Education by itself is a great equaliser of life, but it is through the use of ICT that we can enable a larger cross-section of society to gain access to quality education. Now the HRD Ministry, in association with the Ministry of External Affairs, is planning to use online systems for helping Indian students and researchers in universities abroad. Unfortunately, there has been a significant rise in instances of racial attacks and fake universities duping Indian students studying abroad. So the HRD Ministry wants to ensure that there is help at hand for those falling prey to such scandals.
An online helpline is now under development that shall be jointly run by the HRD Ministry and the MEA. It will allow students and teachers to register and track complaints, which will be immediately forwarded to a designated officer at India’s Mission in that country. This is yet another instance of our country using ICT for providing effective facilities to our students and teachers.
This issue of digitalLEARNING has an in-depth coverage of the World Education Summit, which placed thought leaders and various other stakeholders in the education sector from across the world on a single platform, on 23-24 April 2013 in Le Méridien, New Delhi. The summit led to the evolution of several new ideas for using ICT to improve outcomes in education. Some of the ideas will get implemented, while others will need further deliberations for making them more effective.
Implementation of new technologies in the area of education is never an easy task. Lot of elements need to come together —technology, connectivity, localised digital content and improved teaching methods. Along with this we also need to take care of other considerations like policy, funding strategies, and commercial ecosystem.
This issue of digitalLEARNING also takes a view of the dynamic changes happening in the technical education sector of the country. We have attempted to rank the top engineering institutions in the country. A total of 220 engineering institutions have been ranked. To facilitate a better and fairer evaluation of the institutions we have categorised the institutes into five zones. The best thing about our survey is that along with listing the institutions that are already at the top, we have also tried to discover other ‘Promising Institutions’ that are improving their educational facilities.
