Official: Islamic Azad University among Pioneering Institutions in Smartization

“Islamic Azad University is one of the pioneering complexes in the country in the field of smartization and virtualization of services. On March 11, the fifth platform of the University called ‘Buffer’ was unveiled which is a type of cultural management platform. Also, a month ago, the ‘Daneshjouyar’ platform was also unveiled which is supposed to be a platform for the development of various software to provide multiple services in an integrated form for students, employees, professors and consumers of contents provided by Islamic Azad University,” Najafpour told ANA.

Noting that Islamic Azad University has taken a great leap in the new management period for close communication between society and industry to settle problems in all areas of society, he said that the platforms are the University's tools to facilitate and develop this process.

“More than 100 articles, 350 case studies, 450 startup ideas in the field of culture and education in virtual space, etc. have been sent to the secretariat of the conference on culture and education in virtual space and Islamic Azad University, and this process will not stop and we intend to continue it,” Najafpour underlined.

Earlier this month, Najafpour had announced holding of the first conference on culture and education in cyberspace and smart university.

“In a smart university, we are looking for the cultural and education life of users in virtual space,” he told ANA.

He explained that first, it was supposed that the conference on culture and education in virtual space and smart university would be held about the generality of virtual education and smart university but in further investigations, it became clear that the subjects of this field are highly broad and it was decided that the conference would be divided into phases.

“In the first phase, the focus is on the cultural and educational dimensions and in the next phases attention should be paid to the education, science and technology in the smart university,” Najafpour said.

“In our view, a smart university includes virtual education. The university includes processes like education, research, technology, cultural and student aspects, and therefore, focusing on virtual education is not correct, and for this reason, we replaced the term smart university in order to address all aspects of making the university smarter, because education is one of the processes of the university and other processes like research, acculturation, technology production, etc. also exist and a smart university should pay attention to all these processes,” he stressed.

A smart university is a university that provides innovative ways of working, learning and teaching in spaces that creatively integrate advanced hardware and software platforms that utilize big data, sensors, social media and machine learning.

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