Summary
National Education Policy Accelerator Programme (NEPAP) aims to help institutions in remote learning, online examination and assessment, media services, content delivery, gamification, and the creation of digital campuses
The accelerator programme will also create the NEP Solution Finder, a catalogue of National Education Policy 2020-aligned technology solutions developed by edtech firms in India
Apeejay Education and Amazon Web Services have announced the launch of a National Education Policy Accelerator Programme (NEPAP) to help academic institutions use technology in teaching.
The initiative is aimed at guiding institutions and creating public digital infrastructure in the education sector in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The accelerator programme will address two key tenets of the NEP 2020 – extensive use of technology in teaching, learning, education planning and management and creation of open, interoperable, evolvable, public digital infrastructure in the education sector to support multiple platforms.
"It will support academic institutions by conducting digital innovation workshops to focus on identifying and prioritising unique challenges of the academic institutions, and co-building solutions or proofs-of-concept (POCs) using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)," said a joint statement by Apeejay Education and Amazon.com.
However, the initial investments in the NEPAP programme were not disclosed.
The NEPAP will have a collaborative approach to identify and solve challenges through scalable education technology solutions, create a community of edtech platforms aligned to NEP requirements and support implementation and train resources for successful deployment of solutions on campus.
The programme will help the institutions in various areas, such as remote learning, online examination and assessment, media services, content delivery, gamification, and creating smart/digital campuses, it added.
For this, AWS will drive workshops based on the Amazon Working Backwards innovation methodology, which uses design thinking to identify and define a customer-focused problem or opportunity and develop prototypes.
Apeejay Education will bring expertise on the use of digital solutions in the education sector and provide support in testing the solutions to extend the reach to other institutions across India.
"Through the accelerator programme, AWS and Apeejay Education aim to support academic institutions with AWS credits and capacity building workshops to build and implement the POCs," it said.
Apeejay Education and AWS will run the accelerator programme through multiple cohorts of academic institutions that can apply for the programme.
Aditya Berlia, a co-promoter of Apeejay Education, said that academic institutions in India need to reach the digital maturity advised by the NEP 2020 and take advantage of the latest technologies to modernise their systems.
"There is a clear need today to help institutions identify and define problem statements, develop digital solutions, test their efficacies in fail-safe environments, and scale the solutions for the benefit of the education sector," Berlia said.
The accelerator programme will also create the NEP Solution Finder, a catalogue of NEP 2020-aligned technology solutions developed by EdTech companies in India.
It will list solutions tailor-made for the education sector, covering aspects, such as digital transformation, administrative services, governance reform services, academic and curriculum restructuring, financial restructuring, and local language support, among others.
"By bringing together academic institutions and Indian edtechs, the accelerator programme will help in the experimentation and development of cloud-based solutions scaled for India's education sector, and aligned to the NEP 2020 vision," said Sunil PP, lead -- education, space, and nonprofits, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia.
Last updated on 13 May 2022
