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Tele-counselling to help Indian students getting exams on nerves

By
digitalLEARNING Network
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With board examinations just round the corner in India, for students suffering from exam jitters, relief is just a phone call away. The Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) began its tele-counselling service for the students from February 1, while another helpline called 'Disha' has been launched by the NGO Snehi.

Using the CBSE helpline, which will be on till March 31, the students will be able to contact as many as 40 principals, trained counsellors of CBSE affiliated to government and private schools and psychologists. The CBSE helpline will have experts from 13 as many as cities such as Delhi, Chandigarh, Meerut, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Vishakhapatnam, Coimbatore, Mumbai and Kolkata among others, for solving the problems of the students. It will also be operational in Dubai during the same period. Introduced in 1998, the CBSE tele-counselling service is the first of its kind to be provided by any educational board in the country. Besides regular tele-counselling, the board will offer counselling through a multi-tier system in order to enable examinees in far-flung areas to avail the facility. The tele-counselling service will be available through interactive voice response system (IVRS) mode. Snehi's helpline 'Disha', which started functioning on February 1 and be on till March 2, will this year have 20 trained volunteer counsellors. The helpline got 1638 calls last year, out of which 1204 callers were students, 195 parents and relatives of the students. Of the 1204 students who were counselled and helped, 617 were students of 10th and 12th classes and the rest 587 callers were students from class IV to under-graduate and post-graduate or those preparing for different competitive exams.

Kosmix, India’s answer to Google

By
digitalLEARNING Network
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Two Indian computer wizards, who studied along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University, are now launching a start-up to compete with the world's best known search engine.

Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan are betting that 'Kosmix', with its deep search technology, can challenge Google by gleaning more about the overall content of web pages searched instead of their popularity. Google basically searches pages based on a sort of popularity contest and not necessarily its content, but creators of Kosmix say that they took a different approach and developed a new kind of 'categorisation' technology. The two Indians, who were among the co-founders of web database company 'Junglee', hope that their deep search technology can improve upon Google's one-size-fits-all approach. Kosmix asks users to define a category for a search. If a search term is related to health, users can make a query in a health-related search box. That way, it can find web pages closely associated in meaning with the search term. It then looks at what web pages linking to other pages say, to take a bigger stab at judging the page's subject. If a web page is saying something similar to the page it links to, one can get enough information to categorise it by topic. Kosmix has already started testing a health search on its website. Over the next year, the company will release numerous categories of search – from health to travel, politics and finance. It plans to unveil a general search box within a year.

Libraries fear digital lockdown

By
digitalLEARNING Network
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Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future. Many publishers put restrictions on how digital books and journals can be used.

According to the British Library, such digital rights management (DRM) controls may block some legitimate uses. And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves. The British Library spends

Reality bites on computer Brailles for blinds in India

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

According to some reports, just 5% of the millions of blind children in India get an education. And for these brave few it's an uphill struggle. Recently, the University Grants Commission, the apex regulatory body for university education in the country, paved the way for visually-impaired students to be given the option of using a computer to write answers during exams. UGC's stance follows a similar instruction from the Central Board of Education (CBSC) allowing candidates from Delhi to use PCs or typewriters during exams.

Till recently, the visually-impaired needed to depend on scribes or writers for examinations, a system that is fraught with problems. A switch to computers, however, will do little to change the plight of the visually-impaired, unless institutions back this up with some progressive support. Examinations are in fact just one part of what is a daily struggle for the visually-impaired. Take the most basic need any student has- books. There is no accessibility of reading and study material in India. In the absence of these, visually-impaired students are left to the mercy of others or spend hours scanning page after page of text books to be loaded on to computers so that screen-reading software (which allows the blind and visually-impaired to access information on their PCs either by voice or through Braille or both) can be used. The National Association in Delhi for the Blind is trying to change what is a cruel reality for the visually-impaired by using its in-house mini-computerised Braille press to publish textbooks and literature of general interest. All year round, the organisation gets special requests from school and college students for transcriptions. Already, NAB has covered substantial college-level material in subjects like history, political science, English and BEd. With the help of Media Lab Asia it hopes to provide material in 12 other subjects identified as being popular choices for visually-impaired students within the next three years. These include Hindi, Sanskrit, sociology, philosophy, law and social work.

NAB Delhi has been working with the Delhi University, under which it believes 200 visually-impaired students study to bring about just such a change. It hopes that by 2007 they will have the training in place to transition DU's students to computer-based exams. Apart from training, another problem that some foresee in using technology to give visually-impaired students greater academic indep- endence is infrastructure. The other problem that could emerge, is if colleges are asked to provide computers themselves.

Classroom construction funded by Vietnam

By
digitalLEARNING Network
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It was announced recently, that a project for building classrooms and teacher's houses through 2012 will receive around US $241 million in form or government bonds, by the minister of Education and Training at a conference. Nguyen Thien Nhan, deputy Prime Minister, has asked the ministry to make a list of localities that have already used up the funds by June. The ministry and the Ministry of Finance will recommend which localities are to receive additional grants from the 2011 budget.

