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Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and the World Bank is together hosting an International Conference on Blended Learning Ecosystem for Higher Education in Agriculture 2023.

The conference is being carried out from March 21 to 23, 2023, as a part of the National Agricultural Higher Education Project’s (NAHEP) Resilient Agricultural Education System (RAES) development initiative.

According to the press release by ICAR, the NAHEP initiative has over ten academic associates from around the globe representing more than ten countries reflecting on the best techniques for combined teaching and learning in agricultural education. NAHEP is a five-year project started in 2018 in order to change agricultural higher education.

While addressing the conference, the Union Minister of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Shri Narendra Singh Tomar, said: Since the previous five years, the ICAR has achieved a new height. When we established Krishi Megh, nobody knew it would perform as a game-changer during the covid-19 pandemic as it did not allow India’s education system to be as adversely affected as other nations. I believe even in the future, it will help us achieve many new accolades. Combined learning and agricultural sector will help India become a developed nation by 2047.”

The conference- a 3-day affair is being held in order to identify the best approaches in blended teaching and learning, Sustainability in the Blended Learning Ecosystem, Technologies for Blended Learning, Building Stakeholder Capacities to Navigate in a Blended Teaching – Learning Ecosystem and Contemporary Curriculum for Agricultural Education.

The National Agriculture Higher Education Project has reached “almost all targets” and surpassed more than half of them. The next challenge is to convert digital learning into digital agriculture.

Around 1000 students and 450 faculty members from 20 agricultural universities have achieved international training till now at 89 institutes in 27 nations in 160 subjects under National Agriculture Higher Education Project.

Under NAHEP, over 900 experiential learning units have been put up at different universities where students can get hands-on knowledge for six months and become skilled in subjects as diverse as genomics and tea processing. The digital content repository has up to 160 digitized courses, and faculty members have uploaded over 10,000 videos.

News Source: The Hindu