Digital Learning - July 2015

ASIA’S PREMIER MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON ICT IN EDUCATION

VOLUME 11

I ISSUE 07 I JULY

2015

I ISSN 0973-4139 I ` 75

digitallearning.eletsonline.com

Safeguarding Education

GATEWAYS

Learning to chalk the mouse | Securing Cyber future

5th

Come, be a part of 5th World

21-22 August 2015, Hotel Le Meridian, New Delhi

Skilling Youth, Skilling India

Education Summit to Meet, Discuss & Disseminate Knowledge

Confirmed Speakers@WES 2015

Government Speakers Dr. Daljit Singh Madan Mohan Mittal Cheema Hon’ble Minister Hon’ble Minister of School Technical Education Education, Govt. of Punjab Government of Punjab

Higher Education Speakers

School Education Speakers

Priyanka Bhatkoti Principal Maxfort School New Delhi

Dr. Satbir Bedi Joint Secretary MHRD

Dr. G. Immanuel Chairman CISCE

C Roul Principal Secretary School Education, Government of Punjab

Shri. M.V.V. Prasada Rao Director (VE & E) CBSE

Subrat Sahoo Secretary, Department of School Education Government of Chhattisgarh

Prof. G.S.N. Raju Vice Chancellor Andhra University

Prof. Dr. K. Lal Kishore Vice Chancellor JNTU, Anantpur

Dr. Prafulla Agnihotri Prof. V.S.S. Kumar Dr. Kavita A. Sharma Dr. Devinder Dayal Prof. Uday B. Desai Singh Sandhu Director Vice Chancellor President Director Vice Chancellor IIM Tiruchirappalli JNTU South Asian University IIT Hyderabad Kurukshetra University Kakinada

Sudha Goyal Director Scottish High International School, Gurgaon

Dr Vandana Lulla Director Podar Group of International Schools

Anirudh Gupta CEO DCM Group of Schools, Ferozpur

Hazel Siromoni Managing Director Maple Bear

Anita Malhotra Principal, Lotus Valley International School Gurgaon

Kalpana Mohan Shanti Krishnamurthy Principal, Vidyashilp Principal, Chinmaya Academy, Bangalore International Residential Gurgaon School, Coimbatore

Kavita C Das Principal St John’s High School Chandigarh

Kavita Sanghvi Principal MET Rishikul Vidyalaya Mumbai

Bijoya Baksi Principal Navrachana School Vadodara

Dr Indu Khetarpal Principal Salwan Public School New Delhi

Lakshmi Kumar Director The Orchid School Pune

Pramod Sharma Aditi Mukherjee Director cum Principal Principal Genesis Global School GEMS Akademia Noida International School, Kolkata

World Education Summit 2015 organised by digitalLearning

magazine aims to build a strong community around all the stakeholders of education, providing various business and networking opportunities for clients, partners and education leaders of both school and higher education. With rapidly changing dynamics of education, WES provides an ideal platform to all the stakeholders to come together and deliberate, discuss and explore the horizon.

World Education Conference: The conference would be a unique platform for sharing of knowledge, challenges, ideas and best practices among the stakeholders in the domain of education. Bureaucrats, tecnocrats, academicians, industry personnel and civil society members along with education experts, senior leaders and management teams of various schools, foreign education representatives , practitioners, business leaders would all beneďŹ t through the thought provoking sessions, workshops and round table discussions etc. The conference would have three parallel tracks: School Education Track

Nominate for WES Awards

2015

Higher Education Track Skill Development & Vocational Education Track

World Education Expo: The two day Exhibition will attract more than 200 stakeholders from government bodies, private sector, NGO’s and educational institutions. The Exhibition would put the spotlight on education sector.

WES 2015 will have ample space for Edupreneurs - global or national to showcase their education technologies, new ideas & innovation and best teaching learning practices.

