KOCHI: In a first of its kind international conference on Technology for Education held at Amritapuri, the experts decided to address some of the basic issues in education and hone the expertise of students and teachers alike.The four-day International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E) concluded at Amritapuri in Vallikkavu the other day.
Vice-Chancellor of Amrita University Venkat Rangan and a host of prominent delegates recommended that a pilot project should be started on customised inter-disciplinary programmes which could be done in consultation with the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD).It was further recommended that the project should track the interests and talents of students in schools so that they could be guided into the appropriate branches in higher education, vocational training and other fields.Amrita University, a pioneer in educational technology with a strong focus on research, development and implementation, also invited eminent educational leaders to discuss ways and means that would facilitate sharing this technology for the benefit of educational institutions in Kerala.
Some of the national projects at Amrita University are supported by the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), an initiative of the Union HRD Ministry. S V Raghavan, Scientific Secretary to the Government of India launched Amrita’s A-VIEW and Online Labs (OLabs) project on the National Knowledge Network (NKN) during the inauguration of the conference.Amrita University is actively working on several national projects such as A-VIEW (virtual classroom), Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri, president of Amrita University and vice-chairman of the Mata Amritanandamayi Math said in a release on Tuesday.“A-VIEW has been implemented in over 6,000 colleges, including IITs and CBSE schools in India. This is a very remarkable feat indeed,” he said. For skill development and implementation, it has created interactive contents in several areas such as plumbing and haptic training devices.Virtual Labs are available for engineering and OLabs for schools. MedSim, a case-based Medical Simulation, is available for medical, nursing and health worker training.Amrita had also developed automatic translation of controlled text and text-to-speech engine for Malayalam and Tamil.
“Amrita University is a pioneer in educational technology. Universities in Kerala have much to gain from the work of Amrita,” Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University Vice-Chancellor B Ashok said.