EDITORIAL
New Year is time for New Ideas in Education

HIGHER EDUCATION
Policy Initiatives Higher Education in 2012

Pouring Quality in Indian Education System

HIGHER EDUCATION – LEADER SPEAK
Measuring Outcomes is Critical to Achieving Quality
(Dr) SS Mantha, Chairman, All Indian Council for Technical Education

SCHOOL EDUCATION – FEATURE
Nourishing the Roots

Assistive Technology is must for making inclusive education a reality
Dr Uma Tuli, Founder, Amar Jyoti School

SCHOOL EDUCATION
Foss is the Way to Inclusion
Krishnakant Mane, Social Engineer, IIT Mumbai, and a Free Software Advocate

FEATURE – ONLINE EDUCATION
Education Just a Click Away!

ACADEMIC SPEAK – ONLINE EDUCATION
Delivering Life-Long-Learning Support
Prof (Dr) Sandeep Sancheti, Director, National Institute of Technology, Delhi

INDUSTRY SPEAK – ONLINE EDUCATION
e-Learning will Continue to Germinate in India
Anand Nagarajan, CEO, Dexler Information Solutions Pvt Ltd; Co-Chairman National Council on HRD, Education & Employment, ASSOCHAM

Growing Mandate for e-Learning in Medical Colleges
Rohit Kumar, Managing Director-South Asia, Elsevier Health Sciences

CORPORATE DIARY
“Education can put One’s Life into a Different Orbit”
Anju Banerjee, Chairperson and Managing Director, EdCIL (India) Limited

2013 to Spur Growth in Projector Market
Vineet Mahajan, General Manager-Professional Display Division, Panasonic India Pvt Ltd

SPECIAL FEATURE
Sowing the Seeds of Inclusive Education
Aravind Sitaraman, President Inclusive Growth, Cisco

Education on the Cloud

Revamping Vocational Education through Station-e Model
Dr Haresh Tank, Director, Station-e Language Lab

SPECIAL REPORT
Employability-Outlook Report 2013

EVENT REPORT
Madhya Pradesh State Education Summit Addresses Gaps in the Education Sector

School Education Track
Vocationalising Education, and Capacity Building of Teachers

Alternative Assessment Strategies and Innovative Approaches in Evaluation

Creation of Inclusive Learning Environments in Classrooms

Right to Education and its Implications for Schools

Higher Education Track
Employability Skills and Proficiency Levels amongst Youth Best Practices and Next Practices

Changing Dynamics of Higher Education – Envisioning Strategies for the Future

Emerging Trends in use of Technology in Education

Technical Education in India – Challenges, Opportunities and Insights

digitalLEARNING Shiksha Ratna Awards 2012

POLICY MATTERS
ICT in Education
Hari Ranjan Rao, Secretary to Chief Minister and Department of Information Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh

The session opened on the note of several challenges in one of the fastest growing sectors of our country. It brought into light the fact that employability is the biggest challenge in the technical education sector in our country. It pointed out some of the phobias and assumptions made by the industry, academia, parents and students

Dr Mukesh Pandey, Dean-Industrial Technology, Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya

The principal challenge with the massive expansion of technical education is maintaining the quality. The premier institutes in our country like the IITs, NITs and even the RGPV, have failed to inspire or nurture innovation,  entrepreneurial skills, and path breaking technological ideas as generated in foreign universities like the MIT or Stanford. We need to reposition our institutions and universities in response to the global changes that are happening on a day-to-day basis.

 Dr Lovi Raj Gupta, Vice Chancellor, Baddi University

The major challenge in technical education is getting a good job. Factors like employability, quality of teachers, and less practical exposure are associative. The need of the hour is to think out-of-the-box. We need to define the box today and the rest will be done. The society has already taken in the privatisation in school education and senior secondary education. Most of us send our kids to private schools. But still, the society has not gulped in the privatisation of the higher education sector.

Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar, Vice President – Strategies and Alliances, Mosaic
Network, India

Twenty five percent of the population of India is still illiterate. Only 15 percent of Indian students actually go to high school. Out of those 15 percent, only seven percent are able to make it to the graduate level. Population is not a challenge for us; it is an opportunity. Even though about 3.5 lakh engineering students graduate in our country every year, we are unable to optimise on the existing talent pool that we have.

