The Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the World Bank are jointly hosting the International Conference on Blended Learning Ecosystems for Higher Education in Agriculture 2023. The conference is being organized as a part of the National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP) from March 21 to March 23, 2023. Resilient Agricultural Education System (RAES) Development Initiative.
According to a press release issued by ICAR, the NAHEP initiative has more than ten academic partners from across the world, representing more than ten countries, deliberating on the best strategies for blended teaching and learning in agricultural education. NAHEP is a five-year project launched in 2018 with an aim to transform agricultural higher education.
Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Shri Narendra Singh Tomar while addressing the conference said, “In the last five years, ICAR has reached a new height. When we launched Krishi Megh, no one knew that it would act as a gamechanger during the pandemic as it did not allow India’s education system to be adversely affected like other countries. I also believe in the future; This will help us to achieve many new achievements. The mixed education and agriculture sector will help India attain the status of a developed nation by 2047.
The 3-day conference is being organized to identify best strategies in blended teaching and learning, technologies for blended learning, sustainability in the blended learning ecosystem, building capacity of stakeholders to navigate in a blended learning – learning ecosystem and contemporary curriculum for agricultural education.
The National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP) has achieved “almost all goals” and exceeded more than half of them, said Dr. Bekzod Shamsiev, senior agricultural economist at the World Bank at the conference. The next challenge is to bring digital learning to digital. Agricultural universities have an important role to play in promoting precision farming, environmental monitoring and automation of agricultural processes. This can provide better trading systems and market information, efficient supply chain logistics and information for better policy making and regulation. Should do.”
So far, around 1000 students and 450 faculty members from 20 Agricultural Universities have completed international training in 89 institutes across 27 countries in 160 subjects under NAHEP.
Under this initiative, more than 900 experiential learning units have been set up in various universities where students can gain hands-on experience for six months and become proficient in diverse subjects such as genomics and tea processing. The digital content repository has over 160 digitized courses and faculty members have uploaded over 10,000 videos, read the press statement.