Chief Minister Oommen Chandy said here on Friday that with globalisation and technology transforming the academic world, it was vital that Kerala made use of the opportunity to improve the prospects of higher education through transnational education.
Inaugurating an international meet on Transnational Education, organised by the Kerala State Higher Education Council here on Friday, Mr. Chandy said in its effort to make basic and higher education affordable to all, Kerala had lost the focus on improving the academic excellence of its institutions.
He said the government recognised the urgent need to step up the quality of higher education and improve research institutions in the State and had identified six areas for future expansion and excellence-building. Infrastructure, technology, teachers’ training, research, autonomy for academic institutions and international education would be the areas of focus, Mr. Chandy said.
Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Thraoor, in his special address, said in the eagerness to embrace new open learning and online resources as the future of higher education, the value of conventional academic institutions should not be overlooked. There were a lot of challenges before online and open learning resources could be made more widespread in India, particularly due to the poor and abysmal standards of English teaching and learning in the country, he said These new avenues of learning could only be supplementary resources for conventional university education in India, Dr. Tharoor said.
Dinesh Singh, Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, in his keynote address, said there was an urgent need to take education out of the confines of the campus and make it transdisciplinary and well-connected to society, so that it could help individuals find themselves. India’s academic institutions used to be like this and it was vital that this identity be retained.
T.P. Sreenivasan, executive vice-chairman of KSHEC, said the meet on transnational education was an effort to grasp the extent of education revolution taking place globally and to design a strategy for the State to catch up with the latest trends because Kerala’s higher education sector had remained unaffected by the new global trends.
