Apeejay Education, an academic institution in India established for more than 50 years, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of the National Education Policy Accelerator Program (NEPAP), an initiative to enable academic institutions in India to align with the technology requirements documented in the Government’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). This is the first program in India to support the technology transformation of education institutions as per the NEP 2020.
The NEP 2020 aims to strengthen India’s education sector that directly contributes to the country’s growth and development, demonstrating the need to integrate technology in education to improve learning and teaching at all levels. The accelerator program will address two key tenets of the NEP 2020 – on the extensive use of technology in teaching, learning, education planning, and management; and in the creation of open, interoperable, evolvable, public digital infrastructure in the education sector to support multiple platforms and point solutions. The accelerator program will guide academic institutions on multiple aspects of the NEP 2020. It will support academic institutions by conducting digital innovation workshops to focus on identifying and prioritizing unique challenges of the academic institutions, and co-building solutions or proof-of-concepts (POCs) using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AWS will drive these 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.
“Academic institutions in India need to reach the digital maturity advised by the NEP 2020, and take advantage of the latest technologies to modernize their systems, address evolving learner expectations and demands, and achieve operating cost savings,” said Aditya Berlia, co–promoter, Apeejay Education. He adds, “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.”
