Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia on Wednesday emphasised on introducing industry designed courses within the education curriculum at schools.While addressing an international symposium on creative education, he also underlined the Delhi government's innovative efforts to make education more student centric.Sisodia who is also the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, was speaking through video conference at the symposium organised by Council for Creative Education (CCE) at Tampere, Finland.The three-day symposium focused on current trends in education technologies and expectations from society."We have set a deadline of 100 per cent readability for school children by November 14. Our 'Reading Melas' exemplify Delhi government's efforts in shifting education's focus from being curriculum centric to student centric," he said at the symposium.He added that in the current scenario there is a need to create global citizens and what is required is discontinuation of conventional courses. "Industry designed courses will link higher education to market demand," Sisodia said.
Besides Sisodia the panel discussion also included representatives and stakeholders, from the education sector from Australia and Finland.He said that at government schools there are 1,35,000 teachers in Delhi while students in higher education are more than one million and students in technical education more than 50,000. He said that he was shocked to see the teacher:student ratio more than 1:100 in many cases.He added the government initiated the construction of 8,000 classrooms to tackle this bad teacher to student ratio."Higher education, especially of applied sciences & technology should be directly related to community and market demand," Sisodia said.Sisodia said that he was quite impressed at a government school in Finland as teachers were using tablets for maintaining the database of students."I am planning to send teachers to Finland as well, to interact with and learn from the head of schools there," Sisodia added.