Dell Technologies, UNESCO MGIEP partner to bring teachers up to speed on tech

US multinational technology giant Dell Technologies has announced a new partnership between Dell India and UNESCO MGIEP to train school teachers to adopt new technologies for teaching within classrooms.

UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP)  is UNESCO’S category 1 research institute that focuses on the UN Sustainable Goal 4.7 which states that by 2030, all learners should acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, along with a host of other humanitarian goals.

Dell’s PC for education programme, Dell Aarambh, along with UNESCO MGIEP’s FramerSpace platform, will join hands and collaborate to train identified teachers, Dell said in a statement.

Dell Aarambh was an initiative started by Dell Technologies back in June 2016 as a project to expose children to interactive methods of learning mostly through personal computers. The plan was targeted at students, teachers and parents in a series of activities to make using PCs more common. 

The current partnership however, focuses mainly on the teaching community. Dell claims that Dell Aarambh has provided ICT training to more than 85,000 teachers across 4,530 schools in 80 cities across India.

 FramerSpace on the other hand is an AI (artificial intelligence) powered digital platform built by UNESCO MGIEP. The specialty being that the curriculum’s content can be deployed in a multi-modal environment where data is collected in a transparent manner. The data collected is then analyzed and used to build personalized learning plans for teachers.

Dell Aarambh claims to provide a springboard for teachers in information and communication technologies (ICT) while the FramerSpace platform would help teachers make rich content backed by analytical insights for better quality of education.

“In an increasingly digitized India, emerging technologies will play a pivotal role in what the future of work will look like. Teachers will be at the forefront of this revolution as they educate tomorrow’s digital workforce, today,” said P Krishnakumar, senior vice president, consumer and small business, APJ, Dell Technologies.

The proposed engagement will reportedly be carried out in three phases starting with training teachers in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

 The first phase will involve teachers who have already completed the Dell Aarambh certification course. They will be trained further to utilize the FramerSpace platform. Phase2 will involve a 200-hour training protocol on FramerSpace which will be offered to only 45-50 shortlisted teachers. The teachers will then be awarded a joint certification by both Dell and UNESCO MGIEP.

In the final phase a joint impact assessment will be created to explore the short and medium-term differences in the learning outcomes and tweak the procedures accordingly.

 Commenting on the program, Anantha Duraiappah, director, UNESCO MGIEP said, “We need to forge partnerships and collaborate with all stakeholders to achieve our vision of transforming education for humanity by bringing in digital pedagogies, trained teachers and quality content into the classroom.”