At, DOT, the recently concluded education conclave, Ajit Rangnekar, the former dean of ISB and Director General of Research and Innovation Circle of Hyderabad, pointed out how examinations such as IIT-JEE and CAT were killing the creativity amongst the students.
Hinting towards School of Accelerated Learning, he mentioned how new and alternative systems of learning which focus on lifelong learning will be the need of the hour.
The panel, which Rangnekar was a part of, saw Neha Barjatya, Chief Internet Saathi of Google; T-Hub’s founder Srinivas Kollipara and LinkedIN head of alliances for India and South Asia, Sachin Kapor, second Rangnekar’s opinion.
The event was hosted by SchoolofAcceleratedLearning, in an attempt to get together all the stakeholders of an individual’s education lifecycle. The conclave aimed to kick start a dialogue on the direction forward for the learner in today’s world and how the education systems can facilitate this.
In a first of kind, DOT saw rich perspective from policy makers, academic stalwarts, corporate heads, ecosystem enablers, and the investor community. The discussion revolved around how India needs to reimagine its education systems in order to become the superpower in the information age we live in.
The conclave heard from Rajiv Kumar, the Corporate Vice President of the India offices of Microsoft, on his personal experience with Satya Nadella, Steve Balmer, and Bill Gates, and how the workplace taught him what traditional education currently lacks.
Another panel reiterated the need of skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication along with technical and computational expertise. PradeepDesu, Head of Recruiting of Uber India and South Asia, raised the need of accelerated programs that deliver the above agenda along with the latest tech education, if are engineers are to face the glooming fear of automation.
The very same panel also heard views from Ramesh Loganathan, the former Chief of Innovation of Telangana State and Head Innovation at IIIT-Hyderabad, who mentioned how fundamentally the learners need to become self sufficient over time. He also emphasized on how universities must let go of their fixation with salary figures and rather focus on providing opportunities to students where they can learn and grow.
The Director of Skilling from Ernst & Young, Prashant Sinha, and former CIO of Omnicom Media Group, Avinash Jhangiani, concurred these views from their perspectives.
Ryan Bennett, the India General Manger of WeWork, the world’s biggest co-working space venture, spoke about how enablers such as them promote and support alternate education programs in other countries to enable lifelong learning.
The 1st DOT also hosted an all female panel to highlight the importance of equitable participation of both genders in the field of technology and how can education organisations act as catalysts to enable this. The discussion saw senior directors and leaders from some of the biggest technology MNCs in the world. BhaAccelernu Mudhireddy from IBM, Sowjanya Chalamkuri from GE Digital, Dr. Shanta Thoutam from T-Hub, and Ritu Chawla, from UTC, all lauded the efforts of programs such as the School of ated Learning to participate with Women Who Code to push subsided tech education for female students.
The entire discussion comes in the wake of a possible emergence of a new solution for the Indian education woes. The speakers collectively pushed the vision of programs such as that of SOAL. SOAL builds hybrid learning spaces which are powered by their proprietary behaviour engineering platform. While the spaces serve as the epicentre for creation and collaboration, the platform facilitates collective feedback to progress a student through their learning journey.
The school deliberately moves away from the traditional classroom model, to deliver a more holistic experience for the students, while leveraging technology and the data it collects each day through its platform, to engage the student. Overall, this makes the learners more prone to self reflection and learn by themselves with a structured approach.
Currently the School offers a product engineering program, and will soon launch the same in Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain as well. The programs are co-created with inputs from all the stakeholders, that impact an individual’s professional career such as corporates, academia, policy makers and the ecosystem enablers.
