To address and cater to the needs of ITIs and enhance the students’ competencies for employment opportunities, Station-e model can be the right choice, asserts Station-e Language Lab Director Dr Haresh Tank

“In order to produce technicians of world standard, Government proposes to launch a programme in the Central sector to upgrade 500 ITIs over the next 5 years at the rate of 100 ITIs a year. Appropriate infrastructure and equipment will be provided, the syllabi will be upgraded and new trades will be introduced. This is an area where I welcome Chambers of Commerce and Industry to join hands with the Government and create a public-private partnership model for designing and implementing the scheme,” says P Chidambaram, Union Minister for Finance, Govt of India

The vocational education sector is the most neglected area and is the weakest link in education and the economy. The Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) across the country are monuments of this neglect. With this mandate ‘to produce technicians of world standard’, India finds itself completely inadequate to meet the match and hence the call for the upgradation of ITIs into Centres of Excellence. After eight years of that speech, things have not improved a great deal.

The quality of the ITIs in the country has always been a cause of concern and more so in the last few years, because of the fact that the industry is clamouring against the blatant disconnect between the skills imparted in these institutions and the skills demanded in the market. There are several challenges that ITIs face, but they cannot be understood or addressed unless one understands the ground reality.

Training the youth
The ground reality has its direct relationship with the international competitiveness that companies aim at in the present era of globalisation, and rightly so, they require a skilled and competent workforce that is attuned to the market requirements and is equipped with knowledge of right skills and advanced technologies. Unfortunately, the ITIs in the country do not have any of the expertise or resources to train the youth for that.

In countries like Finland and South Korea, vocational education is at par with mainstream education and half of the student pool opts for vocational education because there are excellent facilities, up-to-date syllabi and advanced tech tools to support their training.

Students passing out of such a system would naturally obtain good jobs as ‘technicians of world standard’. Compared to this, India has never taken its vocational education seriously and hence, students never considered it to be a path to employment. However, the fact remains that the world of business badly needs skilled technicians and the irony of the situation is that the sanctioned seats in ITIs across India remain unutilized as the youth do not opt for education imparted in ITIs. For those who opt for it, the employment opportunities are not easy to come by.

Challenges for ITIs
The biggest pointer to the abysmal state of vocational education is the under utilisation of seats as reported by more than 51 percent of the ITIs. It is hard to argue with the fact that the trades presently being offered by the ITIs in the country fail the test in terms of the industry and market needs at the national and local levels and that many of the old fashioned trades limit the scope for job opportunities after completion of the course.

How much a country spends on a sector/segment is a rough indicator of how much significance is attached to it.

Of course, the problems lie usually in the implementation, but in the case of ITIs, nearly 77 percent of the budget is, on an average, allocated for salaries, leaving very little for other expenses. Imagine the situation of an ITI with very little to spend on equipment, infrastructure and instructor training, when it has very good budget to do it.

What this means is that our ITIs are operating on old machines, average infrastructure put in place years ago, and instructors who do not receive any great training opportunities to upgrade themselves. Another facet to this is that while nearly 95 percent of the budget is that of all the funds allocated for the purchase of raw material used in the machines and equipment, the average proportion allocated under this head was a meagre six percent of the budget.

These ITIs spend very little on staff training and development, which is a significant area for any educational institution. Only 30 percent of the ITIs had allocated budget for staff training and development in the year 2003-04. But since then, the scenario has only marginally improved in the case of only some of them. The rest still lag behind in the same way they used to a decade ago. The more fundamental evil is the availability of staff – shortage of staff has been a serious cause for concern for the ITIs in India with a whopping 80 percent+ of the ITIs functioning with staff strength less than what is sanctioned for them by the NCVT, DGE&T.

There is, of course, the almost non-existent monitoring system prevailing in the vocational training system in the country, which tells us the grim story regarding the number of inspections during the last several years in these institutes. There are ITIs where no inspections at all has been undertaken in many years, with so many of them where very few inspections took place over the years. When one places this with the fact that these are the institutes poised for becoming centres of excellence in the future, points towards an even more frightening picture of the overall scenario in this regard.

What all of it spell for the students is that their skills training is affected in a significant way and the trades they learn may not be of great use to the world anymore but they discover this only after passing out. Students passing out of ITIs do not belong to the skills-oriented world of business and industry where cutting technology defines new age innovations everyday. In order to upgrade and enhance the quality of ITI students, we propose a model envisaged and implemented in Gujarat by Station-e.

Station-e Model for ITIs
To address and cater to the needs of ITIs, Station-e has evolved a unique model for the enhancement of the student competency and employment opportunities. Station-e model is a high tech language lab facility that caters to the students’ need for skills training for the employment today. It works in several ways to serve the cause of students of ITIs. It is a unique mix of components which make skills training an art and science both.

