Education Technology | Innovations and Insights - Edinbox

As part of initiatives to revamp Indian higher education, the University of Delhi (DU) has initiated a multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud India. The partnership will prepare thousands of students with skills in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, cybersecurity, data analytics, and digital literacy.

Under the initiative, DU will implement Google Cloud's cutting-edge training content into the curriculum. The course will consist of in-lab workouts, skill certifications, and access to Google Cloud's AI learning assistant NotebookLM, which will allow students to save time-consuming work by building answers on their own research and class notes.

The partnership is our part of future-proofing DU as a university," said university officials. "We are not only launching our students into careers, but also into spearheading the digital economy."

What DU Students Can Look Forward To:

High-in-demand technology specialty courses

NotebookLM, Google's AI study assistant, at no cost

Google Cloud certifications in GenAI, data science, and security

Hackathons, webinars, and mentorship on campus

Incubation support and cloud credits for student-startups

Faculty upskilling and digital upskilling programs

Implementation of end-to-end Google Workspace for Education at the department level

Google Cloud India Managing Director Sashi Sreedharan quoted the program's potential to bridge the skill gap: "Technology is a powerful equalizer. It's important that India's youth have skills which are not just in demand today, but future-proofed."

Google Cloud will collaborate with DU to code-design learning pathways and grant access to a vast array of technical tools to prepare students for problem-solving and innovation in the global world.

The partnership is aimed at igniting entrepreneurial passion, career preparedness, and pedagogy revolution on DU's inclusive campuses, a monumental step towards a digitally enabled academic future.

As an initiative to narrow the gender divide in innovation and technological leadership, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has introduced a special certificate course in business-focused generative AI for women. The course, "GenAI for Business: A Hands-On Introduction," will be organized by the Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship (DSSE) from September 11 to 13, with September 9 as the deadline for registration.

This foundation course aims to empower women managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals with business-oriented, practical skills in the rapidly emerging area of generative artificial intelligence. The online course is formatted to be convenient and flexible, particularly for working women and aspiring entrepreneurs.

IIT Bombay says the program will be an environment of co-learning and interactivity through which AI will be made accessible without the apprehension that naturally hovers over in technology-rich classrooms. The effort falls under a broader institutional drive to increase diversity in nascent technologies and create women leaders in AI-led industries.

The course provides hands-on exposure to state-of-the-art generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Co-Pilot, DALLE, Perplexity, Flux1, Grok, and Notebook LM. Students will be exposed to live demonstrations, practice sessions, and actual business case studies that demonstrate how these tools are redefining businesses.

"This course isn't about mastering tools; it's about releasing new modes of thinking and solving," DSSE faculty said in a statement.e

By providing a dedicated platform for women to learn, work together, and innovate, IIT Bombay aims to generate a new generation of women changemakers who would be able to lead AI-facilitated change in various sectors with confidence.

IIT Mandi Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) has joined hands with Nagent AI to launch what they call a hybrid no-code AI agent creation program. It is for working professionals who want to learn how to develop and deploy AI agents without spending months coding or researching. The initiative incorporates IIT Mandi TIH's intellectual virtues with the already established platform of Nagent AI, which currently has more than 1,000 enterprise customers in the world.

Organisers state that the programme is aimed at directly addressing India's AI talent gap, which is projected to be more than one million unfilled positions by 2027. Vacancies for jobs using AI are expected to reach 2.3 million by the same year, where demand is 51 percent higher than supply. The goal is to allow professionals and organizations to cut time from concept to fully functional AI system from several months to a few days.

A hands-on format with a restricted intake

The hybrid format involves a 23-hour curriculum that includes online sessions and in-person campus immersion at IIT Mandi TIH. Registration is open until August 30, 2025, but seats are capped at 30 participants. According to the organisers, the program will let attendees build fully deployable AI agents using Nagent AI’s Playground. They will also get access to hundreds of AI models, a no-code RAG pipeline, and other tools needed for production-ready systems.

Somjit Amrit, CEO of IIT Mandi TIH, said the initiative is meant to move beyond industry hype and focus on usable skills. “Buzzwords can bury real breakthroughs in hype, so we’re cutting straight across the substance,” he explained, adding that the workshop is designed to show how humans and AI agents can work together in practical ways.

Industry relevance and academic mentorship

The curriculum has also been co-developed by the IIT Mandi TIH faculty and Nagent AI specialists. Some of the topics are agent orchestration, multi-agent collaboration, agentic prompting, and proprietary data integration through the no-code RAG pipeline. Capstone projects will be mentored by industry leaders like Pratap Behera, Senthilraj Kalaimani, Siddharth Kanungo, and Anmol Gupta.

