G20 Edn Working Group begins, Leverage technology to achieve common educational targets, says Union Higher Education Secy

The Education Working Group under the G20 Sherpa Track commenced its first meeting here on Tuesday with Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, K Sanjay Murthy appealing to the G20 member countries to collaborate and leverage technology further to achieve common educational targets. The G20 countries and 9 invited countries discussed the tech-enabled learning in three verticals of education sphere viz. school, higher education and skill. The outcome of the deliberation would be discussed in a detailed manner in the next two day, Murthy said.

”There has been a broad consensus among the countries on the need for greater collaboration among government and catalytic institutions to see how the challenges of tech-enabled learning should be resolved or modified. Tech-enabled learning is a future which should be accepted wholeheartedly,” he said briefing media persons about the seminar at IIT Madras Research Park.

The seminar on ‘the Role of Digital Technologies in Education’ was held under the joint auspices of the Ministry of Education, G20 Secretariat and IIT Madras. The Education Working Group during India’s G20 Presidency will focus on four priority areas, including issues of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, Tech-enabled learning, Future of work, and Research and innovation collaboration.

Apart from Chennai, India’s Presidency will see the Education Working Group further convening in Amritsar, and Bhubaneswar with the final education Ministerial scheduled to be held in Pune.

All meetings of the Education Working Group will feature seminars and exhibitions in addition to formal deliberations under the Working Group. The idea is to enable the Education Working Group to broad base its discussions with enriching inputs from sector experts and from all G20 member and invited countries.

The exhibition is intended to make the sharing of best experiences more tangible and effective. An exhibition with 50 stalls was inaugurated at IIT Madras to showcase research, innovation and cutting edge technologies of the G20 countries.

Murthy also separately chaired a session on ‘Providing accessible and equitable education for K-12 learners.’ Secretary, Skill Education, Government of India, Atul Kumar Tiwari chaired a session on ‘Emerging technologies to provide skill education and training.’ The session underlined the need for hands-on training and experiential learning; integrating skill education into school and higher education.

At the seminar, IIT Madras Director Prof V Kamakoti, spoke about quality and equitable education for all and the challenges and best practices in G20 countries in the area of school education, higher education and skill development.

Chairman, National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) Anil Sahasrabudhe chaired a session on ‘Enabling high-quality higher education learning opportunities at scale.’ Prof Andrew Thangaraj, IIT Madras and SWAYAM, underlined the importance of ensuring universal access to higher education and the role of digital intervention, the need for happy learners and the need to equip the graduates with requisite skillsets.

Chairing a session on ‘Provide accessible and equitable education for K-12 learners,’ Secretary, School Education, Ministry of Education, Government of India, Sanjay Kumar, said, “in India, we have 1.48 million schools having 265 million school students, with 170 million of them being in government and aided schools and nearly 9.5 million teachers. There are more than 20 regional languages as medium of instructions alongside 62 educational boards of instruction across country (State and Central).”

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