National Education Collaboration Trust partners Education Innovation Summit 2017

The National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) has been confirmed as a strategic partner for the upcoming Education Innovation Summit 2017.

The National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) is an organisation dedicated to strengthening partnerships within civil society and between civil society and government in order to achieve South Africa’s national goals for basic education. It strives both to support and to influence the agenda for reform of education.

The NECT’s objectives are to:

• Improve the quality of schooling and systems for monitoring and supporting schools.
• Provide a governance platform for joint initiatives by civil society, business, trade unions and government to improve education.
• Oversee implementation of collaborative education programmes and ensure their suitability to the situations they seek to address.
• Strengthen coordination of private sector-funded activities to improve schooling and encourage alignment with the national agenda for education reform.
• Undertake activities that promote good returns on investment for private and public spending on education.
• Consolidate knowledge generated by private and public sector organisations about school improvement.
• Set guiding principles for national education programmes and local education projects.

Sponsored by Mwabu, Logitech, Accelerated Education and XON, education and technology executives will convene on the 31st of May at the Radisson Blu Gautrain hotel for the second edition of the Education Innovation Summit. Under the theme “Transforming Education With Technology” the conference will be interactive with roundtable discussions and case studies from leading education experts, policy makers, service providers and EduTech entrepreneurs.

Key topics to be discussed:

• Investing in ICT for Education
• Connecting with the next generation of students through mobile and social media
• Transforming to a digital institution
• How can technology drive down the cost of tertiary education in Africa
• How data and analytics can improve education
• How moving to the cloud can help schools
• Unlocking sustainable finance for education from non-traditional sources
• Best practice: incorporating innovative tools in teaching and learning
• Online Education: IT Security and hacking as an emerging challenge
• Exploring the potential impact and benefits of Social media and gamification in learning

Education reform is essential to provide learners with what are commonly called 21st century skills — those competencies and values needed to become responsible citizens in a learning society and allow learners to sustain employability throughout life in a knowledge economy.

Technology has the potential to transform education by extending the learning space beyond the four walls of a classroom. Although brick-and-mortar schools will continue to play a leading role in education over the coming decades, technology offers a variety of learning opportunities beyond the physical limits of school.

With the current accelerated growth in mobile devices, there is already an emergence of flexible, open learning environments that enable contextual, real-time, interactive and personalised learning. The summit will explore all the possibilities and opportunities which technology creates in the educational environment.

For more information on this conference visit: http://africaninnovatormagazine.com/education/

Staff Writer