Highlights:
- Facebook and CBSE comes together to offer certified training to students
- Facebook will offer certified training to at least 40,000 students in India on Digital Safety and AR
- Facebook is set to teach Digital Safety to at least 10,000 students
The US-based tech giant Facebook has joined hands with national-level education board Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) wherein it will launch a certified curriculum on Digital Safety and Online Well-Being along with Augmented Reality (AR) for both students and educators in India.
This development from the social media giant is aimed towards helping the young adults and the students in India to develop skills required to safely navigate the Internet and be better prepared for the new jobs. In the partnership, different modules will be offered to the Secondary School students.
With its fresh move, Facebook wishes to teach at least 40,000 students in India.
The curriculum on Digital Safety and Online Well-Being will cover aspects like privacy, safety, mental health and Instagram’s Guide for Building Healthy Digital Habits said Facebook in a statement. A specific module has also been designed to help the students in becoming responsible digital users along with being able to identify and report threats and harassment online and report misinformation floating on the internet.
Facebook aims at covering at least 10,000 students in India via its training which will be conducted by the Centre for Social Research (CSR).
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Apart from the Digital Safety and Online Well-Being, Facebook will also bring AR curriculum which will teach basic Augmented Reality and teach students to create immersive experiences through its software named Spark AR Studio. The curriculum will run in multiple phases and in the initial phase will aim to train as little as 10,000 teachers who will further teach 30,000 students in the second phase.
A 3 week training will be conducted in batches which will cover the fundamentals of AR and focus on ways to create new AR experiences using the Spark AR Studio. Additionally, Facebook is also providing SV.CO Digital Learning Platform as the implementation partner for this AR Curriculum.
Chairperson of CBSE, Manoj Ahuja said, “Incorporating technology and digital safety into school curriculum will ensure students are not only gaining knowledge to succeed in the digital economy but also learning and collaborating in a safe online environment,” in a statement.
The registration for teachers who seek to be trained in AR is now open on the official website of CBSE. Also, schools, students and teachers who wish to start their Digital Safety and Online Well-Being curriculum can also register themselves on the same website.
Facebook’s partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education is one of its latest effort to expand its presence in the country which is its biggest market in the whole world with 32.8 crore users.
It can also be regarded as a rather pocket-friendly test for the company to enter the education space and bolster the Facebook for Education initiative. However, this is not the first time Mark Zuckerberg’s company has used India to bring a proof-of-concept (PoC) for the global markets.
In 2013’s August, Facebook came up with the internet.org programme in India which was renamed to Free Basics in the year 2015 which offers certain Web services in the country at no cost whatsoever. However, that move was rolled back by the firm in 2016 due to a massive criticism faced over violating net neutrality.
