Under NEP 2020, educational institutions must find space and scope for integration and innovation through 21st century skills

DIGITAL AGE PEDAGOGY

The NEP 2020 document emphasizes equipping students with 21st-century skills to prepare students as future educated and skilled workforce dominated by fast moving digital technology markets (Digital Economy driven global society) and allied industries (Gig Economy).

  However, education sector must concentrate on developing soft skills including critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration (4Cs) whatever be the curriculum. The education sector must integrate the proposed soft skills with the curricular processes at all levels of education - right from pre-primary to higher education.

Further, the policy has also emphasized the need for vocational education and skill development in order to align education with the needs of the industry and the evolving job market in the gig economy sector by urging the education sector to expose students to employable skills and future career options as well as self-employment through start-ups and entrepreneurship.

An AI Overview explains the subsets of the required skills as follows.

• Critical Thinking: analyzing information, solving problems, and making sound judgments

• Creativity:  generating new ideas, thinking innovatively, and finding unique solutions

• Communication: expressing oneself technically, clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing. English must be taken a technical language skill.

• Collaboration:  working effectively with others to achieve common goals.

Besides the 4Cs skills, digital literacy skills have been added to the language literacy skills and mathematics numeracy skills The subset skills of the Digital literacy skills are the information literacy, media literacy, Information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy.

Since the policy bats for an holistic approach to education which means technology is not replace teacher but its integration with to make the teaching process effective. The world over educators and researcher have found that only 10 percent of face-to-face teaching can replaced by technology-driven education in institutions. While for project work and topic research, the students can access internet as enhance their digital skills and sharpen their soft skills while writing the reports. Also, teacher development courses and in-service training programmes must aptly prepare teachers for integration and innovation.