AICTE to give nod to one year MBA

Higher Education

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April 1, 2009

Following the lines of the United Kingdom (UK), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), has decided to amend its Act drawn up in 1987 to give nod to one year MBA programme. Till this date one year MBA course offered by B-School is considered as unrecognized by the AICTE. In spite of this, number of prominent colleges including the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and Great Lakes School of Business in Chennai backed by the industrial house Godrej offers a one-year full-time postgraduate programme in management. Both the institutions has been declared as unrecognized by the AICTE.

Now, both the colleges have applied to the AICTE for recognition. 'We have started framing rules to legitimize one year MBA programme, because a number of colleges offer one year MBA programme. Some industrial houses had also approached the Prime Minister's Office stating that one-year management courses across the world were popular and the government should amend the AICTE Act with the changing times,' informed an official from AICTE. As per guidelines released by AICTE for two years MBA Course, its obligatory for B- Schools to provide a minimum of 1,050 to 1,200 hours of classroom teaching. And it should be half ( 600 hours ) for colleges offering the year- long programme with a minimum of 100 hours spent on project work or industry based assignment. Apart from this, the student wanting to enrolled for the part time management courses will require work experience of a minimum of two years.

Tamil and Chinese Primary schools may follow Bahasa Malaysia Standard

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digitalLEARNING Network

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April 1, 2009

Education Ministry is currently collecting opinions from all parties to study the feasibility of using Malay primary school's Bahasa Malaysia syllabus in Chinese and Tamil primary schools, hoping that students from different streams will be able to achieve equal Bahasa Malaysia standard. At present, Chinese and Tamil primary schools are teaching Bahasa Malaysia as the second language. The textbooks and the Primary School Evaluation Test (UPSR) examination papers that they are using are different with those used in Malay primary schools. The government is preparing to strengthen English and the Education Ministry is studying the feasibility of using Malay primary school's Bahasa Malaysia syllabus in Chinese and Tamil primary schools. However, the above study is still in the preliminary exploratory stage with no decision has been made.

The Education Ministry is keeping an open mind and collecting views from university lecturers, academic groups, Chinese education organisations, teacher associations, Tamil education organisations, as well as the Indian community. It seemed that Education Ministry officials had conducted a meeting with the representatives of the above mentioned groups to discuss on the curriculum reform in Chinese and Tamil primary schools, namely to use Malay primary school's Bahasa Malaysia syllabus, including the UPSR examination papers, in Chinese and Tamil primary schools. In the meeting, they also talked about increasing Bahasa Malaysia lessons in Chinese and Tamil primary schools from the current 270 minutes per week to 360 minutes per week in order to implement the proposal.

Indian student invents Braille software

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

A visually challenged class 12 student in India, Satveer Singh has invented a software that can translate the Braille into the Devnagari script.

One of the main advantages of the software is that anyone who can read or write Braille will now be able to use it to translate whatever they write into a script. Instead of using the Braille stencil, one can use just six keys of a normal computer keyboard and the software then automatically translates the Braille script into Devnagari. With this software, visually impaired people can correspond easily even with people who can't read Braille.

But unfortunately Satveer does not have the financial or organisational support he needs to take his software to other visually-impaired people. Such issues however, have failed to dampen Satveer's spirit and he is ready to invent a software that will translate Braille into Marathi and Kannada and another that can be used without a keyboard.

Winners of Red Hat Scholarships Programme 2005 -2006 announced

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, announced the winners of the Red Hat Scholarships 2005 – 2006 programme. Red Hat Scholarships is an open source programming competition, conducted jointly by the eKALAVYA open source initiative at IIT Bombay and Red Hat India.
The first place prize of Rs 2 lakh was given to a two-member team from IIT-Bombay. The second (Rs 1.5 lakh) and third (Rs 1 lakh) place prizes were won by all-women teams from the Cummins College of Engineering for Women, Pune and the Shri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore, respectively.