Generate tremendous business leads Drive brand promotions Network with third party vendors, partners & channel Maximize brand visibility

For Programme details contact: Seema Gupta, seema@elets.in, 08860651643 For Sponsorship/ Expo details contact: Fahim Haq, fahim@elets.in, 08860651632

Sponsors@WES 2015 Creative Learning Partner

Gold Sponser

Sliver Sponsers

Associate Sponsers

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Exhibitor

Partner Publications

Contents

ISSN 0973-4139 0973-4139 ISSN

VOLUME VOLUME 11 11 ISSUE ISSUE 04 07 APRIL JULY 2015

School Education 08 Village Education Committee formed under SSA

Campus Calling 10 More girls qualify JEE exam this year

12

Astronomy & Astrophysics institutes to be set up in India

News Policy 14 Outreach programme to

SAFEGUARDING EDUCATION GATEWAYS

mobilise 400mn youth for skills training Stephen’s interview policy questioned

15

Cover Story

P16 Guest Column

Exclusive Interview

P30

Exclusive Interview 30 32 44

55

Innovative learning through innovative solutions Challenging students’ creativity with game design

Start-ups 50 52 54

4

Cementing the learning gap Making enrolment easy Look-out for a bright future

July 2015 / digitalLEARNING

Enabling online transparency

In Conversation 34

Technology for transparency

Opinion

Facilitating Education Ideating for Smart Education Uttarakhand eyeing Private Varsities

47 48

Changing literacy dynamics Enhanced technology encouraged duping?

Special Feature 24

Industry Speak 13

28

36

P36

40 56

New vocational landscape Securing Cyber future Learning to chalk the mouse Easing out payment smartly

INDUSTRY SPEAK

digitallearning.eletsonline.com

Challenging Students’ Creativity with Game Design

H

ave you ever wondered, what goes into the making of an ‘Angry Birds’ or a ‘Temple Run’? Well, what if you actually get to make a game yourself! Anyone can make a game, and everyone should. Everyone needs to learn how to program for a game; it’s just a good skill to learn. It teaches you to adopt a creative thinking mindset, a step-by-step way of making things work and solve challenges. It’s also a lot of fun.

With some of the game design software out there you don’t even need to know coding as long as you can recognize shapes and put things in order.

MindBox, a Creative Education initiative by ARK Infosolutions, in collaboration with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) Gaming Forum, is once again providing an opportunity to all school students across India to learn and express their creativity through ‘Game Jam Titans 2015’.

Game Jam Titans (GJT), India’s only game development competition for school kids is set to be held across six cities in India New Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune.

The competition will begin from 17th

August 2015 and will last on 28th September 2015.

Recognizing the growing opportunity, NASSCOM Gaming Forum and MindBox aim to tap the potential of young gaming developers through this competition. Speaking on the initiative, ARK Infosolutions CEO &Director Rishi Khemka said, “As educators, we empower students to ideate, explore, lead, think and collaborate. Such competitions are the perfect platforms not only for students to take their classroom learning to the World outside but also for students to express their individuality in more innovative and creative ways.

We are overwhelmed with the encouraging response we have received from schools and their students for our GJT competition. We are pleased to promote the game and app development culture amongst Youth of India.”

NASSCOM Gaming Forum Chair Rajesh Rao added, “The gaming industry in India has proved its capability in terms of delivering quality products and has the potential for acquiring a large domestic as well as international market. The sector is poised to grow at an exponential level in the years to come and will continue to capture the imagination

Game Jam Titans provides opportunity to school students to be creative

Benetits of Game Design q Improves number and shape recognition, grouping, and counting q Develops sense of visual perception and color recognition q Improves hand-eye coordination q Develops math, color recognition, reading, reasoning, and social skills q Games and Simulations allow students to explore and create materials that they could not work directly with in real life q Promotes creativity and motivate students to explore science & math q Strong toolto teach foundation of software development q Enables students to invent and explore multiple solutions to a problem q Introduces career possibilities in Gaming and App Development industries of users and developers alike. Through this competition, we aim to engage with the youth and encourage them to take up game development as a career as it is a growing domain.”

The winning teams will be shortlisted from each of these cities will get an opportunity to showcase their game on the sidelines of the NASSCOM Games Developer Conference (GDC) to be held in Pune in November in front of the professionals and experts of the Gaming Industry.Participants will be given a participation certificates and the regional winners from each city will receive exciting prizes.

