MIELES aims to modernise and enhance access to the Indian higher education system by supporting the development of diverse institutional e-learning strategies.
Background
India has one of the largest education systems in the world with over 600 universities, 35,500 colleges, and 4 million schools. In spite of a rather high investment rate, the Indian education system suffers from various inadequacies such as poor infrastructure, high drop-out rate, imbalanced student teacher ratio (27:1), and poor gross enrolment ratios (15% in higher education), etc.
Realising the opportunities in India, many e-learning organisations (domestic and international) have been offering their services in India. Given the size of the sector and the population of the country, there is a need to enable HEIs to exploit e-learning partnerships and opportunities.
In order to capitalise on the investment made by the Indian government’s Digital India initiative, Indian HEIs need to develop strategies for e-learning and ICT in general. Focus on educational quality in e-learning is essential, which is another reason that e-learning institutional strategies are pertinent. It is for these reasons that one of the main objectives of MIELES will be to support a network of Indian HEIs to develop and implement institutional strategies for elearning. This is also a novel component of the project: many development cooperation interventions are related directly to ICT infrastructure (Digital India, for example) or to the provision of online course content. Few projects have addressed the need to support HEIs to utilise ICT infrastructure and online course content, and to enable leadership and staff to do so, in a cross-institutional way (one of the purpose of the strategies). Working on this issue in an international consortium of partners, in the context of Erasmus+, will help in shaping quality standards for Indian online course content and e-learning approaches, innovate teaching and learning practices/pedagogy via e-learning, and build capacity of teachers across partner institutions to use e-learning and ICT tools.
MIELES is thus designed to provide a collaborative platform to address a relevant issue for the development, reform, and modernisation of the higher education system in India and to reinforce Indian-EU higher education collaboration.
Consortium
Indian partners:
University of Mysore – UOM
MEA Engineering College – MEA EC
Kahm Unity Women’s College – KUWC
Amrita University
Indian Institute of Technology Madras – IITM
Indian Institute of Science – IISC Bangalore
Edulink Private Limited – EDL
European partners:
University of Barcelona
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
TU BERLIN
Sapienza University of Rome
Centre for the Advancement of Research and Development in Educational Technology LTD – CARDET LTD
University of Peloponnese
European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education – ENQA
Objectives
The general objective of MIELES is to modernise and enhance access to the Indian higher education system by supporting the development of diverse institutional e-learning strategies. The specific objectives are to:
S01. Support Indian Institutional management to assess their interests and needs with regards to e-learning
S02. Build the capacity of Indian institutions to develop a clear, realistic, and tailored strategic approaches to e-learning
S03. Enhance the capacity of Indian institutions to implement their institutional e-learning strategies, both through staff training and collaborative pilot projects
S04. Enable transfer of knowledge within India regarding e-learning strategy and capacity
SO5. Enhance Indian-European collaboration in e-learning