The chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi announced the facility of broadband connection for every village in Gujarat at the gathered audience of NRIs at the Pravasi Bharti Divas.
This would help the state government harness EDUSAT and use it to provide long distance education. Keeping the mission of bringing technology closer to the farmers he said even farmers can avail of this facility to update themselves about the latest agriculture-related technology.
There is a growing increase amongst the Indian diaspora to invest and support education initiatives in India. The Pravasi Bharati Divas held a session on 'Education and Diaspora Knowledge Network' to urge the Indian diaspora to supplement the efforts of the Indian Government to make India a knowledge-based economy.
The Chief Guest, Minister of State for Human Resource Development Smt. D Purandeswari Devi, outlined the educational initiatives of Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and Mid Day Meals Scheme, which have attracted more students to schools. However, she urged, there is a long way to go as 7 million children are still out of school and about 25 percent faculty shortfall is being experienced. Diaspora Knowledge Network was emphasised as the next level of connected efforts of the community to tap the potential. Mr. S Ramadorai, Chief Executive Officer, Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai urged that urged that the knowledge network portal should result in concrete collaborations and generate ideas and transform them into community actions.
This was followed by deliberations from distinguished speakers from across the world engaged in education and training.
Lack of trained staff is now becoming a major hurdle in roll-out of expansion plans for many infrastructure firms. They are now investing in setting up of engineering education and training colleges to internalize manpower requirements by providing education and training in the skills set as required by the industry.
Such efforts have already taken off in Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) which plans for in-house engineering institutes to cater specifically to the needs of the power sector, and other major industry are soon following with huge infrastructure players as Larsen & Toubro (L&T) to start an institute of project management, with the aim of developing managers with specialized skills spanning the engineering, procurement, construction and manufacturing sectors.
The Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (ISRO) model is being considered as the institute was successful in meeting its manpower requirements with the with the objective of offering bachelor's degree in space technology with specialisation in avionics and aerospace engineering. Similar industry-specific skill sets are required by the power sector which in its big expansion plans in the coming years is in face with manpower crunch. Almost all the players including Tata Power, Lanco Infratech, Jindal Steel & Power, Reliance Energy, NHPC Ltd and Damodar Valley Corporation have chalked out plans to establish new industrial training institutes.
According to a recent joint study by Crisil and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, around 20 lakh trained personnel would be required for meeting the power capacity addition targets set for next five year plans.
Uttar Pradesh after recently being criticized for its apathy towards the higher education sector has started working towards improving the state of affairs.
The state is convening efforts of various officials and experts to draft a comprehensive higher education policy, focusing on qualitative improvement by providing minimum infrastructure facilities and financial support to state universities and government colleges. The policy will address the major thrust areas to upgrade the standard of higher education in the state; these include minimum infrastructure and funds admission and examination systems, fee structure and education of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes amongst others.
The 96th Indian Science Congress conclave concluded in Shillong.The event organised by the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) saw participation of more than 4,000 delegates consisting of scientists, engineers and technologists of different disciplines for sharing their expertise and experience on a common platform. < ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
The dropping interest in careers in science inked the theme of this year as 'Science Education and Attraction of Talent for Excellence in Research'. The five-day conclave saw power-packed presentations and at the end of the event made 11 recommendations, including setting up of scientific advisory councils in the northeastern states, reviewing the science education systems at various levels, and increasing career opportunities for students in the science and technology sector.
The venue of the next Congress was announced as Thiruvananhpuram under the new presidentship of Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman G Madhavan Nair.
The nodal body established under UGC is working on a national ranking of Indian universities on the lines of the global system.
Endowed with the responsibility to assess and accredit institutions of higher education in the country the agency has been following
a grading system. It is now taking clues from the China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University's (SJTU) Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the UK and Australia in order to develop its own framework of indicators and index of grading scales.
The ranking will not only be applicable on the NAAC accredited institutions but also on other institutes. “The NAAC-ranking should not be just for Indian universities but for others too. While it is premature to state an exact date, we intend to come up with indicators for the rankings by 2010-11,” said HA Ranganath, director, NAAC.
