Apeejay Education and Amazon Web Services (AWS), on March 12 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 NEP 2020. This is the first program in India to support the technology transformation of education institutions as per the NEP2020.
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 pointsolutions.
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) Through the accelerator program, AWS and Apeejay Education aim to support academic institutions with AWS credits and capacity building workshops, to build and implement the POCs. Apeejay Education will bring expertise on the use cases of digital solutions in the education sector, and support with testing the solutions to extend the reach to other institutions across India.
“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 while adding that 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.
The accelerator program will also create the NEP Solution Finder, a catalog of NEP 2020-aligned technology solutions developed by EdTechs in India. The NEP Solution Finder 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, local language support, among others.
Sunil PP, lead—education, space, and nonprofits, AISPL*, commented, “By bringing together academic institutions and Indian EdTechs, the accelerator program will help in the experimentation and development of cloud-based solutions scaled for India’s education sector, and aligned to the NEP 2020 vision.”
The accelerator program will also help academic institutions to publish whitepapers to amplify successful and replicable implementation models and solutions. This will encourage best practices on the implementation of NEP 2020, and in the creation of a knowledge repository.
Apeejay Education and AWS will run the accelerator program through multiple cohorts of academic institutions, who can apply for the program. EdTechs interested to showcase their solutions to the academic institutions can also apply to participate in the accelerator program.