About 95 percent of all business education uses technology in some way or the other. With a panel formed of representatives from the industry, the government sector, universities, private institutes, entrepreneurial development centres, and investors, the session took us through the emerging trends in the education sector

Suresh Mhatre
Vice President, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)

The dearth of quality faculty, keeping consistency in quality across all spheres of education, and leveraging technology for meeting volumes are the three reasons why we need to rely more on ICT.

Vikram Upadhyay
Board Member, Indian Angel Network

Besides the basic parameters of a team: the market space, need, and demand and supply, investors look for scalability of the business. In the business model of the education space, the fastest and most proven stability and scalability comes from the use of technology. A technology which can reduce the time and increase the space is given high weightage by the investors.

Dr Sanjiv Tokekar
Director, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya

Our enrolment ratio has scaled three times from about 49 lakh in 1991 to about 1.5 crores at present. This is a problem created because of massification, a term given by the UNESCO. Massification has also given way to unethical practices in the system. Education runs as a business these days.

Sumeet Ponda
Chairman, M K Ponda College of Business and Management

Technology is opposed to the basic concept of education. It is not an ingredient to complete a more effective education. Technology desensitises us. The more technology we use, the more insensitive we become. Technology is only a facilitator. The idiom of technology has gone so deep into our lives that students from nursery to research are put almost on a conveyor belt. The teachers and parents have become insensitive to their toddler, infantile and teenager needs. Technology can be a good slave, but, we are making it become a master.

Prof Jagdish Bhagwat
Faculty for Operations, Supply Chain and Marketing,
Jaipuria Institute of Management, Indore

In today’s world, technology is readily available to us and sometimes, students are a step ahead of us in technology. Technology is indeed, a boon to all of us and we need to leverage it to develop better managers for tomorrow.

Dinesh Khare
Regional Coordinator,
Centre of Entrepreneurship Development

The BA, MA, BSc and MSc courses in our country are not up to the mark. Doing these courses is not good enough to make a student employable. A student may be having a first class degree. But, the curriculum is still based on mugging and rote-learning system. This process does not make a student competent enough to take effective decisions. The improvement of the quality of teaching-learning process of these courses will facilitate betterment of the overall education system.

This session delved upon the changing patterns in the education sector and the ways to maintain quality standards in education. It also emphasised on the need to motivate students to make them lead and not merely get employed to earn a livelihood

Dr V K Verma
Vice Chancellor,
AISECT University

Both quality and quantity are required to meet the national goal of economic development. At present, we have 18 million students in higher education, and by the end of 12th Five-Year Plan, we will have 25 million students in higher education. But, we are still lacking in the quality part. In a country of millions of students and lakhs of teaching force, why cannot we have a cadre for administration of the technical education system? Why cannot there be a forward thinking of our rules and regulations? Why cannot the regulatory body take the role of a mentor, counselor and a facilitator?

Prof Satish Sharma
Maharaja Education Campus, Udaipur

Why to serve others to make people serve you? We should prepare real workers for the nation. Why do we prepare them to work for others? They should work for themselves, to make the nation more and more prosperous.

Dr Appu Kuttan K K
Director,
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT)

Innovation will keep going. We need to motivate and promote the students. We should always have a positive attitude and positive publicity of things. Small things done by the students should be appreciated in the media.

G C Sharma
Head-Financial Education,
National Stock Exchange (NSE)

Financial literacy should become an essential life skill for the masses.

Dr P K Sen
Head, Dept of Applied Physics,
Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science

In India, we talk more than we do. When it comes to implementation, we divert our attention. The time has now come for us to start criticising ourselves. Knowledge is no more segregated. We have to gather knowledge from all the sectors if we want to create good quality engineers, technologists, and scientists.

Ritu Ghosh
Head-Education Initiatives, HP

We have villages without schools, schools with no classes, classes with no teachers, and teachers with no books. The root cause of this problem is that all our resources are not integrated. To cover this up, such schools have ghost teachers to sign their attendance and get paid. And, in reality, these teachers live in the cities and consequently, there is a high student dropout rate, which is evident. The question is if we are creating this youth to add to the economic growth.

Dr R K Khandal
Vice Chancellor,
Gautam Buddh Technical University (GBTU), Lucknow

Based on the technologies required, you need to decide how you are going to frame your strategies, devise plans, develop policies, and put them in place to match what is required and where gaps exist. Technology can put you in the leadership position. But, it cannot lead you. It will always be your assistant. The leadership role has to come from the human factor and that is from the teacher. The teacher has to play the role of showing the student the way to go forward.