Savita Datta,
Principal Maitreyi College & Director, Campus of Open Learning, Delhi University
“Open and Distance Learning is a scalable model, the only model which ensures uniformity and quality of delivery. Moreover, technology ensures that the lessons delivered reach far and wide”
What are the challenges confronting India’s higher education system today? How do you see your institution deploying new technologies for ensuring quality distance education?
Two major challenges confronting India’s higher education system are the lack of good faculty and insufficient places for students in the existing higher educational institutions. The University of Delhi has always believed in expansion and in 1962, on the recommendations of Kothari Commission, the School of Distance and Continuing Education was established. Another measure taken earlier by DU was establishing the Non-Collegiate Women’s Education Board, way back in 1948 whereby women candidates living in Delhi were allowed to attend classes on Sundays and holidays and were examined and awarded degrees by DU.
From our experience in all these initiatives, we know that some face to face contact and physical examination and evaluation of scripts is a must and is not humanly possible without having sufficient faculty in place. Therefore, introduction of new technology is a must. There is a need not only to deliver lessons online but also have examinations online to overcome these challenges.
What role does Open and Distance Learning (ODL) institutions play in dissemination of information to socially disadvantaged groups or people in inaccessible areas?
Open and Distance Learning is a scalable model, the only model which ensures uniformity and quality of delivery. ODL institutions are invariably using technology and the expenditure on students, infrastructure and faculty is relatively less as compared to a regular institution. The socially disadvantaged groups have limited places in regular institutions. The percentage of seats assigned to them is fixed whereas ODL institutions ensure no ceiling on the number or any other condition for entry into the institutions. Moreover, technology ensures that the lessons delivered reach far and wide even to the remotest areas with the help of computers, DVD Players and televisions.
What initiatives have been taken by your university for integrating ICT in its framework?
We established an Institute of Life Long Learning where teachers are creating content and online assignments. Blended Learning will have significant role to play in classrooms and science laboratories when the number of seats increase by 54% in the coming years.
It will not be possible to appoint suitable faculty or raise infrastructures overnight. As a pilot project with the Open University, UK, DU has created video CD’s and e-instructions for the labs, which are really being appreciated by the students. The students can see the videos and read instructions before coming to the lab. They are better aware of the experiment because of the visual effects and one teacher instead of handling a class of 20 can handle many more students at the same time. This also gives some spare time to the faculty to update themselves and also to create more content for other classes.
Do you think a Public Private Partnership model will help in effective integration of technology in higher education?
The university teachers invariably are experienced in their own fields and teaching methodologies but there is a lot of variation as there are 7,000 teachers across over 68 colleges of DU. Use of technology will ensure uniformity and quality in delivery of content, but most of the teachers are not technology savvy. Moreover, this may shift the focus of the teachers from the actual content of their discipline to the formatting and designing of the web, which is not desired. On the other hand, if we hire services of private vendors who are experts in technology and allow them to convert the knowledge of the teachers to e-platforms, the integration of technology will speed up which is the need of the hour. Necessary funding should be provided by the funding agencies for this.
Gautam Goradia
EO, YoKnowledge.com
“YoKnowledge is based on the philosophy that every student has his own question bank, which may be packed in textbook lessons or written in notebooks or queried by teachers and parents”
How did Hayagriva come up with the idea of having a dedicated product for assessment as YoKnowledge.com?
Although I don’t come from an IT background, I am good at writing software applications. I had done few applications for our family textile company which were very successful. So I thought of diversifying. It has been a long journey since I started out in 2001. We launched our first product in 2008 and have four to five new products line up in the next six months.
The idea for YoKnowledge came to me from my wife, who is an avid quizzer and a consultant with schools. As she had difficulty in frequentlyupdating the question bank for quizes, I made a software for her where she could keep a bank of questions in different folders as per age of contestants or the difficulty level. She could also put images, video or audio files in them. Those days in 1994-95 many quiz-based shows such as Kaun Banega Crorepati had already come in market. So then I decided to make this application commercial. YoKnowledge is based on the philosophy that every student has her/his own question bank, which may be packed in the lessons of our textbooks or written in notebooks or queried by teachers and parents. The product personalises learning as YO means ‘Your Own’. Now we also have YoQuestions Pro, an authoring tool, and YoQuestions Lite. It is a desktop based product and hence does not require Internet except when you want to download questions.
In what ways does YoKnowledge empower the teacher with new age tools and technology use in classrooms?