Firstly, Station-e has developed training modules which emphasise on the soft skills that can prove crucial in getting a job in today’s scenario. These modules are based on the years of research at the global level and national level to upskill the youth. These modules are what average education is not- it is customised to meet student needs, activity based to the core and defined by contemporary pedagogy. To add to this, there is advanced technology playing a pivotal role in the transaction of these modules for upskilling the youth.

Every aspect of the modules and every activity to be carried out by students is interwoven into a technology-led process so that students are trained into a culture of the 21st century workplace where technology is the ultimate unifying factor of all business and industry processes. Mix this with very high standard of trainers which are missing in the ITIs and we shall have the perfect combination of skills up gradation for the youth. This model operates through the establishment of Skills Development Centre to be established and interwoven in the processes of an ITI. With a scientific pre and post-test, results are as concrete as one can get from a scientific experiment. To complete the cycle, Station-e Skills Development Centre serves to link ITIs with local and national industry so that the youth are absorbed as soon as they pass out.

When implemented, there were pleasant surprises for both ITIs as well as us, because the results have been astonishing to say the least. It is profoundly significant to note that all these Station-e Skills Development Centres (SDCs) are established across the rural parts of Gujarat and not the urban areas which is a measure of its success and efficacy. Take for instance, an ITI like Rajula in the remote part of a district like Amreli has grown manifold in terms of skills training and employment opportunities. Students have reported unrivalled growth and their stories of employment and good salaries float across the small town of Rajula today.

The experience of the instructors of technical subjects after the establishment of Skills Development Centre at Keshod ITI, Junagadh district, is a case in point. These instructors saw a marked difference in the competency level of students after their training  in the SDC. There are several ITIs today which have Station-e SDCs and which have narratives of transformation to tell us with a focus on skills upgradation and employment opportunity. The industry has taken note of this transformation and is entering into agreement today with these ITIs to employ these youths.

As a model of skills enhancement and employment generation, Station-e Skills Development Centre has proved its mettle and the record is improving with the passage of time. The time is ripe to consider its national implementation with some solid policy initiatives.

Cisco’s CEED platform has been started with the objective of imparting quality remote education to students living in remote and rural areas

A computer scientist with over 25 years of work experience, Aravind Sitaraman, President Inclusive Growth, Cisco, has done pioneering work in several start-ups and high tech companies in the US. He is regarded as one of the leading innovators of Cisco with 54 US patents. He has led and been part of several international standard bodies

Inclusive growth means an economic growth whose fruits are broad-based and leads to the upliftment of a population that is not a part of the mainstream economy. Economic growth is a crucial component of poverty alleviation, and therefore, if there is inclusive growth, there is rapid transformation of all sections of the society. The poor, illiterate and other disadvantaged sections can have equality of opportunity only if there is a time-bound plan for inclusive growth that can bring in transformation.

India has witnessed rapid economic growth in the last few years, but at the same time, it is taking inordinately long for the benefits of this growth to trickle down to the larger population. Most of the rural areas in India lack proper infrastructure for education and healthcare. Hence, inorganic means are required to ensure that the capabilities of all sections of the society are enhanced so that they are able to partake in the overall economic development. These methods of inclusive development contribute to the economic, political and social stability and further accelerate the growth of the nation.

Inclusive education

Cisco has started the Cisco Education Enabled Delivery (CEED) platform to enable access to quality education to one and all. The initiative aims to provide quality remote education, both supplemental and interventional coaching, to students living in remote and rural areas. The students are connected with qualified teachers based in the cities. Using the network as the platform, CEED uses Cisco’s collaborative tools and security technology delivering content out of the cloud and over the video.

A part of a comprehensive, integrated, and open learning platform, CEED is designed to bring collaboration and video to the heart of teaching and learning. In this platform, the power of networking, Internet, video and collaboration tools developed by Cisco get leveraged to create a real-time interactive environment between the remote teacher and the students. It preserves every aspect of a traditional classroom, except for the fact that the remote teacher is not in the same classroom as the students. The main focus is on ensuring that students are provided high quality teaching.

In CEED, students can interactively raise and answer questions using the equipment (screen, projector, speakers, mic and electronic whiteboard). This system of teaching ensures that the same remote teacher is able to teach several classes in different locations. The curriculum is developed specially to ensure that it is easily disseminated through the use of the educational tools and aids that are being used.

In case a teacher or supervisor is present at the rural school, a special instructor is assisted by the teacher in the classroom to increase interactivity in the class, and also so that the instructor can attend to the specific needs of the class. This will ensure that all rural schools offer all subjects with the same level of expert teaching, that a child in a city or a metro gets access to. Along with its ecosystem partners, Cisco is responsible for development, creation and delivery of the coursework which is based on the regular curriculum or syllabus.

Implementations of CEED

The CEED programme from Cisco was initiated as a pilot programme in the villages of Raichur. The success of the Raichur pilot led to remote intervention coaching using CEED deployment at two boys’ hostels in Shimoga and other two in Raichur.  Over 1,000 students have benefited from using the platform. Children of class seven and eight are taught English, Mathematics, Science and Social Sciences across four schools, three times a week by a teacher (remotely from the city), using local vernacular language (Kannada) as the medium of instruction.

