HRD Minister Inaugurates Indo-US Conclave on Engineering Education

New Delhi: Human Resource Development (HRD) Kapil Sibal has announced that with the open content and open-access movement, they 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.

As per sources, he said this while inaugurating the Indo-US Engineering Education Conclave on Monday i.e. on January 10, 2011. He was giving an address on the subject, Universities for the 21st Century: Promoting Innovation and Education. In addition, the two day conclave was also attended by Department of Higher Education Secretary Vibha Puri Das and the Department of Science and Technology Secretary T. Ramasami.

Sibal has said that 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 emphasized 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 that 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.

Furthermore he added that for universities of the 21st century to succeed, he 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.

Besides, 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/activities.