IITB joins hands with Next Education – sets-up a research laboratory to create innovative research-based products
Mumbai: Next Education India Pvt. Ltd, a pioneer in K–12 education and a leading education solutions provider, collaborates with the Interdisciplinary Programme in Educational Technology (IDP-ET), IITB, to set up a research laboratory called Next Education Research Lab at the latter’s campus.
With this first-of-its-kind association, IITB’s IDP-ET department aims to create innovative research-based products that aim to bring in a learner-centered pedagogy through ICT in the realm of school education in India. The products are envisaged to benefit a wide range of stakeholders starting from school leaders to teachers to students to e-learning companies.
On the collaboration with IITB, Mr Beas Dev Ralhan, CEO & Co-founder, Next Education India Pvt Ltd, said: “With an upsurge in the number of educational technology organisations in India in the last few years, the volume of content has also increased considerably. But, to ensure that the content’s quality is not hampered, we thought of setting up a research lab with one of the most renowned educational institutions.”
Prof Sridhar Iyer, Head of IDP-ET and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, IITB, said: “In today’s teaching environment, the K–12 teachers need a tool to evaluate the impact of the content they use while teaching. Since an audiovisual integration alone cannot be an effective teaching–learning resource, identifying a way of validating the quality of the digital content available on different platforms was an obvious choice for us. We believe that our research work will help not just teachers but also those who are dependent on the online platform for quality information.”.
The lab is currently involved in two projects:
· Creation of benchmarking instruments for quality evaluation of digital learning materials and textbooks being produced by e-learning companies. These instruments will assist the e-learning companies to measure the quality of their products with regard to content quality, pedagogical alignment, and technology integration.
· Development of two learner-centered Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), namely ‘Pedagogy for effective use of ICT’ and ‘Pedagogy for effective teaching–learning of Computer Science (CS) in schools’ for school teachers. Each course, running on the IIT-Bombay X platform, has already trained over 5000 school teachers to initiate the shift from teacher-centric teaching to learner-centric teaching in schools. For enrolment in these courses, register at https://iitbombayx.in/ The MOOCs will be conducted by professors from IIT Bombay and the participants will receive a certificate on successful completion of the courses. For more details, please visit http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/labs/NextEducationResearchLab.html#