Behera, CEO, and co-founder of Nagent AI said that the alliance "fills the AI skill gap by enabling any professional to build and deploy high-performing AI agents in days." He added that the approach had the potential to accelerate the use of AI within industries by making the tools accessible.

Option to work on enterprise projects

The course participants can opt to implement enterprise projects either through the Nagent AI community or create systems for their organizations. Top-performing projects can get up to ₹1 crore of funding through iHub's Call for Innovation pipeline. Excellent work will also have industry showcase opportunities.

Organizers say the program dovetails with India's "AI for All" initiative and can be beneficial in healthcare, supply chain, and customer experience. The aspiration is to compress the typical six-month to one-year process of upskilling in AI into weeks. This is in order to match the speed at which businesses now expect to get a return on investments in AI.

As the market for no-code AI platforms is estimated to grow from $4.9 billion (₹426 crore) in 2024 to $24.8 billion (₹2,157 crore) by 2029, the demand for existing AI development talent will only increase further.

Emphasizing India's youth power in the tech industry, Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw pointed out that 20 indigenous student-designed semiconductor chips have been successfully produced at the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali.

Taking to social media, the minister announced, "Bharat's Yuva Shakti, 20 indigenous student-designed chips taped out from SCL Mohali."

As per the Ministry of Electronics & IT, the chips were developed by 17 Indian engineering colleges' students, including a few IITs, and successfully produced at its unit.

These designs are under the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme, which looks to enhance semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity in India.

The ministry also added that the approved DLI Scheme of Rs 1,000 crore supports homegrown companies, startups, and MSMEs in creating semiconductor products.

The process of designing and marketing semiconductor products has high entry barriers, long development cycles, and fierce international competition.

To overcome these hurdles, the DLI Scheme provides design infrastructure facilities, including Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and Intellectual Property (IP) cores, for early prototyping.

It also gives financial support of up to 50 per cent of qualifying expenses, capped at Rs 15 crore per application, towards design prototyping, scale-up, and volume production.

There are also incentives of 6 to 4 per cent of net sales turnover for five years, with a cap of Rs 30 crore per application, towards deployment and commercialization of chip solutions.

Since its inception in December 2021, 278 education institutions under the C2S program and 72 startups under the DLI program have been cleared for access to sophisticated EDA tools.

The ministry said "The DLI Scheme is implemented in close consultation with stakeholders and beneficiary companies. Any modifications needed will be done based on evolving requirements and feedback.".

The ministry also mentioned that fiscal assistance has been approved to 23 companies and start-ups for chip designing for uses like surveillance cameras, energy meters, microprocessor IPs, and networking.

Among them, ten companies have raised venture capital funds to ramp up their prototypes for commercialization, while six companies have executed prototype tape-outs at different semiconductor foundries.

Following the growing demand for veteran professionals in the new technology area of artificial intelligence, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) has launched the second edition of its Certificate Programme in Generative AI. As a part of its Continuing Education Programme (CEP), this six-month online certificate program is open to working professionals with a view to acquiring freshest competencies in Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and responsible AI development.

This sector-agnostic course is intended for professionals from any industry such as software development, data science, machine learning, digital product management, and applied research. It also includes educators and tech-enabling professionals willing to make a career shift to innovative AI applications.

Pragmatic AI technologies like Python, NumPy, TensorFlow, PyTorch, spaCy, and Hugging Face are learned by students. The courses include hands-on tutorials as well as industry-led capstone projects that are orchestrated to simulate actual deployments of AI in different verticals including healthcare, education, finance, and autonomous systems.

Evolving research entails evolving subject matter in the form of transformer models, neural architecture, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for low-resource settings, and multilingual NLP. Students study evolving model architectures such as GPT, BERT, and T5, and are exposed to evolving techniques such as instruction tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), and evolving prompting techniques in order to maximize model performance and usefulness.

Emphasizing the larger societal relevance of the program, IIT Delhi Electrical Engineering Department Professor Tanmoy Chakraborty added, "This program is a result of our conviction that Generative AI will drive innovation and decision-making in the future. We aim to develop professionals who do not just know AI technologies but also drive their use in industries responsibly with depth."

As the world undergoes a change with AI, industry reports have already established an on-demand demand for AI experts. According to studies by PwC, AI will add as much as USD 15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. The BCG report does, nonetheless, lay out that even though investments in AI are on the rise, there is a success rate of only 26% for organisations to apply these technologies in driving material value. While that, The AIDEA of India report by EY estimates the figure at USD 1.5 trillion by the close of the decade, i.e., from Generative AI alone to India's GDP.

