by a panel discussion on 'the infrastructure play'. There will be two more panels discussing 'educators of the new world', and 'empowering all educators for digital transformation'.
Welcome to the second day of the India Education Summit (IES) 2021! After the inaugural address from the Union Education Minister and in-depth discussions on the future of education, National Education Policy, among other key issues, today's theme is 'a grassroots approach'. Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog will be the first to join today at 10 am for a discussion on 'building a strong foundation'. Deputy CM, Delhi Manish Sisodia will also join us for a special address at 10:55 am.