IGNOU hosts pre-summit on AI-enabled education

The event featured thematic discussions on "AI Innovation, Efficiency and Scalability in ODDE" and "Resilience and Inclusivity, AI for Bridging Educational Divides", with panelists from leading organisations, including University of London, MeitY, Ministry of Education (GoI), NAAC, AICTE, IITs, JNU, CDAC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, HP and TCS iON.

IGNOU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Uma Kanjilal, said, “IGNOU is proud to be part of AI Impact Summit 2026 as part of the government's initiative to leverage a vast learner ecosystem to demonstrate how AI can contribute to the ODDE mode. With distinguished industry stakeholders and state partners already working on the AI Education model, this summit has proved to be a platform for effective recommendations, frameworks and partnerships. This event reflects IGNOU's commitment to the GoI’s vision of positioning India as global AI innovation leader serving humanity.”

Prof Ganesan Kannabiran (director, NAAC) shared insights on quality aspects of AI enabled ODDE systems, while Prof Partha Pratim Chakraborty (IIT Kharagpur) emphasised computation paradigms and the need for a sovereign multilingual and multimodal AI model. Linda Amrane Cooper (University of London) discussed global perspectives and industry experts from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and TCS iON deliberated on AI training for educators and technology innovations.

The second session, chaired by Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan (IIT Bombay), focused on the GoI’s sovereign AI model, BharatGen, with discussions on AI-driven resilience, inclusivity and learner-centric capacity building. Karunesh Arora (CDAC) highlighted “the need for AI that serves diverse learners from all age groups”.

Prof Nayantara Padhi, organising secretary, said, “It's a first-of-its-kind forum where industry, academia and governmentS across nations deliberated on ‘AI Enabled Future Ready Open, Distance and Digital Education (ODDE)’ and has come up with guidelines which will be useful for all ODDE institutions across the world.”