Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham participated in the Transforming Education Conference for Humanity (TECH) 2017, held at Visakhapatnam, from 16th to 18th December, 2017.
The conference was organised by UNESCO MGIEP (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development) and supported by the State Government of Andhra Pradesh and the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India under the theme ‘digital pedagogies for building peaceful and sustainable societies’.
The conference included N. Chandrababu Naidu, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister; Ganta Srinivasa Rao, Pradesh Education Minister; Satyapal Singh, Union Minister of State; Dr. Anantha Duraiappah, UNESCO MGIEP Director, among other dignitaries.
Dr. Maneesha V. Ramesh, Director, Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications (AmritaWNA), Amritapuri; Prof. Kamal Bijlani, Director, Amrita E-Learning Research Lab; Rao R. Bhavani, Director, Ammachi labs, Amritapuri; Dr. Raghu Raman, Chairman, Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore; and Co-director of AmritaCREATE; and Dr. Prema Nedungadi, Director, AmritaCREATE, Amritapuri, showcased Amrita innovations and presented 7 talks, 1 live demo session and 2 posters. In total, Amrita had 8 delegates at this UNESCO MGIEP event. Dr. Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England, known for his “Hole in the Box” experiments with children in communities, spoke at the event.
Dr. Maneesha Ramesh presented on Amrita’s Live-in-Labs® rural internship program. The Amrita Live-in-Labs® program aims to expose youth to problems faced by rural communities in India. Through experiential learning opportunities, participants put theory into practice by generating innovative solutions, thereby facilitating the critical and collaborative problem solving abilities of participants and improving the communities. Dr. Raghu Raman and Dr. Prema Nedungadi focussed on the various ICT-enabled pedagogical tools, learning platforms and evaluation tools for ICT-enabled learning developed at AmritaCREATE. Prof. Kamal Bijlani, Director, Amrita e-Learning Research Labs (AERL), said, “Our existing way of teaching via lectures and assessments via exams in the current fashion is highly inadequate. We need to look at project based learning in groups to foster critical thinking, peer based learning and teamwork.” AERL developed the video conferencing tool, AVIEW, that connects more than 10000+ institutions in India today.