The training is being imparted in a mix of self-study and live web classrooms, amounting to 60 hours of formal instruction and facilitated learning, and a 10-hour capstone project. The trainees can choose one-day campus immersion at IIT Delhi, experiencing the quality of research and academics of the institute.

For admission, the candidate should have a bachelor's or master's degree in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. On successful completion, the students are awarded an e-certificate by IIT Delhi CEP.

With a focus on cultivating applied skills as well as ethical innovation, the program is meant to build the future generation of AI leaders to make lasting impact in industry.

The long-established faith that a computer science degree from a leading American institution will lead to a lucrative job is running into increasing obstacles. Even with booming enrollments and rising expectations, recent graduates are finding it hard to secure employment in an ever-changing world of technology. The New York Times report states that a mix of changing industry needs and the advent of artificial intelligence is making new computer science graduates unemployed and frustrated.

The Golden Ticket of Promise: Big Tech Wages and Coding Skills

Students such as Manasi Mishra have been motivated by corporate heroes who promised computer science as the ultimate ticket to success for more than a decade. Having grown up close to Silicon Valley, Manasi learned the message resonating loud and clear: "If you simply learned how to code, work hard and earn a computer science degree, you can earn six figures for your entry-level salary," she remembers. This assurance compelled her to begin coding websites in elementary school, learn higher-level computing classes in high school, and eventually study computer science at Purdue University.

Technology behemoths amplified these hopes. In 2012, Brad Smith, a senior Microsoft executive at the time, pointed out that computer science majors tended to have initial salaries exceeding $100,000, along with generous bonuses and stock awards. This promise created an education boom. The Computing Research Association estimated that the number of US undergraduate computer science majors more than doubled between 2014 and over 170,000 last year.

AI, Layoffs, and Job Market Contraction

Though, the job landscape has changed dramatically. The advent of AI coding tools that can write and debug code has decreased the requirement for junior software developers. At the same time, the large technology firms like Amazon, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft have performed major layoffs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirms that recent college graduates with degrees in computer science and computer engineering have unemployment rates of 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively. This is much higher than recent graduates in biological or art history, which has an average unemployment rate of 3 percent.

Thousands of Applications, Few Interviews, No Offers

Most graduates encounter a rigorous job hunt. Graduates from various institutions, such as Maryland, Texas, Cornell, and Stanford, indicated that they applied to hundreds or thousands of positions. However, months of work usually concluded without any offers or interviews.

The job search process has become emotionally taxing, with some graduates describing it as “bleak,” “disheartening,” or “soul-crushing.” Several candidates said they felt “gaslit” by the industry’s earlier promises of easy success.

AI’s Role in Automating Entry-Level Jobs

One of the major reasons for the dismal job outlook is the growing involvement of AI in software development. First-line coding positions, which were once a stepping stone for freshly graduated engineers, are now most exposed to automation. An example of such a tool is CodeRabbit, which claims to debug code quicker than human engineers, leading companies to reconsider their recruitment strategies.

The graduates are also confronted with an AI "doom loop" in applications. They use AI applications to personalize résumés and autofill applications in a hurry, as employers utilize AI systems to automatically reject and sift out applicants, bypassing human discretion during the hiring process.

Reevaluating What Tech Firms Value Nowadays

In this new environment, analysts advise students to re-strategize. Google's Android head Sameer Samat points out that merely a computer science degree is not enough to achieve success. "If you just want to learn Java or Python, you don't need a degree," he explained. Passion, intense specialization, and problem-solving capabilities are what differentiate applicants.

Samat encourages would-be engineers to become a leading expert in one area they are passionate about, be it system design, AI, or user experience. Specialized expertise more and more fuels hiring managers at large tech companies.

The Cost of Education

Compounding this doubt is the heavy financial cost endured by most students. Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, recently warned against borrowing large amounts to study abroad, particularly with job prospects dwindling. He believes employer-sponsored training programs and greater acceptance of non-traditional qualifications are the way forward, citing this as the potential to keep students out of debt.e

The age of having a computer science degree from a well-known US university as an automatic guarantee of success is drawing to a close. As AI revolutionizes the sector and job markets shrink, graduates need to adjust by learning specialized skills, accepting lifelong learning, and being willing to take non-traditional career routes. For students and teachers, attention needs to shift away from syntax programming and focus on deep problem-solving and learning about the interlinking of technology and the physical space.