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Tata Trusts has tied up with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) to upskill rural secondary school students in four states using digital interactive tools.

The Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) will offer access to interactive and hands-on learning experiences to advance their knowledge and skills and also seeks to instill values to help them succeed as professionals and citizens, a statement said today.

"We have the strength of a large and young population, an entrepreneurial population, (but) the one thing that they don't have is the chance of and the ability to be educated," Tata Trusts Chairman Ratan Tata said at an event here.

The programme will be carried out in over 1,000 schools in Mizoram, Telangana, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and benefit an estimated 1.65 lakh students in classes 8 to 11 and 4,400 teachers till fiscal 2019. Tata said the initiative will focus on English, Science and Mathematics. Details with regards to investment in the programme by the entities were not immediately available.

CLIx will align technology-integrated offerings with the school curricula, and aims to enhance professional development for teachers, apart from helping the students by leveraging new technologies, the statement said.

As part of the tie-up, a Centre for Education Innovation and Action Research has been created at TISS to incubate CLIx and will serve as the Indian collaborator with MIT.

"We believe online learning technologies can offer teachers (and learners) everywhere the tools to transform the educational experience by engaging students in active learning that stimulates their curiosity, makes every lesson more memorable and helps build skills relevant to students' experiences," MIT's president L Rafael Reif said.

The programme will also have a component, which will focus on research, measurement and impact assessment that will help in the future scale-up of CLIx, the statement said.