News

Chinmaya Vishwa Vidyapeeth witnessed a spectacular 2-day international conference on ‘Hybrid Learning – Preparing Tomorrow’s Solutions’. It was a joint initiative of the School of Ethics, Governance, Culture and Social Systems (EGCS) and the Centre of Excellence in Applied IKS. The Director of the Centre, Dr. Sunitha Grandee, was the convener and the Head of the School of EGCS Dr. Pramod Dinakar was the coordinator of the conference. The team reached out to about a thousand institutions, calling for papers. Inquiries were overwhelming not in terms of numbers but in terms of outreach. The name of the University reached institutions that usually could not have been approached. Papers were received from ten states of India and two papers from the USA and Bulgaria. Four out of five invited speakers were of international repute.

Pujya Swami Advayananda (Trustee, CVV Trust and President, CIF) in his benedictory address, explained the four aspects of learning as given in the ancient texts and also praised the team immensely for their efforts.

The honourable Vice Chancellor of CVV, Prof. Ajay Kapoor in his address extended his wholehearted support.

Sri. Yash Pal, an experienced independent entrepreneur from Seattle USA, spoke on ‘Future of Education’. His simple and casual interaction made the session lively.

Prof. H. H. Lau, Pro Vice Chancellor and CEO, Faculty of Engg., Computing and Science, Swinburne University, in his keynote address spoke on ‘Future of Hybrid Education’. Dr. Nirupama Prakash, Director, Amity Institute of Social Sciences, Noida, gave her plenary address on ‘Social Aspects of Online Education’.

The second plenary speaker Dr. Sree Ganesh Thotempudi, Professor, SRH University, Heidelberg, Germany, spoke on ‘Semantic Web: Dig the Past to Build the Future’.

Day two began with an awe-inspiring session by Dr. Roger Natarajan,  Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, USA, who is one of the distinguished faculty of CVV. He spoke on ‘Hybrid Learning – Lessons Learned’ with a flavour of personal examples.

This session was followed by a surprise fun event brought up by Dr. Anusha, Assistant to the Academic Director, CIF, who demonstrated how a simple cloth, the ‘chelav’ can be used in so many different ways.

In total, the conference received nearly a hundred individual registrations. Over the two days, fifty-four papers belonging to five sub-themes were presented. In total there were eleven sessions with about four to six speakers in each. The sessions were excellently managed by ten moderators who were faculty members of CVV and 27 student volunteers who worked meticulously towards its success.

Paper presentations turned out to be a pleasant surprise as the content matter ranged from Advaita Vedanta to dance and music to contemporary knowledge systems to tourism and visual arts to design infringement to education in kindergarten school to higher education to internet addiction, data science,  all in harmony with the main theme of the conference, ie. ‘Hybrid Learning – Preparing Tomorrow’s Solutions’. 

Feedback about the conference has been very positive, fulfilling and immensely satisfactory. So much so that there was a call to make the conference an annual event.

Testimonial

“The Hybrid Learning Conference was an eye-opener for many of us. The diverse experiences of different educators from different parts of the world brought a wholesome learning on the plate. While we do residential and in-person training programmes, we know that there is a big section of the society out there who are unable to be part of the programmes because of geographical constraints. And keeping it just online also reduces the experience that we can get out of an in-person camp. A hybrid mode has always been there but I think most of us refrained from taking the risk of trying out a new mode of teaching and learning. I am definitely looking forward to some of our in-person programmes to be in a hybrid mode from this year. This was indeed a great opportunity for mathematics educators like me. I now feel more empowered to do programmes in a hybrid mode. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who made HLC happen.” 

~ Vinay Nair

Founder, Vichar Vatika

Co-Founder/CEO at Raising a Mathematician Foundation