For more information on Game Jam Titans 2015 log on to: www.gamejamtitans.com

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

5

ASIA’S PREMIER MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON ICT IN EDUCATION Volume 11

Issue 7

July 2015

PRESIDENT: Dr M P Narayanan EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Dr Ravi Gupta ADVISORY BOARD Prof Asha Kanwar, President, Commonwealth of Learning Dr Jyrki Pulkkinen, Senior Adviser, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland Dr Subhash Chandra Khuntia, Secretary, Depertment of School Education & Literacy, MHRD, Government of India EDITORIAL TEAM EDUCATION Senior Assistant Editor: Garima Pant Assistant Editor: Bhawna Satsangi GOVRNANCE Senior Assistant Editor: Nirmal Anshu Ranjan Assistant Editor: Kartik Sharma, Rachita Jha Senior Correspondent: Souvik Goswami Correspondent: Poulami Chakraborty, Gautam Debroy Junior Correspondent: Sneha Mejari Trainee Sub-Editor: Akanki Sharma HEALTH Senior Assistant Editor: Garima Pant Senior Correspondent: Anshuman Ojha Correspondent: Romiya Das SALES & MARKETING TEAM: digitalLearning Project Manager: Seema Gupta, Mobile: +91-8860651643 Assistant General Manager: Ragini Shrivastava, Mobile: +91-8860651650 National Sales Manager: Fahim Haq, Mobile: +91-8860651632 Sr. Manager: Arup Kumar Maiti, Mobile: +91-8860651645 Gaurav Srivastava, Mobile: +91-8527697685 SUBSCRIPTION & CIRCULATION TEAM Manager Subscriptions: +91-8860635832; subscription@elets.in DESIGN TEAM Creative Head: Pramod Gupta Deputy Art Director: Om Prakash Thakur, Gopal Thakur Senior Web Designer: Shyam Kishore WEB DEVELOPMENT & IT INFRASTRUCTURE Team Lead-Web Development: Ishvinder Singh Senior Executive – IT: Zuber Ahmed Executive – Information Management: Khabirul Islam EVENT TEAM Manager: Gagandeep Kapani ADMINISTRATION Head Administration: Archana Jaiswal

EDITORIAL & MARKETING CORRESPONDENCE

digitalLearning – Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd: Stellar IT Park Office No: 7A/7B, 5th Floor, Annexe Building, C-25, Sector-62, Noida, Uttar Pradesh - 201301, Phone: +91-120-4812600, Fax: +91-120-4812660, Email: info@elets.in digitalLearning is published by Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd in technical collaboration with the Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS). Owner, Publisher, Printer - Dr Ravi Gupta, Printed at Vinayak Print Media, D - 249, Sector-63, Noida 201 307.UP and published from 710, Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30 Sector-50, Noida, Up

Editor: Dr Ravi Gupta All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic and mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage or retrieval system, without publisher’s permission.

digitallearning.eletsonline.com egov.eletsonline.com ehealth.eletsonline.com events.eletsonline.com bfsi.eletsonline.com smartcity.eletsonline.com Write in your reactions to Education news, interviews, features and articles. You can either comment on the individual webpage of a story, or drop us a mail: editorial@elets.

6

July 2015 / digitalLEARNING

EDITORIAL

Bridging the Digital Divide The Digital India initiative flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently aims to make citizens digitally literate and transform India into digitally empowered economy.

A secure digital nation is capable of advancing economic prosperity. But a keen eye on educating the citizens on cyber security is the need of the hour.

Digital India is a transformative programme, which will increase the adoption of ICT and will empower citizens through equitable access to ICT infrastructure. The programme will bring huge opportunities for the education sector, where ICT penetration is already playing a vital role. With Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technology gaining momentum in the education world, it is obvious to make users aware of the threats prone to technology.

Our nation’s growing dependence on cyberspace is evident today. From smartphones to online banking, from e-governance to m-governance, electronic attendance record, social networking, all talks about the progressive India. The need for a secure and safe environment has never been important.

