Signing you in

The agreement, confirming the collaboration, was signed recently in the presence of Obijiofor Aginam, Director, UNESCO MGIEP, Manu Santhanam, Dean (Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research), IIT Madras, and M Manivannan, Head of Experiential Technology Innovation Centre (XTIC) at IIT Madras.

This initiative to transform the education sphere by incorporating digital learning solutions will be supported by UNESCO MGIEP’s leadership in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) along with IIT Madras’ expertise in AI, Extended Reality (XR), game design and immersive technologies.

The Director of UNESCO MGIEP, Obijiofor Aginam, said that the organisation will contribute to the project with its SEL expertise and alignment with UNESCO’s recommendations on AI ethics and learner-centred education.

The developed open-source AI is likely to boost the scale of the integration of SEL into everyday classroom practice. This tool would also help teachers to reduce the burden by providing a temporary platform that would help them practically embed SEL into lesson plans, teaching activities, and assessments, he added.

He also said that the resulting OpenAI models would be expected to be low-cost and efficient in low-bandwidth scenarios, eliminating the constant dependence on continuous internet connectivity.

In addition to the development of technological tools, the collaboration will also explore joint research in educational technology, pedagogy, AI and learning sciences. It will also open the platform for faculty and researcher exchanges, workshops, conferences and seminars, and promote interdisciplinary research at the intersection of immersive technologies, pedagogy and learning science.