Just within 2 months rebranding the company to ‘Meta’, Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced that the company will expand its partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to provide a curriculum on digital safety, online well-being and augmented reality (AR) for over 10 million students and 1 million teachers in India.
Joining hands with Government’s plan of universalizing education, Meta and CBSE will enhance the high school curriculum by allowing students access to quality educational content online through modules which would be made available on CBSE’s website.
“I am really excited about this partnership and I think it is a huge opportunity to [invest in] this entrepreneurial spirit and bring some of these tools around the metaverse, [AR], and training to the education system here in India,” Zuckerberg said at Meta’s ‘Fuel for India, 2021’ virtual event.
The partnership will also aim to empower educators with new technological tools and skills, needed to nurture the Generation Z and Generation Alpha students into responsible digital citizens.
Lining up with National Educational Policy (NEP) 2020, Meta and CBSE will collaborate on content curation and development of curriculum integrating immersive technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) that is relevant for the evolving digital landscape by introducing these as skills subjects for students.
Including latest techs like AR experiences into the curriculum creates curiosity among students that could be directly entangled to education and understanding the future technology. CBSE will aim to empower students in the under-served regions of India through its community skill centers making these new age skills available to the youth and help them become creators in the digital economy through equitable access to resources.
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“We are investing in other growing areas like education and commerce through Unacademy and Meesho, which are important use cases as we think about the future that we are building. We want to continue to partner in all of these areas as we accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, the social platforms and creative tools that are going to be necessary to bring the metaverse to life,” Zuckerberg said in a chat with Vishal Shah, Vice-President of Metaverse at Meta.
The first phase of ‘FB for Education’ initiative launched in June 2020 with an aim to prepare students and teachers for the future of work and creating a safe online environment and learning experience, witnessed over 500,000 students show interest for digital safety and online well-being and more than 14,000 teachers apply for training in Augmented Reality.
Kickstarting the second phase of the partnership for the next 3 years, select principals and teachers participated in the Educators Roundtable at the India International Centre, New Delhi on November 2, 2021 and further a webinar was organized on December 1, 2021 with over 5,000 teachers discussing on digital wellbeing, digital citizenship and immersive STEM education using AR/VR.
Finally, education is about to see an impulsive shift after decades, in the hands of technology.