Conference pushes for more advanced education
KUWAIT: Participants in the Education Technology Conference ‘Vision for the Future’ called yesterday for the necessity of implementing the national development plan of His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah vision by 2035 for more advanced education. Participants in the conference stressed the need to work on the implementation of the projects especially the one related to the development of the educational system in the country that aims to prepare young people to become competitive and productive members of the national workforce.
Chairman of Kuwait Public Relations Association Jamal Al-Nasrallah, said that the conference, which lasted for two days under the patronage of Minister of Education and Minister of Higher Education, discussed many axes by presenting visions of experts, specialists and educators in five working sessions that will be submitted to the Ministry of Education and the General Secretariat of the Supreme Council for Planning and Development and the cabinet. The conference recommended the need to work and cooperate with the United Nations and international organizations to benefit from successful international experiences in the field of e-learning, he said. It also recommended necessity of carrying out more applied and experimental research to identify the advantages and challenges associated with the implementation of e-learning plans and programs and evaluate the experiences of local e-learning in public and private education and higher and applied education to identify best practices in this field, Nasrallah said.
Nasrallah also called for the need to create a comfortable and attractive learning environment equipped with the necessary technologies, resources and educational materials and to organize the teaching process in the classroom in an interesting format and encouraging the thinking of students using educational software and research tools and social networking educational networks and encourage students to innovate. It also suggested to employ modern interactive techniques in order to create stimulating methods for learning and thinking, as it stressed the need to make the e-learning a mean of support to the process of education and transformation.
The conference called for working on the provision and use of modern educational techniques in schools to expand the options of learners in learning, including interactive e-book, multimedia, the Internet and tablets, and electronic and virtual reality software and enhanced reality, he added. The kindergarten students should be encouraged to use elearning programs in the pre-primary education stage inside and outside the school to prepare a modern generation capable of interacting with modern technologies from an early age, Nasrallah said. The conference called for the need to organize and develop professional development programs for teachers and specialists in order to train on the basic principles of information technology and how to employ e-learning programs and create an e-learning environment. — KUNA