While the biggest push for the Digital India initiative is towards inclusive growth in all sectors, but what is required is to strategies plans to tackle the threats associated with the cyber crimes. Industry estimates that number of cybercrimes in India is around 1,49,254 and is likely to cross 3,00,000 in 2015 growing at compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 107 per cent.

Raising the concerns on the growing epidemic of cyber crime in the educational world, we have highlighted the experts, educationists and psychologists opinions on the growing need of training and counselling students on cybercrimes.

In the midst of all, there is another disturbing truth negatively influencing India as an educational hub. Where the Prime Minister envisioned ‘Digital India’ as an ambitious umbrella programme to transform India into a digitally empowered knowledge society, the real truth lies in the negative influence of the technology in hand. In the past one year, about a dozen major question paper leaks have been reported affecting lakhs of students across India. This has compelled the academicians to opine that cheating in India has long gone beyond personal ethics and become institutionalised, enhanced by the use of technology.

Amidst the entire negative picture, the issue has put forth a breather on how technology is being used for a very positive development that involves fee management through the online mode and how anti-virus and network security plays a crucial role in safeguarding the educational institutions interest.

The issue highlights the burning issues of technology advancement and how it can be controlled through implementing the right solutions and drive plans to shape up the digital future.

Dr Ravi Gupta Editor-in-Chief Ravi.Gupta@elets.in

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

7

NEWS

To read latest news, log on to education.eletsonline.com

Students still waiting for admissions in Maharashtra schools

Students who desired to get admission through Right to Education (RTE) online admission process might have to wait for some more time as it is delayed because of a conflict between some schools and state government.

It is to be noted that the admissions under RTE are conducted through a lottery system by BMC, and the second phase of the lottery is still 15 days away.

The schools which are in conflict with the State government want to admit children under RTE quota to pre-primary classes, but the state government wants admissions to take place from the first standard.

Now, the matter is in the Bombay High Court and BMC has been asked to disclose how many children are yet to get admissions in schools, and how many schools have vacant seats under 25 per cent quota.

K Narayan, Secretary, Anudanit Shikshan Bachao Samiti met the Deputy Director of School Education to demand that the department should take action against those schools which has refused admissions to students under RTE

Village Education Committee formed under SSA

The State of Jammu and Kashmir will now have a Village Education Committee (VEC) to achieve the objective of universalisation of elementary education. The committee for schools will be formed under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the aim of the formation of the committee is to encourage government-community partnership.

The constitution of VECs will give community ownership to educational institutions as it functions as a part of the social system. The committee will play a significant role in micro-planning, preparing school development plan including requirement of buildings, toilet and drinking water facilities.

The step will bring a change in attitudes of people towards education and will also help in motivating the parents or guardians to send their children to schools, especially girls and children from disadvantaged groups.

The VECs will also look forward the work of school construction and maintenance, school mapping and micro-planning exercise, preparation of village education plan and monitoring the school management as well as teacher performance. The committee will also work towards the assurance of cent per cent completion of elementary education of all children, monitor academic performance of children, attendance and quality of education, alternative and innovative education centers as per guidelines and directions of District Education Committee.

Smriti Irani launches KV Shaala Darpan Programme

On the inauguration of KV Shaala Darpan programme of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan in Delhi, Union Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani said that the programme will write a new definition of e-governance, good governance, and digital India.

She further added, “This programme will be a step forward in the direction of fulfilling the vision of Digital India for our Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

Elaborating upon the details she said, “With the launch of KV Shaala Darpan, parents will get entire information at a unified platform about their children in respect of the attendance status, performance, health challenges and entire academic record from Ist to XIIth standard. Students will have facilities of e-tutorials and learning aids to enrich their knowledge. She made an appeal to the parents not to put unnecessary pressure on the children while availing the facility of getting instant information under this system.”

Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Upendra Kushwaha said that KV Shaala Darpan programme will work in the direction of bringing transparency in administration and governance. This programme will ensure saving of money, time and paper. He further appealed to parents to devote maximum time to their children in the interest of their complete development.

