Education Community

The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has announced the admit card for the civil services exam that is going to be conducted in the year 2021. The candidates applying for the exam can check their respective admit cards from the website, ‘upsc.gov.in.’ The last date to download the admit card is October 10. The admit card is a must for verification purposes and without it, the candidate will not be allowed to apply for the exam. The admit card will be a compilation of the applicants photo, name, roll number, registration ID, year of exam and SOP. Steps To Download Your Admit Card Step 1: Visit the official website, upsc.gov.in Step 2: Click on the link in the ‘what’s new’ section Step 3: Log-in using credentials Step 4: Admit card will appear, download Important Instruction to Follow On Campus Candidates need to enter the exam venue 10 minutes prior to the scheduled commencement of the exam, which is 9:20 AM for the forenoon session and 2:20 PM for the afternoon session. Note: All candidates will be denied entry after the closure of the entry gates. Only the use of ordinary watches is allowed in the exam hall. The use of smart watches or any other watch that has a communication device embedded is strictly prohibited. Applicants to also note that while appearing for the exam, only the use of black ball point pen is permitted. Any answers marked with a pen of a different colour, will not be accepted. Source: NEWS 18

The JEE Advanced 2021 registrations were scheduled to begin from Monday, but have been delayed. IIT Kharagpur will begin registrations as soon as the NTA declares the results for the JEE Main final session. In a report published by the Indian Express, Debashish Chakravarty, JEE Advanced 2021 chairman said, “We are waiting for JEE Main result to be declared so that JEE Advanced registration process can begin.” The JEE Main final session result was supposed to be declared on September 10, 2021. Hence, the JEE Advanced registration process was scheduled to begin on September 11. But, due to a delay in the declaration of the JEE Main final session result, the JEE Advanced registration process will begin on September 13, 2021. Only the candidates who clear the JEE Main final exam will be eligible to appear for the JEE Advanced exam which is scheduled for October 3, 2021. The result of the JEE Advanced exams will be announced on October 15, 2021. Details such as the NTA percentile score, All India Rank of the candidate, the qualifying cutoff along with personal details such as the candidate’s name, state, category, etc are mentioned in the result. As the exam was being conducted in four sessions this year, the best of the percentile scores will be considered for the candidates who appeared for the exam in more than one session. Source: Indian Express

The management of the private school in the state of Andhra Pradesh has initiated a request to its government to allow relaxations in the fee fixation rules for the sake of helping the already burdened sectors and for the survival of the budget private schools. Since the school has been facing a shutdown due to covid-9 for the past 18 months, there are a lot of financial crises being faced by these schools lately, due to the covid-19 pandemic. Keeping in mind, the need of the hour as per the current situation of these schools, the President of National Independence school alliance (NISA) Dr. Kulbhushan Sharma, mentioned, “As per the total revenue of the private schools in India has fallen from Rs 15 lakh to 7.5 lakh crores. Among these almost 80 % of schools are low-budget private schools. Lately, they have been under a lot of burdens due to financial stress with EMIs for buses, insurance, loans from financiers, teacher’s salary, ESI, property tax, bill, etc.” Sharma Added,” the fee fixation rules in Andhra Pradesh have become more troublesome while there was a shutdown of schools seen due to covid-19. The autonomy of private sectors has been violated in many areas. Hence, it has become important now that some relaxation in fee fixation rules shall be given by the Andhra Pradesh government. That will help these private schools to catch up with the losses incurred during the pandemic. Source: ndtv.com

