Experts from India, Egypt discuss cooperation in education

Experts from India and Egypt have discussed here how emerging technologies in education are creating new opportunities as well as challenges, and explored ways of mutual cooperation in the field.

The Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture (MACIC) of the Embassy of India in Cairo organised a seminar on the 'Role of Emerging Technologies in Enhancing Teaching, Enabling Active Learning and Eradicating Illiteracy' here yesterday as part of the monthly seminar series of the MACIC Roundtable.

During the seminar, speakers explored the areas of mutual cooperation in the field of education for both the countries.

They discussed how emerging technologies in education are creating new fronts of opportunities as well as challenges.

India's Ambassador to Egypt Sanjay Bhattacharyya discussed how to include the current and future technologies in the education system, and whether it should be done in separate programmes or subject in the curriculum or is it something to be integrated into the entire curriculum.

Shukti Basu, High School Economics and Social Studies Teacher and children education expert from India, said that eduction has now become "student-led", where students are asked to research on their own and the teacher is more of a facilitator rather than a lecturer.

"Now the whole generation has changed. It's a digital generation. They go online, get whatever information they want. So, it is very important for a teacher to catchup to the modern technology and has to be confident enough to deliver this confidence to the students because the students are smarter than us in using technology," she said.

Professor Mohamed Alzayat, Assistant Professor of E-learning at Egyptian E-learning University and a pan Arab and universal lecturer of E-learning, said that India has gone way ahead in developing education using technology.

India and Egypt share same issues and both countries can exchange a lot of knowledge together, he said.

Professor Ahmed Daher, Lecturer at AAST and Minster of Education technology consultant, said that Indian companies are dominating the IT field, and that Egypt and India can cooperate in areas like data analytics and data science, which India excelled in.

Asser Salama, Chairman of Easy Group, said India made amazing steps in the last 10 years in education development.

"Indian universities are among the ranking of best universities all over the world. Indian students are GMs and CEOs in top companies all over the world. And we should learn from the Indian experience and this seminar can be a starting point for cooperation between the two countries," he said.

India and Egypt both are your countries with more than 50 per cent of their population below the age of 25 and at the same time, both have a sizable illiterate population.

India and Egypt have been trying to device innovative ways to achieve their objectives in a desired time-frame. However, there are a lot of areas where they can learn from each other's experiences, Salama said.