Every teacher loves collaborative learning but they don’t have the tools to do it. The authoring tool gave them the power to go beyond textbooks. India is yet to integrate the system of collaborative learning in its education system in a big way.
YoKnowledge goes beyond regular testing for students; it has in-built tools for teachers responsible for bringing collaborative learning into the classrooms with printable worksheets, flash cards, snap cards etc. The teacher is an intuitive author and the tool liberates her from the book publisher and empowers her to ask her own question. The software also empowers her to create worksheets, chose topics within a chapter, and format it as MCQs. You can also add a video clip along with the question, which can then be stored and shared later with other teachers and students. The package has 6,000 questions for offline study and for online mode, practice and test sessions are available on our website. A study done in the US found that repeated assessment gives better results than repeated studying.
How do you keep up with competition?
Currently we are not active in the mainstream competition. Our philosophy is unique and the simplicity of our product is its USP. The advatage derived throgh its offline/online mode gives our products an edge over others in the market.
Which markets are you looking forward to for launching your products?
We have started out in India and are in close contact with several companies in the Middle East, the UK, US and many African countries as well. Although the market is huge in India and there are many companies doing testing, ours is the only company which gives more than one source of content and helps build a community. We aim to cater to every examination system in India, including all professional examinations such as banking, etc, in the next three years. We also want to expand to become a 15-million-dollar company in the coming three to four years. As English is the most preferred language across the globe, we also plan to launch our language improvement solutions as the next product line.
Dr. Arun D Sawant
Pro-Vice Chancellor, Mumbai University
“Unfortunately, currently we cannot fulfill the infrastructural needs and provide quality education in true sense. Leave aside instruments and high profile laboratories, even a good reference book is not affordable for small colleges”
What are the key challenges that are in face of delivering quality higher education in India?
We have moved into the 11th Five Year Plan and the focus now is on the need to increase the access of higher education. But this is a formidable challenge. Our current national target objective is to raise it from 9% to 15%. This will require a herculean effort and a massive infrastructure like hundred universities and some thousand colleges. Unfortunately, we cannot fulfill the current infrastructural needs and provide quality education in true sense. Leave aside instruments and high profile laboratories, even a good reference book is not affordable for small colleges. The cost of education also needs to be revised as it is a major hurdle in the establishment of good infrastructure and delivery of quality education.
Physical structure, along with internal infrastructure, is further challenged by lack of funds. It is difficult to pay attractive salaries to teachers particularly in non-professional colleges where the fees is not based on the cost of education.
Access to education is another major issue, as it is not keeping pace with the increasing population.
What initiatives have been taken by MU as far as ICT is concerned?
We have been on an expansion drive and have started many distance education programmes based on IT. e-Governance has been set up with SAP programme for speedy disposal of administrative issue. We have a scheme for laptops to every faculty and have WiFi connectivity. We use the website for all practical purposes including programme schedule, syllabi and examination schedules and now online admissions in distance education. Enrollment of students to colleges using IT application has started. We have a centralised computer unit for examination processes and a Computer Centre for maintaining our website.
Our young staff is technology savvy and has easily taken onboard new initiatives. As the older staff are not very computer savvy, we regularly organise training and orientation programmes to facilitate the process. All our colleges are connected through the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited’s IT programme; the state government has asked the University to be stakeholders in the company and we have taken up the programme for connectivity between students, college, university and inter-universities.
What are current focus areas in the field of vocational courses and what new initiatives are on the anvil?
We have the Garware Institute, which offers over 45 vocational courses, and we are also coming up with a new Centre of JJ Applied Arts. We have 300-plus certificate and diploma courses. We are planning new courses for the Service industry. Many industries now have research and development centres affiliated with the MU. We have industry representation even in the board of management in the university. So it’s a symbiotic relationship. We have an MDP programme, where we train their executives in management courses.We also have a collaboration with NASSCOM. We are also in touch with international universities for student exchange and short term programmes for exposure and interaction between students from various cultures.
Do you think we need IT benchmarks in Higher Education?
IT benchmarks is definitely required. We need an IT rating agency right from the students, teachers and curriculum, to assess and rank each college. It’s very important. There are enough funds for education; we need to use it for improving the quality of delivery.