GUWAHATI, 9th September 2021: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati has retained its position in National Institutional Rankings Framework (NIRF) achieving 07 Rank in ‘Engineering’ Category this year and ranked 08 in India in ‘Overall’ Category in NIRF 2021. Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Education Minister, Government of India, announced NIRF 2021 results today (9th September 2021). Announcing the NIRF 2021 Ranking Results, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Education Minister, Government of India, said, “In India especially the public Institutions should come out with their own ranking framework as the state fully supports the Institutes. The entire eco system is primarily qualitive in India but we are little hesitant in nature, In India we never consider education as a commodity but in western world it is slightly commercialized. The ranking practice around the globe was a surprise to me, the quality of research work, the quality of knowledge power in our institutions was a pleasant surprise to me” Congratulating the Institute on its performance, Prof. T. G. Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, said, “This is a reflection of the dedicated effort by the institute faculty, staff and students despite the pandemic. This is clearly reflected in both overall and engineering ranks over the past several years and seen in international rankings as well.” Highlighting the Academic and Research plans for the coming year, Prof. T. G. Sitharam said, “The Institute has been working in multiple fronts of academic and industry to attract the best brains across the world and industry leaders, who have been given appointments as honorary and visiting faculty members and this has intensified both the academic collaboration and industry interaction, thereby allowing more technology transfers and better publications. This has also resulted in attracting higher research funds, opening newer academic interdisciplinary schools and centers and engaging more closely with government organizations for socially relevant projects as well as implementing the NEP2020.” IIT Guwahati is the only academic institution in India that occupied a place among the top 100 world universities – under 50 years of age – ranked by the London-based Times Higher Education (THE) in the year 2014 and continues to maintain its superior position even today in various International Rankings. IIT Guwahati has eleven departments, five inter-disciplinary academic centres and four schools covering all the major engineering, science and humanities disciplines, offering BTech, BDes, MA, MDes, MTech, MSc/MS and PhD programmes. The institute offers a residential campus to 412 faculty members and more than 6,000 students at present. IIT Guwahati gained rank 41 globally in the ‘Research Citations per Faculty’ category and overall 395 rank in the QS World University Rankings 2022 released recently. Among other frontier areas of research and innovation, IIT Guwahati is working towards augmenting critical science research initiatives in Genomics, Developmental Biology, Health Care and Bioinformatics, Flexible Electronics, Advanced Functional Materials, Sustainable Polymers, Rural Technologies, Disaster Resilience and Risk Reduction, and Water Resources and Management. Started in 2015, NIRF outlines a methodology to rank educational institutions across the country. The parameters used for ranking broadly cover “Teaching, Learning and Resources,” “Research and Professional Practices,” “Graduation Outcome,” “Outreach and Inclusivity,” and “Perception.” ABOUT IIT GUWAHATI Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati established in 1994 has completed 25 years of glorious existence in 2019. At present, the Institute has eleven departments, five inter-disciplinary academic centres and four schools covering all the major engineering, science and humanities disciplines, offering BTech, BDes, MA, MDes, MTech, MSc and PhD programmes. The institute offers a residential campus to 412 faculty members and more than 6,000 students at present. Besides its laurels in teaching and research, IIT Guwahati has been able to fulfil the aspirations of people of the North East region to a great extent since its inception in 1994. The picturesque campus is on a sprawling 285 hectares plot on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, around 20 kms from the heart of the Guwahati city. IIT Guwahati is the only academic institution in India that occupied a place among the top 100 world universities – under 50 years of age – ranked by the London-based Times Higher Education (THE) in the year 2014 and continues to maintain its superior position even today in various International Rankings. IIT Guwahati gained rank 41 globally in the ‘Research Citations per Faculty’ category and overall 395 rank in the QS World University Rankings 2022 released recently. IIT Guwahati has retained the 7th position among the best engineering institutions of the country in the ‘India Rankings 2019’ declared by National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD). IIT Guwahati has been also ranked 2nd in the ‘Swachhata Ranking’ conducted by the Govt. of India. Recently, IIT Guwahati has been ranked as the top ranked University in 2019 for IT developers by HackerRank in the Asia-Pacific region. Among other frontier areas of research and innovation, IIT Guwahati is working towards augmenting critical science research initiatives in Genomics, Developmental Biology, Health Care and Bioinformatics, Flexible Electronics, Advanced Functional Materials, Sustainable Polymers, Rural Technologies, Disaster Resilience and Risk Reduction, and Water Resources and Management. In its silver jubilee year, IIT Guwahati is poised to scale newer heights through all round growth and development.

