With increased access to education content over the web, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal today focused on the emergence of 'meta-university'.

"The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials".

Meta-university is an exchange programme for students in set up by several partner universities in Europe.

It will also give access to scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, tele-operation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a global endeavour, he said.

Inaugurating the Indo-US Engineering Education Conclave, the minister underlined the need of the hour is to toss out the old industrial model based on pedagogy and replace it with a new model called "collaborative learning".

He said time has come when "we need to change the way varsities think of collaborating with schools. Why should not a nine grade student access university course," he said.

For universities to succeed today, he felt there is a need to cooperate to launch a movement of sharing and partnering in different stages.

The partnership can be in exchange of course content, course content collaboration, course content co-innovation, knowledge co-creation and collaborative learning connection.

The conclave is deliberating on subjects such as leadership and management of engineering institutions, challenges being faced by Indian and US engineering institutions and also collaborative activities.