A documentary film was also shown on the occasion with focus on the KV Shaala Darpan project and how it will enhance school’s overall academic delivery systems and serve as a platform to deliver service to students, parents, teachers, alumni and the school management. The project will link all 1100 Kendriya Vidyalayas.

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June 2015 / digitalLEARNING

More girls qualify JEE exam this year This year, Krati Tiwari from Indore with All India Rank (AIR) 47, is the topper among the girls who passed the JEE (Main).

2015 has seen a marginal increase in the number of girls qualifying the exam from the previous year’s 3,009. OBC topper Majji Sandeep Kumar from Vizianagaram also got an AIR of 10. Chinmaya Sahoo from Pune is the topper in the OBC and disabled category.

The IIT-Madras zone has bagged five of the top 10 merit ranks in the country. The region, which had 50 of the Top 100 rankholders last year, saw only 28 students fall in the top list this year. The Delhi region, which had the maximum succeeding candidates last year, saw a drop in the numbers—from 6,528 to 4,511—this year.

The topper in the IIT-Bombay zone is Bharat Khandelwal, with an AIR 5.

Khandelwal (17), from Delhi Public School, Ahmedabad, managed a score of 440 in the test. Based on students’ performance, the IITs brought down the cut-off from 177 (35 per cent) to 124 or 24.5 per cent of 504. Similarly, cut-offs for each subject have been revised to 7 per cent this year from 10 per cent in the previous year. The highest score, 469/504 (93.05 per cent) secured by Jagwani, despite the difficulty level of the paper, was higher than last year’s 334/360 (92.77 per cent) scored by Chitraang Murdia. Of the 26,456 candidates who have qualified, 21,156 students made it to the common merit list. It may be mentioned that nearly 1.5 lakh students had written the exams conducted on May 24, 2015. The exams were entrance test for students seeking admission for B.E./B.Tech courses.

In 2015, Paper 1 had 262 questions and while Paper 2 had 240. Students had issues with the excessive negative marking after the exams. Under the revised pattern two negative points are given for wrong answers.

Universities can customise syllabi for CBCS: UGC In a new development to the implementation of the proposed Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) from the 2015-16 academic session, the University Grants Commission (UGC) announced that universities can customise the model syllabi by 30 percentage depending upon their areas of specialisation. This move has given more space to the universities in introducing the system.

UGC previously uploaded the model syllabi stating that 20 percentage leverage for modification is allowed, but its proposal for CBCS has been facing major opposition. Various teachers’ groups, including Delhi University Teachers’ Association and students’ groups are protesting the move.

Even the right-wing National Democratic Teachers’ Front from DU has been questioning the feasibility of implementing the system. On the other hand there are many state universities who have updated the ministry of human resource development about their preparedness.

It may be mentioned that the Indian government recently made the Choice-based Credit System (CBCS) mandatory for all 400 public universities at the undergraduate and postgraduate level beginning in the academic year 2015-2016. At present, Presently, DU’s Executive Council has approved the implementation of the CBCS from the upcoming session, ending confusion among candidates seeking admission to the undergraduate programmes, but things are not as simple. Major opposition still stands tall, severely criticising DU for this. Sources have informed Elets Technomedia that the council comprised 17 people, of which five were not in favour of CBCS being introduced.

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June 2015 / digitalLEARNING

Astronomy & Astrophysics institutes to set up in India

The Indian Planetary Society (IPS), the science research organisation has announced the launch of India’s first world-class institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The institute has been set up in collaboration with Charotar University of Science and Technology (CHARUSAT) in Gujarat. The institute will be a first-of-its-kind with observatories for solar and stellar studies and will commence from August 2015.

Having built within the campus of CHARUSAT, the institute is named Dr. Mohanbhai I. Patel (D. Sc.) Institute of Excellence in Astronomy and Astrophysics. A group of world-renowned astrophysicists and scientists will be on board as visiting faculties in addition to a core group of the in-house teaching faculty. Also, each year the institute will invite Nobel Laureates and scientists of international repute to interact and share knowledge and experiences with students, for a week.