Local leaders were asked to utilise their available land, as the money would only be enough for construction, not land compensation. Priority should be given to poor districts, Nhan said, repeating instructions from Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. The programme on school construction began in 2008. It received more than VND12 trillion ($642 million) in government funding over the past two years, including VND8,275 billion in government bonds. The rest of the money came from local funds and private sponsors. 

IIT to host first Indian school on IPR Law

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

IIT-Kharagpur and George Washington University (GWU) have signed a technical collaboration agreement to set up India's first school of Intellectual Property Rights Law. 
 
Christened the 'Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law', and approved by the Union HRD ministry, this school will attempt to equip post graduate students in the fast emerging field of IPR. This school has also got funding of US$1 million from Vinod Gupta, under whose guidance IIT-Kharagpur became the first IIT to house a business school. The Law school will start its academic courses from July 2006 and the starting programmes will be a 3 year, 6 semester, full time, residential course leading to Bachelor of Law in Technology and Intellectual Property Law. The eligibility for this course will be degree in engineering or technology or PG degree in any branch of science or MBA. Admission announcement shall be made in March 2006 and will be based on examination, group discussions and personal interviews. 

Govt schools run by Pvt to reserve 25 lac seats for poor

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

In order to develop and enhance a more inclusive educational society in India, the government has opted to permit corporates, non-profit companies and societies to establish 2,500 schools all over the country. The Public Private Partnership (PPP) model that would allow the government to fill up 1,000 seats from the existing 2,500 seats in each school having children from disadvantaged sections, has been finalised by the Planning Commission in consultation with the private sector.

Around 25 lac students are to receive benefits from the schools that are to be set up and run by a private management, but are still to remain as government schools. Out of the 1000 available seats at the PPP schools, half of these would be reserved for students from the scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and other backward classes (OBC). These students would only have to pay a tuition fee of INR 25 per month. The panel has decided that the rest of the seats would be allotted to children of non-income tax paying parents, who would have to pay a monthly tuition fee of INR 50. The students would be provided free textbooks and two uniform sets in a year.

IDRC announces Open Archive, an intellectual platform for developing countries

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has announced plans to create an Open Archive, the first among Canadian research funding organizations.  The Open Archive will provide full access over the Internet to IDRC's rich research archive.

In addition to making information more freely available, this initiative will provide IDRC-funded researchers with a much-needed outlet to publish and showcase their work. The Open Archive will help Southern researchers to engage in the international dialogue on important development issues and increase the impact of their research. Throughout its 35-year history, IDRC has believed that to bring about positive change in people's lives, knowledge should be shared. Research results and documents generated by IDRC-supported projects, IDRC recipients, and IDRC staff represent a tangible intellectual output of the Centre's mandate. The Open Archive will streamline and centralize the capture of IDRC project outputs and research documents. It will raise the visibility and facilitate the retrieval of the vast array of IDRC materials by consolidating them in a well-managed, indexed, secure, and permanent location. By creating an Open Archive, IDRC promotes transparency of its results-based research and participates in the global movement to remove  economic, social, and geographic barriers to the sharing of knowledge. Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is one of the world's leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges of international development. For more than 30 years, IDRC has worked in close collaboration with researchers from the developing world to build healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous societies.

Nationwide elibrary project rolls out

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Human Resource Development, India recently, formally launched the 'National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content (N-LIST)'. The N-LIST project provides access to more than 2,100 electronic journals and 51,000 electronic books to students, researchers and faculty from colleges and other beneficiary institutions through server(s) installed at the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre.

Faculty, staff students and researches from colleges covered under section 12B of University Grants Commission (UGC) Act are eligible to access e-resources through the N-LIST project. Registration of the above mentioned colleges is required, however, on the N-LIST Website. Currently, 665 colleges are registered members. The project provides for cross-subscription to e-resources subscribed by the two Consortia, i.e. subscription to INDEST-AICTE resources for universities and UGC-INFONET resources for technical institutions.

eCurriculum in IIIT A plans for IT courses

By
digitalLEARNING Network
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In an announcement, the Indian Institute of Information Technology – Allahabad (IIIT-A) mentioned that they will be developing e-contents for 18 subjects of Information Technology (IT) for all IT courses in the country. The move has been taken in accordance with the National Knowledge Process programme launched by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD).

IIIT A has been assigned with a task of training mentors and developing IT e-learning modules for institutions that provided technical training such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), National Institute of Sciences, etc, by the MHRD. The MHRD had assigned IIIT-A with the task of The purpose behind the move by MHRD was too spread education about information technology in the northern regions of India. IIIT-A Director M.D. Tiwari mentioned that the ministry had released an amount of INR 75 lakhs for the project. Tiwari said that the institute was working towards content generation and connectivity with a provision for access devices for institutes and learners.

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