Higher education in India is currently going through a transitional phase while coming across a critical era of development and turmoil. Witnessing and getting into the process of upholding the glory of the developmental phases, digitalLEARNING magazine organised the Higher Education Summit with the aim of stimulating debate and shaping strategies to deal with the rising challenges of the inclusion of ICT in the higher education sector on 9th of April, 2010. The Summit whirled debates on the key developmental agenda that will revolutionise the application of ICT in learning and administrative facilities for higher education institutes across India.
Taking the cue from the requirements and demands of higher education in the country, the challenge is to 'gett it right,' into delivering rightly the core business of teaching and learning, research, and contribution to the industry, community and above all the society.
But as the world is now a global village and India is standing at the threshold of that increasing and grasping stage of globalisation, it can be anticipated that the higher education system shall be operating in an increasingly challenging, competitive and complex world.
Competition is everywhere in today's world and higher education is one of the rapidly evolving sectors in the field. Therefore, the competition has become imperative. Further to that, aim of the summit has been tagged with the goal to enable the CIOs of the higher education institutions to share the best practices of supporting the academic mission, meeting the increasing demands of ICT in their organisations.
The objective of the summit is to bring together the stakeholders of the higher education sector and the technology providers on the same platform; to stir debates on the rapid technological changes and to bring forth the assumption that the most creative, innovative and challenging in the leadership will emerge as the winner in the difficult climate.
Pointing towards the necessity
The summit had stimulated discussion on some of the key topics including using technology for implementation of examination and assessment in an unified way; teacher training and refresher courses in technology for updating teachers; creating a technology map for a higher education institution; future priorities for higher education IT development; the role of technology in supporting off-campus education; enhancing the online admissions process; managing multi-site data centres
