CBSE Modifies Affiliation Bye-Laws

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June 20, 2012

To ensure safety of school children that use the school transport , the Central board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has modified its affiliation bye-laws to include transport precautions.

Guidelines issued by the board includes the exterior of the bus must be painted with uniform colour with the name of the school written on both sides of the bus.

The word ” School Bus” must be written on the back and front of the bus. If it is hired bus, “On School Duty” should be clearly indicated. Moreover, telephone number of the school and telephone number of any contact person shall also have to be written prominently, so that in case of necessity the public can inform the school authority/police or other authorities.

Specifying the fixture and furniture of the bus, the board has clearly notified that the windows of Bus should be fitted with horizontal grills and with mesh wire. The doors of the Bus should be fitted with reliable locks and all buses must be fitted with speed control devices so that they do not exceed the speed limit of 40 Kmph. All school buses should also have fire extinguisher.

In addition of infrastrucutre there must be a qualified attendant in the bus. School buses should also have first aid boxes and to keep the school bags safely, there should be a space fitted under the seats.

IIT Admission Proposal May Get Modified

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June 20, 2012

With the Prime Minister’s intervention, the HRD Ministry is now conceived to have a modified proposal for IIT admission. The new proposal that has been sent to the IIT Joint Admission Board (JAB) seeks to drastically restrict the number of aspirants appearing for the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced).

As per the proposal, only 20 per cent of the top scorers in the Plus Two Exam in each Board (CBSE, ICSE and State Boards) would be eligible to appear for the JEE (Advanced) test that would be conducted by the IITs. The proposal has been “verbally communicated” by JAB Chairman and IIT Delhi Director R K Shevgaonkar to office bearers of the All India IIT Faculty Federation. It shall be finalised after wider consultation with faculty across the IITs.

The plan is in complete contrast to the controversial ‘one-nation, one-test’ policy mooted earlier by the Ministry which provided for an ‘unscientific’ percentile normalisation of Plus Two marks.

Informed sources said that students who do not fall within the top 20 per cent performers’ category would be automatically eliminated from the race. There will also be another stage of “gating” or “filtering” based on the performance of candidates in the JEE (Preliminary) pape

AICTE New Regulations for NRI Quota Engineering Seats Plug Loophole

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June 20, 2012

New guidelines set by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has made it hard for students to take admission under the Non-Resident Indians (NRI) quota.

Only seven students have admission in engineering colleges this year against a quota of around 100 seats. Last year, the figure stood at 12. Before 2011, 90 students had taken admission under this quota. The unusually high number of students at that time had made the AICTE to sit up and prompted it to come out with new guidelines.

“The AICTE made several changes in rules for children of NRIs. Unlike earlier years, there is no provision for admission to NRI-sponsored students,” said directorate of technical education deputy director Dr B L Reddy.

Hailing changes made by the AICTE, Reddy said several students had taken admission in NRI quota in the past by showing “anyone as their relative.”It was an injustice to students who were cracking the PET, but still not getting admission. Now, new guidelines clearly mentions that only parents can be treated as your first relative,” Reddy said.

According to AICTE guidelines, technical institutions shall be permitted by competent authority for admission in respective states and union territories to admit the NRI students up to maximum of 5% of the total sanctioned intake. For NRI quota seats, only a person who is NRI himself may seek admission and no other candidate without NRI status will be eligible.

Asked about the vacant seats in NRI quota, Reddy said any such vacant seat would be turned into payment seat and this will have to be filled up with selected candidates, the list of which is prepared in keeping with the procedure laid down for admission to technical institutions. Private institutions never approach the authorities for seeking NRI quota facility in their institutions.

UP Government Passes Rs 1,715 Crore for Higher Education

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June 20, 2012

The Uttar Pradesh state government tabled department budget during the legislative assembly wherein Rs 354.47 crore for department of technical education, Rs 1,715.62 crore for higher education, Rs 242.21 crore for vocational education were passed.

Reacting to suggestions made by BJP’s Radhamohan Das Agarwal, the state government also said it would consider suggestions to start 5-year integrated post graduate courses in the state. In addition, the government also agreed to order an inquiry into the delay in payments to madrassa teachers. Responding to a question raised by Congress’s Rita Bahuguna Joshi about why payments were delayed despite grants being released by the Centre in November, 2011, parliamentary affairs minister Mohammad Azam Khan said strict action would be initiated against those found guilty. In response to another question raised by Joshi, Khan ruled out the possibility of increasing the salaries of madrassa teachers.

India and US Ties Up to Strengthen Indian Educational Structure

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June 20, 2012

Education institutes of India and US joins hands to make a pool of trained mid-career academicians. These trained talent pool can be groomed further into potential leaders and thereby the Indian education structure could be made strong.