Finding a job-ready workforce that can deliver quality continues to be a worry quotient for employers across the globe. This session not only brought out a comprehensive summary of what ails the employers and the institutes, but also gave some specific solutions that can benefit the two stakeholders

Siddharth Chaturvedi, Director, AISECT University

Higher education  institutions need to develop capacity in employer involvement, build flexibility in training programmes, and embed the entire concept of employability, but not as an adjunct for one or two semesters. They need to invest in professional development of the staff, bring in activities and action learning into the curriculum, and engage the participants in a more qualitative and meaningful manner

Lokesh Mehra, Director-Education Advocacy, Microsoft India

We need to develop the skills on 5Cs and 3 Is: Creativity, Critical thinking, Collaboration, Communication and Computing; and Innovativeness, Intuitiveness, and Incremental. As of now, we are focusing too much on the professional side. An impetus needs to be given towards arts and humanities.

Manoj Bhatia, Director, Sanghvi Institute of Management & Science

The complete integration of employability skills in our education and training system is yet to come. The proposal is to have a developmental model wherein different skills can be brought together to deliver something more than skills,
that is, employability skills.

Dr Prashant Rajvaidya, President, Mosaic Network, US

The IT set up in India is usually impractical and there is a lack of competent teachers and trainers. In order to change it, you have to work bottom up which also includes enhancement of employability skills. The goal should be to treat those as assumptions and then create solutions that work around these assumptions.

Alternative assessment is a form of student performance grading that allows for a more holistic approach for student assessment over the traditional form. With this kind of assessment, students are enabled to provide their own responses rather than simply selecting from a given list of options. The session delved upon best practices and innovative ways of assessments in classrooms

Dr Basheerhamad Shadrach, Country Director, TESS-India, Open University, UK The Open University, UK, works with different organisations in many ways, by providing courses, collaborating on new curriculum, validating programmes, and sharing expertise to help other distance learning ventures become  stablished. The focus for all our collaborative ventures is on finding new ways to fulfil our mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people at more places.

Mohit Yadav, Director, Annie Besant School, Indore In the times to come, the evaluation process will have to have more of assessment so that examination does not become scoring just a grade or marks, but a tool for teachers to understand students, and for students, a better way to understand themselves.

Rajesh Awasthi, Principal, Choithram School, Indore At times, evaluation becomes more qualitative as compared to assessment. So, if we add quality to the assessment it will lead to evaluation, but ultimately, the focus should be on attaining some basic skills, which will help a student in expressing his ideas and work. Grading and giving marks to the student should not be the only criteria to evaluate a student, we must also focus on skills development.

Dr Michael Harnar, Mosaic Network, US Evaluation does have some sort of participatory element, participatory process has three major dimensions – selection of the people, depth of their involvement, and control over evaluation.

Inclusive teaching means recognising, accommodating, and meeting the learning needs of all students. The session focused on strategies and methods to make learning more holistic, while also trying to make it inclusive, not just within classrooms, but in the society as a whole

L K Kandpal
Principal, New Digambar School, Indore

An inclusive classroom is one where students and staff alike recognise, appreciate, promote the diversity, and try to enrich the overall learning experience. In order to make a class inclusive, the system must encourage all learners, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, socio-economic status, and personal beliefs to develop skills to understand and face the challenges of life.

Prakash Choudhury
Principal, Prestige Public School,
Indore

As teachers, we should be like researchers and find whether a child is able to learn the way we teach him. And if he is not, we must find ways to help him learn the way he wants to.

Sarita Manuja
In-Country Advisor- Center for Assessment, Evaluation and Research, CBSE

Effective inclusion improves the education system for all students, regardless of their learning ability, race, linguistic ability, economic status, gender, learning style, ethnicity, cultural background, religion, family structure, and sexual orientation.

Pradeep Pandey
Principal, Pioneer Convent School, Indore

We should make learning interesting and technology can be leveraged to achieve this goal. Inclusive learning is beyond giving equal opportunity to all. Inclusion is no longer a problem as all students are being enrolled in education. But, we have to make sure that they integrate well with each other. For better integration, the learning experience needs to be made interesting.