Innovate or perish

Updated on: Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Empowering higher education

India needs to find a way to advance its higher-education sector. A McKinsey study reports that only 25% of India-trained engineers and 15% of finance and accounting professionals have the skill sets to work for multinational companies. The report also highlighted the dismal quality of education
in many private colleges, where the curriculum is not in sync with the industry’s need. ICRI aims to enhance the clinical research culture in the country to international standards of development, management and monitoring. For decades, foreign universities have been an integral part of India’s higher education.

Whizkids across the country with the financial means have left for highly regarded global universities to study. Many of these students never return, taking both their tuition money and their talent overseas. More than 160,000 students are currently studying in schools in the US, Australia, UK, and elsewhere. Over 100,000 pack up and head to study abroad every year, spending $7 billion on tuition and housing due to the unavailability of career oriented courses in India. In order to make India a world class hub for education we need to bring in new technologies, new courses and set up new departments. To achieve this, reduce red-tapism, deregulate and grant autonomy to universities and offer liberty to access global Institutions.

Paradigm Shift

The foundation of good teaching is to understand a child’s attitude and then adopting to one particular way of teaching. There is more research now on how people learn and more specifically on how children imbibe learning than ever before. It has lead to a lot of debate in the educational field and in the public domain about curriculum and pedagogical practices. These aspects of classroom transaction are as important as the question of what is worth teaching. Teachers are usually provided with syllabus which outlines what is to be taught with some dos and don’ts.

Syllabus is often equated with curriculum. However, curriculum represents the totality of planned learning experiences provided to learners to enable them to construct knowledge, nurture their domains of development, and grow up as responsible citizens. XSEED curriculum programme is a comprehensive curriculum that uses all elements to encourage children to construct their knowledge while also guiding them towards achieving their larger learning goals. It does so in an environment that reflects the classroom community: teacher, student and parent. Detailed learning experiences are designed to provide opportunities for students to explore concepts using manipulatives, represent their ideas in multiple ways to make their learning visible and use symbols and language to move from a concrete to abstract form of thought. The learning experiences provide scope for each child to develop at his/her own pace and at the same time scaffold the child to achieve the essential learning for the grade.

Integrating Technology

In the 21st century, knowledge is the most valuable resource, long-term success of our future generation is based on its ability to innovate and adapt. Education plays the most crucial role in that. Intel is actively involved in education programmes, advocacy, and technology access to enable our tomorrow’s innovators.

We believe that any true education transformations require sustained partnerships that can scale. We have introduced multiple programmes in public private partnership mode in school education, teacher education, higher education sector etc., for this purpose.

Intel Teach Programme is a teacher-professional development programme that helps classroom teachers to effectively integrate technology to enhance student learning and important life-skills like critical thinking, problem-solving etc. The quality of education system can not exceed the quality of its teachers and hence teacher quality improvement is the key issue on which we are working with various partners and state governments in India. We have been able to train more than a million government teachers and teacher educators across 20 states and 73 teacher education universities all over India in the last 10 years in this journey.

Pioneering initiatives

One of the key activities of AEPC is to promote education and training initiatives. These initiatives consist of the largest vocational training network for apparel sector.

With its network of 52 centres and two campuses, the aim is to fill the strategic gaps in apparel and fashion education by creating work place ready professionals, integrated managers and innovation led designers to take the industry to a notch higher to influence and ‘value-add’ to the fashion-eco system as a whole, especially the export and domestic sectors in the coming years.

Times of india

Innovate or perish

More Education news