Education (CSHE), in association with Rutgers University and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, will host an Indian Higher Education Academy at Penn State in 2013 to specifically address the needs of Indian higher education and build academic leaders.

This is part of a proposal, for which the three institutions were awarded the Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative Grant, as announced by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently. Robert M Hendrickson, interim director and senior scientist at the Centre For Study of Higher Education, Penn State University, told that besides onsite sessions from May 19 to May 23, 2013, at Penn State, six virtual sessions would be scheduled during the 2013-2014 on topics selected by participants.

As many as 30 heads from the Indian higher education field are expected to participate in the academy. Elaborating further, Prof Hendrickson said, “The academy has been set up to provide foundational knowledge to help academic administrators of higher education institutions become more effective administrators of academic units. Several higher education leaders and vice-chancellors from India will be present at the Academic Leadership Academy, to be held from June 24 to June 28. They will help put topic areas in an Indian context for the 2013 India Academic Leadership Academy.”

Speaking on the matter, he said, “The Academic Leadership Academy was originally developed to address the problem of developing leadership vacuum created by the retirement of 50 per cent academic leaders in the US. With the development of new post secondary institutions in India, there is a growing need for quality academic leadership.”

Tata Institute of Social Sciences professor B Venkatesh Kumar, who is the project leader from the Indian side said: “We will identify potential candidates from universities and institutes who are mid-career, and then put them through a process of training and mentoring.”

IIT Kharagpur to Set up Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy Institute of Medical Science and Research

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June 19, 2012

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur takes the first step to have its dream Institute Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy Institute of Medical Science and Research with financial approval of Rs 230 crore for a 400 bed superspeciality hospital. The hospital will be made operational within two years. The hospital in next phase would be upgraded to 750 bed. With an operational hospital, the Institute will start Medical education programme leading to MBBS, MD, MS and DM degrees with approval of MCI.

The hospital will be the catalyst to accelerate biomedical, clinical and translational research. Drug design and delivery will be other key research area to which the hospital will contribute. It will bring the two diverse disciplines of engineering and medicine together in education and research.

In the first phase, the Institute will have a Bioinnovation Centre. The Centre will be devoted to research in biomedical engineering and remote healthcare delivery. There will be a healthcare outreach unit. It will significantly extend heathcare outreach to the remote underserved areas through remote diagnostic, telepathology, teleradiology and other diagnostic tools. Remote diagnostic devices will be cellular network compatible. Medical advices will be provided through telemedicine. A series of small healthcare kiosks will be linked to the outreach units. The kiosks will be manned by trained paramedics. The Institute will have also its own nursing and paramedic training facilities.

The Institute will have its unique teaching college in medicine, the first of its type in the country. Small group teaching with electronic connectivity to patient, surgical table, diagnostic facilities etc. will make teaching learning more meaningful. Artificial reality, models and simulators will be extensively used for teaching. Surgery practice will be done through models, simulators and telesurgery. The products will have much higher skills and competence to provide high tech healthcare services.

The Institute will have few intakes at undergraduate level but more at postgraduate level. Research will be the focuss of the Institute. IIT Kharagpur has collaboration with University of California, San Diego and Johns Hopkins University to have a state of the art Medical Institute, the first of its kind in India in IIT Kharagpur.

Goa Government to Launch Higher Education Plan for Orphans

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June 19, 2012

The Panaji government has thought of coming with a plan to offer higher education to the orphans. The government has formulated a scheme ‘Dayanand Bandodkar scheme for higher education for orphans’ to provide assistance to them to pursue further studies, including technical education, from the academic year 2012-13.

The higher education department will operate the scheme, which has been accorded approval by the state government.

“The basic purpose of formulating the scheme for higher education is to support the educational needs of the children who have lost both parents and are deprived of higher education for want of financial resources,” a source said.

Orphans can avail of the scheme to pursue undergraduate courses up to post graduation in general and also technical education.

The beneficiaries will be exempted from payment of fees in the academic institutions, in which they enroll for higher education, as the government will take care of the waiver of the fees.

As per the terms of eligibility for the waiver of fees, the students should be born in Goa or residents of the state at least for last 15 years.

The students who are enrolled for first year of their degree/post graduate courses are entitled to the benefits under the scheme. The exemption of fees covers tuition fees, library fees, laboratory fees and development fees, and also other charges such as lodging and/ boarding, food (hostel charges) or transport.

