Dell Technologies announces new initiative with UNESCO MGIEP to enable school teachers with technology

Vishakhapatnam: Dell Technologies today announced a new partnership at TECH 2019 between its Dell in India operation and UNESCO MGIEP to enable school teachers to adopt technology in classrooms. Through this partnership, ‘Dell Aarambh’ a PC for education program by Dell and UNESCO MGIEP’s ‘FramerSpace’ platform, will collaborate to train identified teachers. This partnership is a resultant of meeting the common objective of equipping teachers with the requisite knowledge to implement technology in classrooms.

Quality education is the foundation of sustainable development and is a force multiplier which enables self-reliance, boosts economic growth by enhancing skills and creating better livelihoods. In India, Dell is addressing the challenge of quality education and digital literacy through Dell Aarambh – a program instituted to help schools, teachers and parents understand PC technology and its use in education. Digital literacy will play a key role in catalyzing the growth of India’s digital economy and bridge the digital divide.

This partnership enables the global community in achieving the UN Sustainable Goal 4.7 towards education for building peaceful and sustainable societies and UNESCO MGIEP in its mission of building social and emotional learning, innovative digital pedagogies and empowering youth.

Dell Aarambh intends to provide a springboard for teachers in ICT and to help them kickstart their digital learning journeys; and UNESCO MGIEP FramerSpace helps teachers with rich content creation abilities coupled with analytical insight to elevate the education quality. Given the commonality of purpose of both the organizations and synergy in their offerings to teachers, the proposed engagement between Dell Technologies and UNESCO MGIEP will be spread across three phases. In the first year of engagement, teachers across Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka will be trained.

FramerSpace is an AI-powered digital platform that helps teachers conceive, implement and monitor personalized learning plans for their students. The training will focus on teaching them the use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and frontier technologies to stay relevant and invest in the sole purpose of achieving Quality Education, as outlined under Sustainable Developmental Goal 4 (SGD 4) by Member States of United Nations. Since its inception in 2016, Dell Aarambh has provided ICT training to more than 85,000 teachers across 4,530 schools in nearly 80 cities in India.

The engagement will be spread across three stages:

Phase 1: Teachers who have completed Dell Aarambh foundation certification and are ready to create customized content for their learning audience would be trained further to use FramerSpace to create content. They can then become ambassadors of this learning methodology in their respective schools and regions

Phase 2: A 200-hour training on FramerSpace divided into face-to-face familiarization training followed by completion of online training material, will be offered to 45-50 Dell Aarambh shortlisted teachers. At the end of this familiarization training, teachers will be awarded joint certification from UNESCO MGIEP and Dell Aarambh.

Phase 3: On achieving its goal of impacting 4,000 teachers over a period of 12 months, UNESCO MGIEP and Dell Aarambh will endeavor to create a joint impact assessment to explore the short and medium-term difference to learning outcomes.

Commenting on the partnership, P Krishnakumar, Senior Vice President, Consumer and Small Business, APJ, Dell Technologies, said, “In an increasingly digitized India, emerging technologies will play a pivotal role in what the future of work will look like. Teachers will be at the forefront of this revolution as they educate tomorrow’s digital workforce, today. We see our partnership with UNESCO MGIEP as an elevation of our intent and support to building capability among teachers who are educating the future workforce. With this positive step, we look forward to addressing a unified goal of achieving quality education in India”.

According to Anantha Duraiappah, Director, UNESCO MGIEP said “Digital media is the reality of today and tomorrow, hence there is an urgent need to build our capacities in order to provide a meaningful and relevant education to the younger generation. We need to forge partnerships and collaborate with all stakeholders to achieve our vision of transforming education for humanity by bringing in digital pedagogies, trained teachers and quality content into the classroom.”

Through 2019, along with UNESCO MGIEP, Dell has organized ‘Policy Hack’, a forum for teachers, schools and education experts, to present real-life solutions for the advancement of the education system in India. At TECH 2019, findings of the 4 series Policy Hack were presented, and some highlights include:

· Lack of access to technology-enabled interventions holds teachers from gaining mastery over newer pedagogical tools

· Teachers are as keen as students to invest in on-going learning, but means to invest in similar programs are limited

· Even with little resources, there is a concerted effort on being innovative and relevant – peer learning sessions with guided efforts could be low cost-high return proposition