As media partner for this design conference and fundraising event, YourStory presents this interview on industry-academia collaboration, and the inspiring role of designers.
Illustration by Raj Verma
Institutes of higher education in India have been looking beyond physical classrooms and paper-pen assessments for a long time. In spite of this, adoption of education technology, or EdTech, did not become a huge trend. The Covid-19 outbreak has changed this. As the pandemic forced education institutions to abandon face-to-face teaching, educators turned to technology for everything, right from conducting entrance exams and course delivery to assessments and managing their knowledge repositories. Digital whiteboards, hybrid classrooms, adaptive tracking camera systems, display equipment and audio-visual technologies are the new buzzwords at education institutes. Today, India finds itself doing well in the global EdTech Index with Bangalore and Delhi at 7th and 14th positions, respectively, globally. While the EdTech space had been growing at a steady pace over the years, the pandemic accelerated this growth, making way for a massive expansion in the sect
Smart classrooms
Haryana CSR Advisory Board has recently launched an initiative to empower all schools in the state with Smart Classroom Solutions so that educators can teach interactively and inspire students. Power Grid Corporation has offered to establish 330 Smart Classrooms in 165 Government Schools. Globus Infocom has also collaborated with the government to implement this project.
Study abroad collaborations
To broaden the scope of international education for Indian students, Prodigy Finance, a cross-border fintech platform offering loans for postgraduate programmes abroad, has joined with six popular universities in the U.S. and the U.K. With these collaborations, students can now have a wider choice of universities to choose from and make informed decisions to have a brighter tomorrow. The fintech platform aims to disburse loans worth more than $1b to over 20,000 deserving Indian students.