The Asia Pacific Education and Technology Awards & Summit (APETA-2020) was jointly held by ASSOCHAM, Education Post and KCCI on February 10, 2020, in Ahmedabad.
The event started off with the awards ceremony in the eminent presence of Mr. Dhaval Raval, ASSOCHAM Gujarat Council; Mr. Bhupendrabhai Rajnikant Patel, Member of Assembly; Dr. P Mannar Jawahar, Vice Chancellor- Karunya Institute of Technology & Science, Coimbatore and Dr. Jitendra Das, Director- FORE School of Management, New Delhi.
A plenary session followed on the theme “Industry 4.0: The New Challenge for University Curriculum”. The session which was chaired by Dr. Jitendra K. Das and recipients of awards in different categories comprising of eminent scholarly panelists who deliberated on the theme.
Dr. Das, who was conferred with the “Leader in Asia with Global Vision and Outlook” award, spoke about disruption in business and how inevitable it is for the education sector too. “With the advent of technologies like Google glass the teaching content is readily available to the students and they are already aware of what the teacher in the class room is going to talk about. Education has to evolve with new age curriculum, exam patterns and the delivery mechanism towards imparting the knowledge to the students in the class room”, he said.
Sharing similar thoughts Dr. Shrirang Altekar – Director, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Nagpur mentioned about the reducing attention span of the students as one of the new age challenges and due to which classroom delivery has to evolve and said, “Today students can come to know sitting in the classroom if faculty is right or wrong”.
Dr. Amit Bhadra – Director, WOXSEN School of Business, Hyderabad, spoke about upcoming courses in AI and Robotics being designed at the institute which would be in sync with Industry 4.0.
Dr. Muddu Vinay, Vice Chancellor- ICFAI University, Dehradun stressed upon “outcome based learning methodology” in which teachers need to be aligned first.
Dr. M Venu Gopala Rao, Director- MODY University of Science and Technology, Lakshmangarh, said, “Static curriculum cannot survive and soon shall be extinct if it is not updated and upgraded”.
Referring to ‘TikTok’ being adopted as a learning tool by many institutes, Dr. Sapna Rakesh, Director- IMS-UC, Ghaziabad, said, “Changes are inevitable and if it is Industry 4.0 today, it may be something else tomorrow. The curriculum should be fluidic in nature and whatever new may come up should be embedded in the syllabus.
Also present were Dr. Rajesh Kothari, Vice Chancellor, The ICFAI University Jaipur, Dr. P Mannar Jawahar, Vice Chancellor- Karunya Institute of Technology & Science, Coimbatore and Dr. Kamal Kishore Sharma, Professor and Head-CSAT, Adani Institute of Infrastructure, Ahmedabad.
The session concluded with a food for thought. As newer technology emerges, content will be instantaneously available in abundance. Taking advantage of these advances teachers’ needs to assess what it takes to make the role of a teacher relevant and make education imparting practices more effective.
