Sibal inaugurates Indo-US Engineering Education Conclave

NEW DELHI - Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal inaugurated the Indo-US Engineering Education Conclave here on Monday.

Giving an address on the subject “Universities for the 21st Century: Promoting Innovation and Education”, Sibal 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.”

Sibal underlined that there is a 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,” said Sibal.

“For universities of 21st century to succeed, I believe they need to cooperate to launch a movement of sharing and partnering in stages for course content exchange; course content collaboration; course content co-innovation; knowledge co-creation; and collaborative learning connection,” he added.

Department of Higher Education Secretary Vibha Puri Das and Department of Science and Technology Secretary T. Ramasami also addressed the two-day conclave.

The conclave is deliberating on subjects such as leadership and management of engineering educational institutions, challenges being faced by Indian and US engineering institutions as also possible collaborative programmes and activities. (ANI)