In this new time when everything has gone online, the new trends of education are also grooming themselves to be fully online and hi-tech to be suited with the current need of education. As kids are now bound to stay at home ever since it’s been more than a year. Since every problem comes up with a solution it is impeding to understand that new Edu-Tech collaborations are going to be a favorite affair for students and education. Keeping the aspirational ideas of increased demand for EdTech, a lot of ventures are trying their best to create a benchmark in the market. Juxtaposing the same aspirations in the right direction, Bengaluru -based GiveIndia, has launched a new EdTech initiative, with a target to enable online access to education for over 1 million underprivileged school -going children across the country. This a new aspirational project under the banner of Bharat EdTech Initiative, is been inspired and initiated to clear up the digital divide between the demographic gap of students who belonged to two different categories of low-income community and wealth community. So that the loss incurred during the covid-19 can be made up to these children which created a setback during the pandemic due to lack of suitable support and infrastructure. There are several EdTech community partners involved in this initiative; EI-Mindspark, Topper, Vedantu, Akansha, Bal Utsav, Educate Girls, People for Action, Saajha and Sarathion board. This program is especially designed for school goers and children belonging to classes 3 to 12, with families belonging to income group 25000 or less. This initiative will bridge the gap between under-privileged and new technologies. With this it will provide an equal access to the latest type of education, for the vulnerable class and girls. This program will cover several languages, Mathematics and science subjects and it will be implemented in two phases. The first phase is targeted to improve engagement for leaning from home-based learning culture till August 2022. This will focus on serving children from key geographical areas for at least 10,000 students. Second phase which is to be started from September 2022 onwards, will be targeted to increase these improvised applied solutions across the country and cover more than 1 million students. In this initiative, GiveIndia is set to manage partner relationships and fund administration, while Sattva will be the design manager and the program partner. Along with that Dell foundation is the anchor founder and fund initiator for this project. It will be a ray of hope project for many underprivileged children and will also lessen the internet divide as far as possible. Which the biggest need of the time, when being connected online is the only best way possible. Source: Theeconomicstimes.com

When it comes to ranking the universities on the basis of their categorisation, not much has changed for the engineering schools and universities category so far, in respect to the NIRF Ranking. Yet this year no new institution or university was able to replace IISc, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) from being in the top three in the university ranking list. On the other hand; IIT Madras, IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi continue to be to ruler of engineering category NIRF Ranking table. As per the report released by NIRF ranking, IIT-Madras, IISc-Bangalore and IIT-Bombay have come to be the top three institutions in the sixth edition of the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) which was lately announced any the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday. Along with JNU, universities like: Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) and Hyderabad Central University (HCU), which have lately been at the centre of student protests against the union government, also made it to the top 10 universities in the country. Although JMI has improved its ranking from tenth position to sixth rank this year, HCU slipped from rank sixth to nine. Source: Theindianexpress.com

National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings for the year 2021 were released at 12 noon today i.e. 9th September 2021 by a webcast by the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Singh. Among the list, IIT Madras ranks as the topmost college in the overall category. Next in the list is IISc Bangalore accompanied by IIT Bombay at the third position. Viewers can look through the complete list from the website of NIRF, ‘nirfindia.org’ Miranda House has pursued its title again for this year by topping the list under the best college category. Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi and Loyola College of Chennai hold the second and third rank respectively. The institutes are given scores based on – teaching, learning and resources (TLR), research and professional practice (RP), graduation outcomes (GO), outreach and inclusivity (OI), peer perception. Last year, the NIRF rankings were released in online format owing to the pandemic. IIT Madras was adjudged the top institute of India 2020 (overall category) while the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore was the top university followed by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Source: The article has been published by the Indian Express with a few edits from the ArdorComm News Network Team.

