Transforming Learning Experience in Rajasthan

‘Project Utkarsh’ and ‘e-Gyankendra’ are the two projects which have earned Rajasthan government’s accolades. If the former project is about bringing qualitative change in mass school education via technology and quiz-based learning system, the latter, developed by Dr Jitendra Kumar Soni, District Collector and Magistrate, Jhalawar, Government of Rajasthan, is meant to facilitate and empower the community through e-learning and e-governance, examines Kartik Sharma of Elets News Network (ENN).

Project Utkarsh
Many government schools have access to technology infrastructure through various schemes, but its utilisation by teachers and students is usually quite below par. Moreover, there is no effective way for the government to track Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure usage or measure the impact on student learning outcome.

Result Indicators
Benefits:

• Build a strong learning culture by making students more curious, confident and participative
• Made curriculum-based learning more engaging and playful
• Collaboration with implementation agencies (e.g. government and Department of Education) for consistent project implementation. As part of the Project Utkarsh, we are establishing district and school level implementation model for further replication.

Key Considerations:
127 ICT schools selected from Jhalawar district
• 80+ schools have completed smart class teachers training
• 500+ systems used for regular practice and learning
• 1,000+ teachers were trained for long term capacity building
• 82.5% participation of rural area schools
• Content developed in local language
• Revolutionary step for Digital India through digital empowerment

Enabler Indicators
Stakeholders’ inclusiveness and participation:
Formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and Statement of Work (SoW) signed up among key stakeholders including roles and responsibility of each stakeholder, programme methodology and execution approach has been crucial in this regard.

Open Media Server based e-Gyankendra aims to bridge that gap by providing a versatile technology solution and sowing seeds of a grassroots community around it.

Technology adaptations/innovative deployment: Quiz Academy platform having exclusiveness and interactiveness of content in common parlance, smooth user interface, remote monitoring dashboard for real time status, offline solution for non-internet availability in schools have been important factors.

e-Gyankendra Teachers and students across the globe can now access educational resources in their own language for free. But there is a big problem of internet access. Around two-third of the world population doesn’t have any reliable internet access and within India, the situation is not good as well. This can be addressed through (semi) offline educational-media servers which are present at the site of the educational deployment. Considered together, the immense growth in high quality Open Educational Resources (OER), recent advances in low-power, low-cost computing, and the fall in cost of storage devices makes bridging the gap an economically feasible and scalable solution.

Proposed Solution
Open Media Server based e-Gyankendra aims to bridge that gap by providing a versatile technology solution and sowing seeds of a grassroots community around it. Let’s take a sample.

• Media
• Connectivity
• Administration
• Sample Content
• Wikipedia (multilingual)
• TED Talks
• Worldwide maps (OpenStreetMap)
• Project Gutenberg (45000+ books)
• Khan Academy (KA Lite)
• NCERT resources (multilingual – through the NROER project)
• Toys From Trash video
• Any other open-licensed content

Web Apps
• LMS – Moodle
• Local Social Network – Elgg
• Wiki – Dokuwiki
• Book Server – Pathagar
• Collaboration – Jabber
• Any other open-licensed web-app
• Personal use

Creates a home Wi-Fi network
• School use (Personal use features)
• Manages the LAN

If there is limited internet connectivity available:
• Provides content filtering
• Optimises bandwidth usage
• Remote debugging and deployment through VPN

Village network use (School use features)
• Wide area Wi-Fi network meshes
• Deployment
• Built on next generation technology
• Web-console for push-button deployment and management of content and services

Analytics
• Content access analytics – AwStats
• Server diagnostics – Munin
• Admin console – Cockpit

Hardware options
• Low end – Raspberry Pi
• Mid to High end – Intel NUC, and most other generic computers and servers

Need for the Initiative
In the present era of the digitisation, relevance and importance of internet cannot be under-rated but affordability, availability, security and consistency are also key aspects. The solution of open media server based e-Gyankendra is an effort to create an ecosystem for community empowerment and smart-citizen though digital learning leveraging open source technology and providing free access to best of the open source digital content for local community without internet-dependency.

The solution of open media server based e-Gyankendra is an effort to create an ecosystem for community empowerment and smartcitizen though digital learning leveraging open source technology and providing free access to best of the open source digital content for local community without internet dependency.

Key Features of e-Gyankendra Best of the knowledge content: e-Gyankendra can host and support open media content in the form of video, docs, PDF, animation, images etc. It has been tried to compile, curate and host best of the knowledge content especially of Indian context.
There is around one Tera Byte data which includes:
• Wikipedia (multilingual)
• Quiz Academy (www.quizacademy.org
• TED Talks • Worldwide maps (OpenStreetMap)
• Project Gutenberg (45,000+ books)
• Khan Academy (KA Lite)
• NCERT resources (multilingual – through the NROER project)
• Toys From Trash video
• Any other open-licensed content.

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