The Red Hat Scholarships programme helps thousands of students looking for guidance on software development projects that they must submit as an integral component of their curriculum. As part of this collaborative programme, students can sign up online for open source projects, seek advice from mentors in the open source community, find a list of projects they can participate in, download open source software and get information on programming standards and guidelines. The Red Hat Scholarships 2006-2007 programme has been expanded to cover countries in the Indian sub-continent, including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Bhutan.

Sikkim gets new education scheme

K-12

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

Sikkim girls are far ahead of the boys in school enrollment, the ratio standing at 113 girls to 100 boys. This is the highest in the entire northeast, and to maintain the trend the central government has ushered in a new scheme, according to an official. 'Sikkim has done very well and has stolen the march over other northeastern states. The girl child enrollment here is very high, which a very good sign,' told Rudra Poudyal, director of the human resource development department.

Focusing on the universalisation of secondary education, the scheme has been launched under the 11th Five Year Plan starting this year. The new scheme will see the allocation of new model schools keeping in consideration the educationally and otherwise backwardness of the entire northeast region. Success would be wholly financed by the central government in the first year and from the second to the fifth year, the central government would contribute 90%, 5% will be funded by the state and 5% by the Ministry of Development of Northeast Region (DONER). Poudyal said the central government had now recognised the need of further developing education in the region and has, therefore, chalked out new schemes and facilities. The government was also initiating the Northeast scholarship schemes and full computerized education for higher secondary students in the northeast region, for which INR 60 billion has been earmarked among others. 'In the northeast even the gross enrolment in standard IX is rising with our average in the country being 90%. We are moving forward and getting over the negative reality of high school dropout rates, we are doing well,' said Poudyal.

IIT-B to launch ‘start-up intern day’ for Final Year students

Higher Education

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

Entrepreneurship Cell (E-Cell) of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) will organize a 'start-up intern day' to provide summer internship opportunities for its third year BTech and dual degree students. 'Start- up intern day' will be held by the E-Cell in association with HelloIntern, a start-up from IIT-B. Students from IIT-B will be hiring as summer interns by the companies. The companies have been called in by IIT-B for the benefit of the students. 'The aim is to help students learn about high-potential and high-growth start-ups. This may also motivate them to start their own enterprises,' said T. R Manoj, media manager, E-Cell. 'Due to economic meltdown around 60 pc students are still looking for internships,' added T. R Manoj.

The start-up will get an opportunity to pitch their products, teams, intern profiles and available positions. This will be followed by a networking session where students get to talk with core members of the start-up companies. Students will be provided the internship for a period varies between 8 to 12 weeks, the stipend could vary between INR 5,000 to INR 15,000 monthly. 'The last day of enrolling is April 6. Interviews will start from April 7,' said Manoj.

Delhi University set to become disabled-friendly

Higher Education

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

For Mohammed Gulfaam, a visually impaired BA-III student of Delhi University reaching college poses a challenge every day. But the coming academic season could be easier on him as the university is set to introduce a pick-and-drop facility for physically disadvantaged students. Proposing changes Chandra Nisha Singh, Officer on Special Duty at the Equal Opportunities Cell (EOC) said, 'We will introduce a bus for physically challenged students who stay close to North Campus. It is a 30-seater bus with four wheelchairs. All kinds of formalities are complete and the bus is ready to roll from the coming session.'

If all goes as planned, physically disadvantaged students can expect washrooms engineered for them, tactile paths for visually impaired students covering all the departments, computers with JAWS (Job Access With Speech) software and a Braille embosser to enable visually impaired students use computers conveniently UGC assistance These amenities will be funded with the INR 5 lakh grant allocated by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to each college. Colleges are also entitled to other grants like honorarium for coordinators and budgetary provisions amounting to INR 2,48,000 every year. The groundwork for this project started two years ago when the EOC did an Access Audit of all 70 colleges in the university, to identify measures to make the university disabled friendly. Lending an ear Hearing-impaired students have already benefited from the measures. For the first time, in the 2008-09 session, they were provided interpreters to understand the lectures. Karishma Saluja, B.Com II year student of Sri Venkateshwara College, had informed the university last year about her inability to understand classroom lectures owing to her hearing impairment. She, along with other hearing-impaired students, was provided free services of interpreters. 'It was a great help, as I don't need to copy my classmates' notes anymore. In the first year, attending lectures was futile, but now it has become useful,' said Saluja. Colleges are hopeful of completing this project soon.

