India’s First Hybrid Learning Facility Inaugurated in Belgaum Maratha Mandal, in Collaboration with Tech Avant-Garde and AICTE

Bangalore, 02 January 2022: The pandemic has disturbed all sectors of society and revealed its fault lines—especially in our education system. The reaction to the crisis has generated some impressive responses, in some cases, public and private partnerships have filled the gaps.One such partnership is between All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Tech Avant-Garde (TAG) to transform AICTE approved colleges from Physical to Hybrid Mode. Under this programMarathaMandal Engineering College in Belgaum become the first AICTE approved college to become Hybrid. Now this institution is lockdown Proof and NEP 2020 complaint. Hybrid Learning – will create learner-centred experiences that are profoundly personalized, relevant and engaging.

In Maratha Mandal Engineering College,the following Hybrid Learning facilitiesare created viz, Hybrid Studio, Hybrid Hub Classroom and Node Classroom;now all the students of the college have access to the Hybrid Learning in the classroom and from anywhere. The Connected Learning Community System and Teaching Learning System have been implemented. The college is using Hybrid pedagogy – Gen Extra Muros and every student has been given device. Now the learning can happen from anywhere anyplace and on any device

The Hybrid Learning facility was inaugurated by DR. C.N Ashwath Narayan,Hon’ble Minister for Higher Education Karnataka. During his inaugural speech,he said “Digitalization of education will give our students an edge over others. This Hybrid Facility is a necessity; this will help our students to become global citizens. I am proud of Maratha Mandal to become the first Hybrid Learning College in India. Now after NEP2020 Karnataka is the first state to implement Hybrid Learning”.

Speaking on the inauguration of the centre, Ali Sait, CEO, Tech Avant-Garde (TAG) said, “Hybrid Learning is both synchronous and asynchronous, virtual and bricks and mortar which explicitly embraces effective Pedagogies, Partnerships, Environments, and Digital to allow all learners to access, understand, create, co-create and refine new knowledge. It is the cornerstone for a new educational paradigm and allows teachers and learners to pursue possibilities previously out of reach for all but a few learners”.

Speaking on the event, Mrs. Rajshree Nagaraju, President of Maratha Mandal Engineering College said, “I dedicate this achievement to the nation, now we will state producing students who are Future Ready. This was the dream of our founding fathers; our group has served the nation for 96 years.We want to reinvent ourselves and our students should become stars of Knowledge Age. We are ready!”

In order toprepare the educational Institutions to use hybrid modalities effectively, teacher training and preparation will become more and more important. TAG will train Teachers on teaching and learning platform, Connected Learning Community and Hybrid Learning Pedagogy. For thetransition from the Traditional to Hybrid School,TAG will partner with Microsoft and other partners.TAG will also collaborate with QCI to accredit educational institutions on Hybrid Learning.

With implementation of technology and using the Hybrid Learning Pedagogy Educational Institutions can take advantage of Cognitive learning, Mixed Reality, Immersive Learning, IOT, AR-VR, STEM & STEAM Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, which will eventually change the way people learn.

About Tech Avant-Garde:

Tech Avant-Garde (TAG) is India’s largest Solution Provider in the education segment, supporting all genre of institutes, ranging from K-12 schools to universities. TAG is a part of the Accelerator program of Microsoft and has been certified as a Global Trainer for Microsoft in Education. TAG won the award for the Best Worldwide Training Partner of Microsoft Asia region. TAG, as a co-sell partner and ISV of Microsoft, has implemented the Digital Transformation and Holistic Learning program to help educational institutions to navigate from physical classrooms to digital classrooms. Some of the products and solutions of Tech Avant-Garde include Lycee-Cyber Academe, an ERP Campus Management solution, Efeeonline, an Online Multimode Fee payment solution for educational institutions which is connected to the Bharat Bill Payment System developed by NPCI. TAG works on knowledge enhancement of educators through Knowledge L’avenir, the largest social learning platform for teachers, and Knowledge Key Foundation, to bring state-of-the-art technology and tools to aid institutions and teachers to enhance their digital teaching and learning skills.