The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) welcoming the NEP2020 has said that the policy paves the way for a fresh and comprehensive vision on education that will power the children and youth into the 21st century.
IAMAI has welcomed the focus on technology and said that it will pave the way for digital transformation of education and will help in bridging the digital divide. The Association has said that the proposal to set up a dedicated unit to coordinate digital infrastructure, content and capacity building within the Education Ministry to look after the online learning needs of both school and higher education will pave the way for digital transformation of education. The Association is excited about the future with the tremendously rich EdTech ecosystem that is part of the IAMAI community. The best way forward is to grant parity between offline and online courses and education providers, it said. According to IAMAI, the focus on use of technology in education like AI, ML, Blockchain, smart boards, will go a long way in addressing the shortcomings afflicting the current education system in India.
IAMAI said National Education Technology Forum (NETF) under the Ministry of Education should now consider partnering with the EdTech industry as well as educational institutions to establish Centers of Excellence. This, in turn, will accelerate and streamline research and deployment efforts and enable the NETF to adopt industry-led best practices. These centers must also encourage EdTech startups to innovate solutions that will help increase access and provide harmonized quality of education. Additionally, the government-academia-industry should come together to digitize education, and not just convert content into digital.
IAMAI also welcomes the initiative to develop E-courses in regional languages. The Association said that following this initiative, India will now have the unique opportunity to establish itself as a global destination of the digital-ready workforce of the future. Indian EdTech companies are already doing a great job of communicating the importance of constant skilling and thereby skilling hundreds of thousands of professionals every year. If there is a way for such people to move from an online skilling course to formal education, this will go a long way in building the workforce of the future.
The Association said that digitalisation of India’s education will not only enable the new normal of learning from home Post-COVID bringing wide-scale access to universal and regional education but also help address India’s sector-wide challenges – school infrastructure, blackboards, teachers, classroom headcount, etc. For underprivileged children, affordable, accessible EdTech solution enablement could become a great equalizer.