Smriti Irani to attend UNESCO conference in China

BEIJING: HRD minister Smriti Irani would join about 40 education ministers from across the world in China this week at a UNESCO conference to deliberate on how information and communication technologies can be leveraged to support the achievements in education sector post-2015.

Achieving universal primary education goal was one of the eight targets set by UN to be achieved by this year under the Millennium Development Goals.

The conference on 'Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Post-2015 Education' would be inaugurated by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova in Qingdao city in east China on May 23.

Effective pedagogical use of ICT to ensure quality of learning, opening up potentials of online content for knowledge creation and benchmarking and monitoring the roles of ICT in post-2015 education would be among a host of issues to be discussed at the meet, officials said.

The conference, jointly organised by UNESCO, the Ministry of Education of China and the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO, will also be attended by leaders of ICT industries, senior representatives of UN agencies and international organisations, eminent researchers and practitioners.