Kapil Sibal Inaugurates Indo-US Conclave on Engineering Education

With the open content and open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced., the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Shri Kapil Sibal said while inaugurating the Indo-US Engineering Education Conclave here today. He was giving an address on the subject, “Universities for the 21st Century: Promoting Innovation and Education”. He said, “The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, tele-operation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a global endeavor.”

The minister underlined that we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy of how learning is accomplished and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. He said, “In the industrial model of ‘mass production’, the teacher is the broadcaster. Broadcast learning may have been appropriate for that era, economy and generation, but increasingly it is failing to meet the needs for a new generation of students who are now entering the new global knowledge economy. For universities of 21st century to succeed, I believe they need to cooperate to launch a movement of sharing and partnering in stages for (1) course content exchange; (2) course content collaboration; (3) course content co-innovation; (4) knowledge co-creation; and (5) collaborative learning connection.”

Smt. Vibha Puri Das, Secretary, Department of Higher Education and Shri T. Ramasami, Secretary, Department of Science & Technology also addressed the two day conclave. The conlave is deliberating on subjects such as leadership and management of engineering educational institutions, challenges being faceed by Indian and US endgineering institutions as also possible collaborative programmes/activities.