For Mohammed Gulfaam, a visually impaired BA-III student of Delhi University reaching college poses a challenge every day. But the coming academic season could be easier on him as the university is set to introduce a pick-and-drop facility for physically disadvantaged students. Proposing changes Chandra Nisha Singh, Officer on Special Duty at the Equal Opportunities Cell (EOC) said, 'We will introduce a bus for physically challenged students who stay close to North Campus. It is a 30-seater bus with four wheelchairs. All kinds of formalities are complete and the bus is ready to roll from the coming session.'

If all goes as planned, physically disadvantaged students can expect washrooms engineered for them, tactile paths for visually impaired students covering all the departments, computers with JAWS (Job Access With Speech) software and a Braille embosser to enable visually impaired students use computers conveniently UGC assistance These amenities will be funded with the INR 5 lakh grant allocated by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to each college. Colleges are also entitled to other grants like honorarium for coordinators and budgetary provisions amounting to INR 2,48,000 every year. The groundwork for this project started two years ago when the EOC did an Access Audit of all 70 colleges in the university, to identify measures to make the university disabled friendly. Lending an ear Hearing-impaired students have already benefited from the measures. For the first time, in the 2008-09 session, they were provided interpreters to understand the lectures. Karishma Saluja, B.Com II year student of Sri Venkateshwara College, had informed the university last year about her inability to understand classroom lectures owing to her hearing impairment. She, along with other hearing-impaired students, was provided free services of interpreters. 'It was a great help, as I don't need to copy my classmates' notes anymore. In the first year, attending lectures was futile, but now it has become useful,' said Saluja. Colleges are hopeful of completing this project soon.

e-Science project planned by Chinese Academy of Sciences

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

e-Science project – a large-scale computer project for data sharing is under plan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The e-Science project aims to tackle the problem of poor data sharing in the scientific community. The target is to make sharing their data easier for researchers at its 90 institutes. The planned 'e-Science' project was described by Nan Kai of the academy's Computer Network Information Centre at a workshop on information technology for geosciences in Beijing on 21 July. The project's funding has not yet been finalised, but could be up to 500 million yuan (US$62.5 million). The e-Science platform will be freely accessible to scientists outside the academy, as well as the public.

India: eschoollinks.com to make school management easier

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

Interactive Concepts Digital Technologies (ICDT) Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based communication and software company has come up with a portal that promises to make school management easier. < ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

The company has completed the portal

IIT-G students to educate children from Class I to X

Higher Education

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digitalLEARNING Network

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March 31, 2009

With an aim to contribute something to society, students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (IIT-G) have launched a scheme 'Zero Illiteracy Zone' to educate students from Class I to Class X from the neighbouring villages. 'We have been conducting regular classes for children to educate them and strengthen their foundation for the last six months,' said a student from IIT-G. At least 160 students have profited from their zero-illiteracy drive. Classes for the 'Zero Illiteracy Zone' is conducted at Kendriya Vidyalaya, located in the IIT-G premises. 'We have noticed significant progress among students after examination held recently. Students were also felicitated by IIT-G volunteer. The other students have also been given consolation prizes,' said Ashish Kakran, general secretary of IIT-G Students' Welfare Board.

The teaching sessions were not only for the youngsters in villages. They also benefited the Grade IV employees of the institute. The IIT-G students have been conducting English speaking classes for security guards so that they can converse with visitors from abroad. 'These guards have started speaking in English,' added Ashish.

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