“This will be India’s first Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics with state-of-the-art facilities and observatories. The centre will offer courses for M. Phil, Ph. D. and M. Sc., physics with specialisation in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The education imparted to students here will also incorporate courses in Science of ancient India and its relevance with modern science. We also plan to educate students in Sanskrit and music. The aim of the management is to make this institute a centre of excellence in higher learning and strive to become the Taxasheela or Nalanda or Vikramasheela of modern India,” said Dr. J J Rawal, President, IPS. The campus houses a world-class library, laboratories, audio-visual unit, photographic unit, conference hall and an auditorium.

The campus will also have its own hostel and recreation facilities for students as well as the faculty. Most importantly, the institute will offer a scholarship to students securing merit as they progress each year and also will provide financially disadvantaged but deserving students full scholarships for their entire academic career at the institute.

Telangana varsity moves to CBCS system

The Choice Based Credit System, which has been given go-ahead by the University Grants Commission (UGC) at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Telangana University Registrar R. Limbadri while interacting with the teachers on the reopening of the colleges after 45 days summer vacation, informed that the university will introduce the choice based credit system (CBCS) from the start of the session.

A simplified education system will enable the students to pursue courses of their choice and subject would be made available at the college of their choice through CBCS. He has asked the teachers to present academic calendar and plan before to get the NAAC.

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June 2015 / digitalLEARNING

INDUSTRY SPEAK

digitallearning.eletsonline.com

Innovative learning through innovative solutions

W

e are wired to be more receptive to things that are simple and easy. Our everyday life is fraught with instances where we respond more naturally to simplicity in everything.

Our innate nature is to cut through the complexity and simplify things.

At the same time, we are surrounded by great yet simple technology products that run on complex technology. Does it sound confusing? If you pause and think, it makes perfect sense. Although these products that we love so much are based on complex technology, they are designed in such a way that technology remains in the background while we use them to achieve our goals.

Speaking of technology in education, we have some popular technology products and platforms that promise to deliver manifold benefits to educators.

Some platforms or products like Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been there for a while and there are a few new ones that are changing the face of online education as we know it today.

Learning Management Systems have a plethora of users across the world.

Moodle is one such LMS which is popular among educators, colleges, and universities. While Moodle has evolved over the years and found many takers, it poses some serious challenges to user organisations and educators who want to quickly build their online presence with minimal effort and without any complexity. Some innovative educational solutions, such as WizIQ Online Academy are addressing these needs and helping organisations build a unique brand identity and deliver a holistic learning experience to their learners.

Here are some reasons why an innovative solution, such as WizIQ Online Academy can offer great value to users by overcoming challenges posed by a traditional LMS like Moodle.

Time to Market - In the fast-changing online education space, educators are experimenting with educational approaches and technology to find the right way of engaging learners. In this competitive space, the idea is to be online with the right solution as quickly as possible. Time to market or speed matters.

You don’t want to be saddled with a solution like Moodle that takes a considerable amount of time to be installed and optimised according to specific teaching needs. You need a server or web hosting services provided by a third-party vendor to host and install Moodle, which is followed by a series of customisations.

WizIQ Online Academy, on the other hand, enables to create your own online academy with a unique sub-domain of choice within minutes and get started with your teaching activities. You don’t need an IT team or experts to set it up for you. It’s pretty much a Do-it-yourself approach to quickly having a strong online presence with minimum effort.

Ease of use - Moodle is far from an intuitive and easy-to-use solution. To fully utilise its potential, you need to either spend a lot of time understanding its in-built features or get trained on the system before you can sail smoothly.

The user interface is not intuitive and requires customisations before if it can be user-friendly.

WizIQ Online Academy has ease-ofuse as one of its biggest strengths. Right from setting up your Online Academy to conducting teaching or learning activities, everything can be done quickly with least possible effort and without any assistance. The simple and intuitive design ensures that even an uninitiated or first-time user can become an expert user within a short time. Using WizIQ Online Academy is a no-brainer.

Affordable - There’s more to it than meets the eye. While Moodle is an opensource LMS which is available for free,

you need to make a sizeable investment before you can bring it to a level that is acceptable to you and your learners.

The additional costs of hosting, integration with third-party applications, and customisations leave you with a “Free LMS” which is costlier than a paid, plugand-play solution that gets you up and running within no time.