Next Education Likely to Accumulate Rs. 150 Crore PE Funds

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June 18, 2012

With the objective of fostering its growth path, Next Education Pvt Ltd, education technology solution provider is planning to raise Rs. 150 crore funds through private equity this year.

Beas Dev Ralhan, CEO, Next Education said, “We run on an up front-capital model where we invest 20 per cent equity and 80 per cent debt. We require Rs 150 crore as growth capital. Currently, we are under discussion with some PE firms but nothing has been finalised yet. It may happen during the July-October period this year’.

The company, which was started in 2007, has so far invested Rs 300 crore in research, content development and in rolling out its pan-India operations. It had risen the initial funding from Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, and ranked among the 40 richest Indians according to Forbes Magazine.

Next Education offers innovative learning solutions for the K-12 segment across CBSE, ICSE, IGCSE and 23 other Indian state boards in eight languages. Its in-house developed products – TeachNext, LearnNext, NextStudio, NextLabs, and NextERP – cater to 7,000 schools across the country.

“We target to reach 10,000 schools over the next three years. Currently, more than 30,000 students use our LearnNext, and another 10,000 students are expected to be added this year,” he said.

The company has implemented TeachNext in over 4,000 classrooms across India.Currently, there are roughly 75,000 private schools in the country, and the number is growing at 30-40 per cent year-on-year.

“The adoption of digital curriculum has hugely taken off across private schools in the last three-four years. Being an end-to-end solutions provider, we are seeing a good market opportunity in this segment,” Ralhan said.

The company has grown 200 per cent over last year, and expects to grow at around 40 per cent in the coming years, according to him.

Next Education, in association with 500 technology and educational professionals, has created 10,000 learning modules that account for more than 1,000 hours of classroom teaching in the K12 segment.

“The next focus area is on how to provide talent management and how to transform hobbies into education and bring it to the learning,” he said, adding that Next Education had plans to tap more schools, bring new products and explore opportunities in CBSE schools in the African region.

AICTE Agrees Upon Closure of 50 Institutes More

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June 18, 2012

In response to several technical education institutes for closure, the AICTE has decided to close down 50 more institutes recently.

There has been an over six-fold increase in the number of technical institutes across the country which have got approval of the All India Council for Technical Education to shut down since April. In its previous meeting, the AICTE had okayed the closure of 44 institutes, taking the total to 51 at present. This includes around 32 management institutes and the remaining are engineering and MCA institutes, said AICTE Chairman S S Mantha. In the first phase, seven institutes had received the Council’s nod for closure.

“We will have another meeting of the AICTE soon and the numbers are expected increase further. In all, 138 institutes had requested for closure,” said Mantha.

Over the past few years, several states have been struggling with massive vacancies at its engineering and management institutes. This year, AICTE had received applications for permission for closure from 138 institutes and the reason cited was low admission rates. Prominent among them were states such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Among the institutes that have been given the go-ahead in the second phase, five are in Maharashtra and a large chunk is from Andhra Pradesh.

Academicians said only institutes with a robust academic life, flexible curriculum in sync with the changing market needs, quality faculty and good industry interaction or collaboration, would be able to survive current market dynamics.

CBSE Introduces English Classics

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June 18, 2012

To encourage reading habits among students, the CBSE has brought a very good initiative to introduce English classics. The board has introduced English classics from classes IX to XII in its schools from the academic session 2012-13.

According to Vineet Joshi, chairman, CBSE, the Board constantly encourages schools to provide multi-fold learning experiences to young children. “Good reading habits help children to acquire the power of imagination, expression and appreciation of literature. Though all the skills of gaining proficiency in a language are equally important, nevertheless, reading habit helps tremendously in improving comprehension, accuracy, fluency and in increasing vocabulary. Reading provokes questioning, helps in generating ideas and inspires students to think. It also supports the syllabus in diverse ways by enhancing language competence across the curriculum.”

Strengthening of Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) has added further impetus in fostering interest in children to read books. As part of the formative assessment in CCE, schools are being advised to take up ‘Reading Projects.’ Schools have also been encouraged to use multiple modes of assessment such as conducting reviews, script, reading, etc.

“The board prescribes a multi-cultural and technology enabled pedagogical approach in all the languages offered by it. In this process, incorporating all the four skills — reading, writing, listening and speaking — in the curriculum prescribed by the board has placed an equitable emphasis on essential skills of English language. CBSE recommends that reading skill should be fostered in children to make them better orators, autonomous learners as well as critical and creative thinkers,” adds Joshi.

“Every school has finalised one classic for students to read. Students will be evaluated continuously under CCE for the reading skills. At the end of the session, their marks on reading skills will be totalled in their final marks,” informs Prabha Sharma, assistant to English consultant, CBSE.

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