Recently, approximately 30 Indian army soldiers in Jabalpur graduated from Cisco’s basic computing and networking skills programme offered through CEED. For training purposes, Cisco’s expert engineers located in Bangalore volunteered their time to train and mentor the retiring soldiers based in Jabalpur in basic networking technology. The employees also donated their personal copies of books for several advanced courses such as Inter- Connecting Cisco Network Devices 1 and 2 (ICND) and CCNA. Cisco set up a practice lab of networking and computing devices.

How does CEED work?

• Teachers sitting at a remote location are connected via the Internet to the classroom using the CEED platform. The remote teacher needs a computer with Internet connectivity, webcam and a digital notepad/electronic whiteboard.

• Remote classrooms need a computer with Internet connectivity, webcam, mic, speakers and a projector.

• The remote teacher and the students in classrooms, to whom the subject/topic is to be taught, log-on at the pre-appointed time to the CEED platform. Several remote classrooms can simultaneously connect to the session at a specified time.

• Students at the remote classrooms can be assisted by their teacher who is on-site. The remote teacher conducts the class. Just like the traditional classroom, students listen to the instructor and raise queries, which the instructor is able to respond to, in real-time.

• Basis the feedback of the teacher on the ground remedial/coaching classes,mentoring etc. can be scheduled as per requirements of a school/cluster of schools.

What are the advantages of CEED?

• CEED requires no special setup.A computer with Internet is all that is needed.

• Teachers and students can be connected from multiple locations (including from home).

• Scales up easily and is great for small-to-large education environments.

• Simple scheduling and registration and click “Join Class” from the home page.

It aims at converting the physical campus into a virtual and knowledge campus – taking administration, information, communication & management to a whole new world

Education has always been a catalyst for evolutionary changes in the society. But today, with the support of technology, the changes have become revolutionary. It started off with the digitisation of teaching content that popularly got known as ‘e-Content’.

The objective was to supplement the traditional teaching process of ‘chalk and talk’ with multimedia interactive presentations. Somehow, its sudden spurt and excess usage led to the debate if it was impinging on the human touch of learning.

In this state of conflicting thoughts, the stakeholders of the education ecosystem were looking for a new idea that could revolutionise the education ecosystem management, and simplify their complex operation tasks.

The management of content is not a challenge for schools and colleges. The real challenge is the management of operation in delivering that content.

For instance, the teachers spend around 30 percent of their time in preparing and delivering a topic to the students. Seventy percent of the time goes in organising, computing and managing the information for the administration of assessment.

Similarly, the admission staff spends less time in interacting and engaging with the parents and more in the administration of inquiry for the admission process. The management that needs access to the right information at the right time to take vital decisions is in search of a smart tool to solve its problems.

In such scenarios, the implementation of technology in the administration process is the perfect panacea. But, it has to be the right technology at the right
cost.

Unfortunately, every institution that has taken the initiative to build and operate an IT system in-house has not been able to sustain it. The issue is not about the capability of the institution, but the focus on an aspect which is not their core competency.

Also, the rapid change in technology has led to high development and maintenance costs. On top of this, retaining technology talents is a very costly affair, with IT companies paying hefty pay packages.

In the process, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a technology solution for an institution in the long run becomes prohibitively expensive, especially when a major chunk of its time goes into managing administrative processes rather than adding real value to the academic processes.

Hence, “Outsourcing” of technology management has emerged as a powerful alternative to mitigate the challenges faced by the institutions. With the advent
of cloud computing, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model is replacing the concept of outsourcing.

This is a very powerful model of application usage as required by the institutions and reduces both the Capex and Opex significantly.

At the same time, giving a very high return on investment on this model led to the genesis of the concept of “Digital Campus”, or putting education on the cloud.

Cloud ERP has developed as a revolutionary approach to deploy an ERP solution. It provides flexible, adaptable, scalable, efficient and affordable solutions.

Cloud ERP is providing huge success in delivering data critical to businesses. It helps institutions on cloud have reduced ongoing hardware costs while maintaining greater control over the software.

The concept of “Digital Campus” (Education on Cloud) aims at converting the physical campus into a virtual and knowledge campus – taking administration, information, communication & management to a whole new world.

Similarly, the administrative staff of schools and colleges does not need to search through volumes of registers to compile and consolidate multiple reports on attendance, examination and fees.

They can spend more time on constructive and creative tasks to improve their administrative processes. This entire process of simplification of tasks through automation and integration, to maintenance and up gradation of technology for an institution comes free of cost for any educational institution: school, college, university or coaching centres.

Ultimately, parents reap the benefits of the Digital Campus. In normal circumstances, a parent visits his child’s school/college at least 5-6 times in a year, and spends around Rs 4,000- 5,000 on fuel.

With Digital Campus, parents can avail all these services online without visiting the campus for a small subscription fee of Rs 500 per student per year: one-tenth the cost.