JLU Bhopal News & Events ,Bhopal

Jagran School of Visual Arts and Design Launches ‘Design Hive-A Design Club’

April 27, 2021: Jagran School of Visual Arts and Design, under the Faculty of Journalism and Creative Studies, unveiled ‘Design Hive’ - A Design club with the aim of creating an art inclusive atmosphere for students at Jagran Lakecity University. Design Hive is a student-run design club that embodies ingenuity, innovation, and youthful vigor, as well as an overall outlook that emphasises responsible technology utilisation in accordance with consumer psychology and liberal arts.

A digital art competition with the theme ‘Design for a better world: A call to positivity in a chaotic world’ was held as part of the club launch. We believe that the strength of art lies in discovering new dimensions and posing insightful questions, and through this digital art competition, we attempted to catalyze independent and challenging creative thought, challenging our students to consider how, through design and art, we can try to avert a climate disaster, a homeless epidemic, a mental health crisis, heat death, poisoned air, and other pressing issues.

Hritika Bhagat's ‘Craft therapy session’ kicked off the simulated affair. Hritika is an eco-artist, art therapist, and the founder of Quality Compliance. She is both an InterNations Ambassador and an Art Life Coach. Bhagat began the discussion by discussing ‘Aesthetics of Mind’. She also showed how a success mentality would assist today's innovative thinkers. She mentioned the use of hands-on techniques in art therapy. The participants were interested in the scribbling process and its relationship to art as a mental therapeutic process.

Rahul Dutta, a futurist designer, led the second workshop, dubbed VR sculpting and Sundowner. As an artist, designer, coder, trainer, futurist, and subject matter specialist in building interactive environments and VR/AR ecosystems, Dutta wears several hats. He is a committed mentor and the co-founder of Alt Real and Hyper-Reality Studios. Dutta began the immersive session by taking us on a virtual reality tour. Students were involved in an interactive simulated presentation of various technologies such as VR Oculus rift, kingspray, and Google tilt brush, as well as discussions about various design software that are useful to students.

Jagran Lakecity University Concludes Virtual Celebration Of Its 8th Foundation Day; Launches JLUET Online Entrance Test

April 26, 2021: The eight-year anniversary of Jagran Lakecity University was recently celebrated. JLU's Foundation Day, themed ‘Educating with a Vision,’ included a series of high-spirited immersive activities led by teachers, faculty, and alumni. In addition to the Foundation Day festivities, the university used the occasion to introduce JLUET, an online entrance exam for admission to university's UG and PG degree programmes.

In less than a decade, JLU, which is accredited by the UGC, has grown to become one of Central India's fastest-growing and most-awarded universities, with practice-based pedagogy at its heart. JLU has also established relationships with over 40 of the world's most prestigious organizations and universities. JLU recently founded the Jagran Wizcraft MIME school of Entertainment and Events, which is Central India's first entertainment and events school. Central India's first Liberal Arts school, which will have an inter-disciplinary orientation to higher education, will open in May 2021. QS IGauge E-Learning Excellence for Academic Digitisation (E-Lead) Certification 2020 was previously granted to the university. It has received several prestigious prizes, including the 'University of the Year' award from the Government of Madhya Pradesh for five consecutive years from 2015 to 2019 and recognition as a Global League Institution in 2015 at the House of Commons in London, UK.

Hari Mohan Gupta, JLU's Chancellor, credited the university's progress and achievements to faculty and students, saying, "In the current scenario, faculty members have made JLU proud with their relentless efforts, keeping in mind the pandemic. JLU is fortunate to have educators who are not only experts and specialists in their fields, but who have constantly strived for progress and change in order to get JLU to where it is now. This performance, if not by accident, is the product of a team effort from everyone involved with us, and I want to congratulate them from the bottom of my heart.”

The Financial Express, A Leading News Website, Interviews Vice Chancellor Dr. Sandeep Shastri About Initiatives To Improve Educational Institutions In Tier-II Cities

April 2, 2021: Jagran Lakecity University Vice-Chancellor Sandeep Shastri was recently interviewed by one of the leading news websites of India, The Financial Express. Focused on challenges faced by educational institutes located in Tier-II cities, Shastri talked about the initiatives that could help uplift these institutions.

Some of the key takeaways of this interview are given below:

New curriculum for aspirational India

According to Shastri, Tier-II cities are most critical and are at the cusp of change. These Tier-II cities represent aspirational India and the aspirations of Indians. Therefore, it’s the moral duty of every educator in these Tier-II towns to assure that the learning here reflects these aspirations and the curriculum should live up to the aspirations of this new India which is emerging from these towns and cities.

