Meta (formerly Facebook) said on Wednesday it will expand its partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to provide a curriculum on digital safety and online wellness and augmented reality (AR) to more than ten million students and a million teachers in the country in the next three years.
In addition, in line with the government’s vision of making education universal, Meta and CBSE will democratize the high school curriculum by providing students with access to quality educational content online through modules that would be made available on the CBSE website. .
The announcement was made by Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s Fuel for India, 2021.
“I’m really excited about this partnership and I think it’s a huge opportunity to (invest in) this entrepreneurial spirit and bring some of these tools around the metaverse and training to the education system here in India,” he said. .
The first phase of the ‘FB for Education’ initiative was launched in June 2020, aimed at preparing students and teachers for the future of work and creating a safe online environment and learning experience.
It witnessed more than 500,000 students express an interest in digital safety and online wellness and more than 14,000 teachers signed up for augmented reality training.
The partnership will also aim to provide educators with the new age tools and skills needed to educate Generation Z and Generation Alpha students to become responsible digital citizens.
Aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, Meta and CBSE will collaborate on content curation and curriculum development that integrate immersive technologies, AR and Virtual Reality (VR) relevant to the evolving digital landscape by introduce as skill topics for students.
By integrating AR experiences into the curriculum, students can collaborate and create more actively using emerging technologies of the future. Immersive education also enables students with various learning challenges and lack of access to laboratory resources to learn in an engaging way.
CBSE will strive to empower students in the underprivileged regions of India through its community skills centers to make these new age skills available to young people and help them become creators in the digital economy through equitable access to resources.
dr. Biswajit Saha, director (Skills Education and Trainings) at CBSE, said the pandemic has impacted lives around.
“The learning process has undergone an unforeseen shift. This drastic change has created a wall of challenges in facilitating the learning process. With Meta’s help, we hope to build on our online education and curriculum capabilities and make them available to students across the country,” Saha added.
This partnership will equip our teachers with the required skills to use online student engagement tools effectively, Saha noted.