Chitkara University has been awarded the rating of A+ by the prestigious National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which places it among the 5% of higher education institutions (HEIs) in India to be granted such a coveted grade. The University scored a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 3.26 on a 4-point scale.   The university has been praised for three major features by the Peer Team. They are: good infrastructure for educational innovation and research; a neat and clean, green, and well-maintained campus; and the location of the institute is in a well-developed urban area with good placement opportunities.   On the occasion, Dr. Ashok K Chitkara, Chancellor, Chitkara University said, “It is the hard-work of our students, staff and faculty that resulted in securing this recognition. Moreover, the university has a well-defined research promotion policy which has resulted in the development of state-of-the-art advanced facilities. CURIN has multi-disciplinary advanced facilities supported by research funding from government agencies such as DST, DRDO, etc. to the tune of 37.24 crore. The research scholars and faculties are provided seed money for undertaking research and filing patents.”   Dr. Madhu Chitkara expressed her sincere thanks to all stakeholders and said, “The curricula are developed following standardised procedures and are revised at regular intervals by taking feedback from all our stakeholders. The local, regional, and global developmental needs regarding employability and entrepreneurship are considered while designing the course. Experimental, participative, and project-based learning are in practise through blended learning. We have adopted a flexible CBCS system that gives freedom to the students to undergo a multidisciplinary approach. The assessment process is well defined to evaluate the attainment level in critical thinking and problem-solving skills through programme-specific learning. ”   Established in 1994, NAAC is an autonomous body of UGC which assesses and accredits Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). NAAC has identified a set of seven criteria to serve as the basis of its assessment procedures: Curricular Aspects; Teaching-learning & Evaluation; Research, Innovations & Extension; Infrastructure & Learning Resources; Student Support & Progression; Governance, Leadership & Management; and Institutional Values & Best Practices. By studying in an institution that is NAAC accredited, students get a chance to learn in a cutting-edge environment and earn a degree that will have global recognition. They get instant recognition as an alumnus of a credible institute and get better placement opportunities as the industry prefers hiring with higher-graded institutions.   The university, through NAAC accreditation, gets to know its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities through an informed review process. The higher NAAC Grade of the university promotes various intra & inter-institutional interactions. Dr. Archana Mantri, Vice Chancellor, Chitkara University said, “The university practices Global Week for students and faculty exchange programs with foreign academic institutions. Various dynamic collaborations have been established through the internationally funded research projects, international conferences and cultural immersion across the campus.  This best practice has had a significant impact on a large number of global experts (250) and students (25000), several value-added courses (100) have been introduced through this best practice.”   Dr. K. K Mishra, Director, Accreditation & Quality Assurance Cell, said “According to the old scheme, which was followed till 2017, the whole evaluation was based on an overhauled visit by a peer team, and under the current process, 70% of the evaluation is based on data from the institution and university that is evaluated by a third party. That makes it even harder to be accredited. The NAAC accreditation will create new avenues for the university and its stud

Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the ‘Shikshak Parv 2021’ conclave on Tuesday, September 7, 2021. During his speech, he announced the launch of key initiatives that will benefit the education sector immensely. To honour the contribution of the teachers and various other educators during the pandemic, the PM announced the celebration of the Shikshak Parv on September 5. The Teacher’s Day celebration will continue till September 17, 2021. The main aim is to recognize the efforts of the educators and to take the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 a step ahead. The PM will continue to address the educators throughout India as well as various education stakeholders during the celebration. Apart from that, five new initiatives will be unfurled on the occasion. The five key initiatives are as follows: Indian Sign Language dictionary of 10,000 words. Talking Books (audiobooks for the visually impaired). School Quality Assessment and Accreditation Framework (SQAAF) of CBSE. NISTHA teachers’ training programme for NIPUN Bharat. Vidyanjali Portal for facilitating education volunteers, donors and CSR contributors for school development. During the speech, the Prime Minister said, “हमारे शिक्षक अपने काम को केवल एक पेशा नहीं मानते, उनके लिए पढ़ाना एक मानवीय संवेदना है, एक पवित्र नैतिक कर्तव्य है। इसीलिए, हमारे यहाँ शिक्षक और बच्चों के बीच professional रिश्ता नहीं होता, बल्कि एक पारिवारिक रिश्ता होता है। और ये रिश्ता, ये संबंध पूरे जीवन का होता है” Source: ANI, Hindustan Times  

An announcement came from Chief Minister Basavraj Bommai, that appropriate actions will be taken this year to appoint 5000 teachers. The announcement came on the occasion of teacher’s day celebrations at Vidhana Soudha. This statement has been released as a response to the request initiated by the Ministers of Primary and secondary education, B C Nagesh. The CM later added to his statementthat the 21st century is the century of knowledge. The country is smoothly moving forward to science, from science to technology and from technology to software. With these upcoming trends of education, it was said that teachers shall acquaint themselves with the updated trends and knowledge. Along with that he stated his opinion, that a person can only become a good teacher if he/she is a good student. With this he added, that the new education policy is profoundly student centric and requires to be implemented soon. Source: indiatoday.com