Global award for Ahmedabad University at The Times Higher Education Awards Asia 2023

Ahmedabad University has been “highly commended” by The Times Higher Education (THE) Awards Asia 2023, under the Teaching and Learning Strategy of the Year Category. The research-pedagogy design and its unique learning initiatives underscored by the Foundation Programme, Engagement and Application Based Learning and Education (ENABLE), and Independent Study Period won the private, non-profit research university in Gujarat this recognition.

This comes close on the heels of AACSB, the world’s largest business education association, picking Ahmedabad University’s Amrut Mody School of Management for the Innovations That Inspire award 2023 in recognition of its innovative interdisciplinary Foundation Studios that defines the Foundation Programme, the common core of Undergraduate education.

“This has been a major achievement for the University. Two global awards for the same thing – our Foundation Programme. This is our significant story - the unique pedagogy that the world is recognising. It is also a direction that the world of education wants to move towards and we are already leading that movement,” said Pankaj Chandra, vice chancellor of Ahmedabad University.

Widely known as the ‘Oscars of higher education’, THE Awards offer a major international platform to recognise outstanding leadership and institutional performance and celebrate Asia’s higher education excellence. THE awards were a prestige fixture on the UK higher education calendar for 14 years before travelling overseas for the first time in 2019.

“Universities have never been more needed than they are now. As the world works to recover from the Covid pandemic’s devastating impact, the countries that will be most successful in restoring the health of their populations, their economies, and their wider societies will find accomplished guides to new and better futures in our higher education institutions,” said Phil Baty, Chief Knowledge Officer, THE.

Ahmedabad University is a leading liberal education-driven research university that ushers in very close interdisciplinary linkages between the arts, sciences, and professional disciplines. ENABLE is a novel concept of designing learning of theoretical underpinnings while coming up with real-time solutions for a problem. The University has a hands-on winter term called the Independent Study Period, where students take interdisciplinary block courses offered by experts, practitioners, and pioneers in various fields. All students entering the undergraduate programme go through the Foundation Programme, building the foundations of interdisciplinary learning,engaging with issues of society through project-based learning, learning to ask the right questions.

“And it is only in learning to ask the right question, that our students learn to discover the answer. That is the future of education”, says Chandra.

About the Foundation Programme and Studios at Ahmedabad University, Caryn Beck-Dudley, AACSB president and CEO, said: “New demands from stakeholders require reimagined business school initiatives, and Amrut Mody School of Management demonstrates a fresh way forward for business education.”

Ahmedabad University was established in 2009 by the Ahmedabad Education Society to offer a world-class education on a centrally located campus with internationally renowned faculty. It now offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral studies in engineering, humanities, management, natural sciences, and social sciences.