Parliamentary Secretary for Education Zeb Jaffar Thursday informed the National Assembly that the project for establishment of one hundred smart classrooms in the universities has been entered into final stage and expected to be functional by the end of 2022.
Taking at the floor to the Lower House of the Parliament, she informed the legislators that the government has taken several initiatives to ensure digital literacy across the country.
She said the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has launched Digital Learning and Skill Enrichment Initiative to provide an opportunity to the students and faculty members of all the private and public sector universities to apply online and get unlimited access to over 1200 courses.
While supporting the mandate to develop e-Academia, she said the HEC has established the national video conferencing network for higher education sector and provided world-class purpose-built video conferencing facility at all the universities. The Commission has signed an education transformation agreement with Microsoft through which capacity building training and workshops are delivered on the products being offered to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), she expressed. In terms of Microsoft Teams, she told the HEC made the platform available for 80 thousand faculty and one million students across the country.During covid-19 peak times universities reported an estimated 500 thousand active usage on teams’ platform for digital classes across the country, she maintained.
To promote the development and dissemination of ICT technologies, she said cultivate ICT talent for society, and meet the long-term talent requirement so far ICT academies program (phase I) launched at 13 Pakistani Universities in collaboration with Huawei, where the selection was made on competitive proposals from the Universities from all over the country. Huawei ICT competition 2020-21 was the first online competition where over 11000 students from 70 plus Pakistani HEIs participated and Pakistani student’s teams stood 1st and 2nd in the Middle East Regional Finals, she told.
The Parliamentary Secretary said so for far five projects under National Research Program for Universities was awarded to support research on competitive merit for conducting high-level and promising scientific research, demonstrating strategic relevance and impact to local industry and society.
Zeb Jaffar said under National Digital Library Program, public and private sector universities and institutions have access to a wide range of digital resources (journals, research article, case studies thesis and databases). To address the critical need for improving communication, she told that Higher Education TV channel was launched with the stakeholders and building awareness about the National Higher Education Standards, quality assurance policies, financial management governance and regulator management.
