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Center for Essential Skills (CES)

Why Essential Cognitive Skills?

 

The two constants that drive our 21st globally and digitally interconnected world is our reliance on continuously evolving technologies and a constantly evolving world of work.  To adapt and succeed in this ever-evolving world of change, students will need foundational skill sets, – transferrable soft skills that go beyond their technical domain expertise and can be applied to a variety of settings.  The Centre for Essential Skills ©Maker Bhavan Foundation has developed 10 courses on essential cognitive and soft skills to prepare students for a seamless transition from classrooms to careers and set them up for success in work and in life. The course material is available to colleges in India free of cost with faculty to be trained in learning outcome focused active learning pedagogy.

CES Courses on Essential Cognitive Skills

A total of ten courses are available for institutional partners in Indian colleges and universities in a phased fashion. All CES courses are equivalent to full-semester ( 14 weeks) courses on credit. While the faculty at the host institutions will be responsible for instruction, the course material will remain the intellectual property of the Foundation. The ten courses are clubbed under the following three categories: –

  1. Communication skills are necessary to process and communicate information effectively and persuasively. ( Courses ready and deployed)
  2. Learning Skills including Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Applied Financial skills. ( Available from July 2022)
  3. Interpersonal, Life skills for effective working with people managing life and effective decision making.  (under development).

What Differentiates CES Courses?

World-Class Content: Our goal is to make CES courses the “best of breed”, standing well in comparison with its international peers.  The content is developed by Active Learning Sciences whose founder Dr Stephen M Kosslyn is widely regarded as the world’s top disruptors in “learn-by-using” pedagogy.  Dr Kosslyn has held several positions including Director of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Chair of the Department of Psychology, Dean of Social Science, and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Active Learning: Traditional textbook oriented teaching is eschewed in favour of “learn-by-using” pedagogy. Active learning occurs when a person uses the information to achieve a learning outcome. In our courses, weekly lessons are coupled with lab sessions (for practice) and they focus on activities that engage the students with the study material and help them realise their learning outcomes.

Course Rigor and Trained Instructors: Faculty at partner colleges who will be teaching the courses are trained in this new pedagogy and refine the course material to suit local needs. CES courses are equivalent to full-semester ( 14 weeks) courses on credit and each course will involve more than 28 hours of classroom and 14 hours of lab sessions spread over 2 lessons and 1 lab session per week.

CES Courses are supported by the IIT Gandhinagar Foundation

We are grateful to the IIT Gandhinagar Foundation for their generous support that enables us to offer all the course content free of cost to interested colleges across India.

Our Partners at Active Learning Sciences

Stephen M. Kosslyn

Stephen M. Kosslyn

Founder, Active Learning Sciences, Inc.; Chief Academic Officer of Foundry College.

Dr. Stephen Kosslyn was the Founding Dean and Chief Academic Officer of the Minerva Schools at KGI. Before that, he was the director of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Prior to that, he was chair of the Department of Psychology, Dean of Social Science, and John Lindsey Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Kosslyn's research has focused on the nature of visual cognition, visual communication, and the science of learning; he has published 14 books and over 350 papers on these topics. He has received numerous honours, including the National Academy of Sciences Initiatives in Research Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three honorary Doctorates and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Beth Callaghan

Dr. Beth Callaghan

Vice President, Active Learning Inc

Dr. Beth Callaghan has been working in higher education for more than a decade. Over the past six years, she has focused on curriculum design, incorporating the science of learning into pedagogy and promoting active learning in diverse classrooms. She received her B.A. in English and World Literature from UCLA, her M.A. in English from UC Irvine, and her Ph.D. in English and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. She has taught in high school and college classrooms in southern California and was previously an Assistant Professor and course designer at The Minerva Schools at KGI. Most recently, she has served as the Dean of Foundry College. She is passionate about creating inspiring curricula that give students real world skills and connect concretely to their life experiences.

Our Partners

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