Global partnerships: A two-way street

Smaller towns have a bigger vision. The town might be geographically small but the youngsters living in them have enormous vision and grit to achieve ground-breaking feats. Indian youth requires a global outlook, a national vision and a local flavour. These global partners are important in smaller towns as they provide these young learners exposure to global practices, ideals, values, beliefs, and experiences. These help them compete globally. However, these global partnerships not only help towns, it’s a two-way street where the global partners make the most of these local flavours and values.

Post-Covid reforms will focus on Blended Learning

While everyone talks about the new normal, Shastri says that no one knows that when will this new normal come. According to Shastri, the real normal will be when everyone has access to the vaccine and educational institutes open up for students completely ensuring physical and psychological safety. Entering into this new normal, Shastri is certain that the future of teaching and learning is “Blended Learning”, which is a combination of the physical classroom and online learning. Online learning must be to supplement offline learning and the proportions of both should be laid out in the best interest of all the stakeholders.

Two main characteristics of this blended learning are:

Members of the Faculty are facilitators and not just teachers: Today, teachers are not the only providers of information as there are a plethora of avenues for that, so they must assist the students in making sense of this information that they acquire and do this so diligently that the students don’t feel confused with these chunks of information and where to use it.

Practice-based learning will bridge the gap between the world of study and the world of work: The flexibility of curriculum will be the determining factor of the NEP-2020’s aspirations of making youth work-ready. The most important flexibility will be in not keeping learning in silos, a math student must be allowed to learn to appreciate arts, commerce graduate must also know about conducting an orchestra, an engineer must know about nuances of banking and an arts graduate should be well versed in laws of physics.

Youth of rural is more aspirational than the ones in metros

Shastri says he has been a part of three studies, including a book named ‘Indian Youth in a transforming World’, a survey with the Government of Karnataka and a series of survey called ‘LOKNITI’. The things common between these studies, Shastri elaborated, were that the aspirations of youth in small towns and cities is phenomenally higher than the aspirations of youth in the metros. Therefore, students in Tier-II cities are less competent than students elsewhere. I believe that the energy, drive, passion is much more because it’s a fact that the value of something is known when you do not have it. Secondly, the educational institutions in Tier-II cities have a much greater responsibility to meet these aspirations of young students in their institutions

Covid-19 made us experiment with online learning

Looking at the positives first, Covid-19 has impacted education institutions. It has shaken educational institutions out of their complacency. A crisis is certainly required to be able to bring out the best in you so, the Covid-19 crisis has shaken all the stakeholders, out of their complacency. They have been forced to bring in reforms, for example, a lot of people were talking of online learning for many years but nothing was actually happening. Covid-19 forced us to experiment with online learning. In some places, the experiment started as a disaster, at some places with trial and error.

At the end of the day, Covid-19 has taught the universities that there is no status quo and it has dramatically demonstrated that change is the only eternal principle. There are some questions that need to be answered. Has a larger section of economically weaker students benefited from online learning and if yes, then how skewed was the ‘learning curve’ across various degrees of comprehension?

Covid-19, Shastri said, brought people together and have a fruitful dialogue because as a pro-V.C. he realised that it is not a teacher or a professor or a student or management or a parent problem but it is ‘OUR PROBLEM’, and how do we together deal with it. This is one of the positives of Covid. All stakeholders have to convince each other that the intentions of the other person were not wrong. We should not look at the challenges of Covid as ‘we’ and ‘they’, but as a collective ‘Us’.

Budget 2021-22: High on optimism

“Budget is like a new year resolution,” says Shastri, and we all know those are full of promises, high on optimism. However, we will get to know what is a hit or a miss at the end of the year. Budget is not about lofty promises but a display of propensity to fulfil promises. As this was the first post-pandemic budget, there were many other challenges the finance minister and her team faced. The ray of optimism and glimmer of hope showed by the budget should be appreciated but my logical question would be, will it be converted into policy and will it sustain throughout the year?

Implementation of NEP 2020

This is the first budget after the government formally adopted the ‘National Education Policy 2020’ and many would argue that the implementation depends on the states as well, as education is a concurrent subject but a little more generosity could be shown in terms of resource allocation, given the fact that studies show, 27% of the employable population of the world would be from India by 2030. But are we planning for the skillset that the generation will need? In the past 20 years, the private sector has emerged as a major enabler of higher education and Shastri is hopeful about productive public-private partnerships in the future.