With WizIQ Online Academy, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your online academy is limited to your subscription plan. Online Academy offers flexible plans and pricing which allow both big and small user organisations to create their online academies without worrying about investing in expensive IT infrastructure and engaging an IT team to maintain it.

Mobile - As more and more content is being consumed on mobile devices every day, mobile learning cannot be ignored any longer. The ease of use and accessibility are some of the reasons why it’s popular among learners.

Educators need the right platform to get their content on mobile devices.

Moodle has a mobile app, but there’s very little that you can do with it. There is no built-in functionality to access content. You are directed to Moodle’s website when you attempt to access content and there are no real-time notifications about important events. The user experience is broken with the Moodle app.

WizIQ App allows learners to access content, attend live classes, and get realtime notifications, among others things.

If you have any queries, write to ajayv@wiziq.com.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

13

NEWS

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Outreach Programme to mobilise 400mn youth for skills training To mobilise under privileged youth for skills training, COAI and Centum Learning has launched the a massive outreach programme. The initiative would help implement Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), a flagship outcome based skill development scheme under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, which plans to skill over 2.4 million people across the country.

One of the biggest hurdles facing skills training is reaching out, educating and motivating youth in the remote areas of the country. COAI and Centum Learning’s outreach programme aims to address this challenge. Initially, the pilot project in Bihar would cover a subscriber base of over 1.5 crore people. Following this implementation, it will be rolled out nationwide by COAI member telcos to cover nearly 400 million subscribers after the formal launch of the scheme in July.

Telecom providers would send text and voice-based awareness messages to the target audience. Interested youth can give a missed call to a toll-free number 1800 102 6000 and an interactive voice response pushed to the candidate would capture relevant details on an online application. Data analysis would then be done with callers being profiled on the basis of their age and location. Finally, interested candidates would be mapped to their nearest enrolment centres.

Rajan S. Mathews, Director General, COAI, shared, “The demographic dividend of India indicates that almost 57 per cent of the country’s population is aged below 30 years, and almost 75 per cent of that population is unskilled. Since early in the 11th Five Year Plan, the National Policy on Skill Development has set a target of 500 million people to be skilled by 2022. With such ambitious targets, the challenge of reaching out to the millions of people for mobilising them to learn professional skill sets needs to be overcome. The Indian mobile telephony industry, which has grown phenomenally to become the 2nd largest market in the world with over 970 million connections, is perfectly situated to help enable this massive outreach programme, to reach out and contact the unskilled workforce to seek skill training under the Pradhan MantriKaushalVikasYojana. We look forward optimistically towards a grand success of this campaign.”

Sanjeev Duggal, CEO and Director, Centum Learning said, “Skilling today has rightly been recognized as an agent of Social Transformation for a country like India. We are delighted that Centum’s brainchild for mass mobilization elicited such enthusiastic response from Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Enterprises that he helped muster active and spontaneous support from all COAI members. I also believe skilling in India is akin to evangelizing and needed a disruption in the existing ecosystem to reach even ‘media-dark’ states in the country, where TV & print reach only 20 per cent of the population. I am certain such collaboration will aggressively advance the National skills movement.”

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June 2015 / digitalLEARNING

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Stephen’s interview policy questioned After being in the news for a 99 per cent cutoff for English, now St. Stephen’s policy of interviewing just four candidates per seat is being questioned by teachers.

The teachers argue that like for the rest of Delhi University (DU), nearly all St Stephen’s candidates apply for more than one subject.

A science stream student is likely to apply for all the sciences and an arts student for the arts and social sciences. And with every interview, they say the number of candidates appearing for the next one, shrinks.

An open letter has been written by Stephen’s principal, Valson Thampu to students who have not made it to the interview. It states: “I, too, dreamt of studying in St. Stephen’s. I, too, failed to qualify for the interview,” he writes. “In my case, the issue was not cutoff; it was my Kerala background. There was an assumption in those days that students from my state could not measure up to the standard of St Stephen’s. But life did not end there for me. I decided to prove myself. Got enrolled in a junior college in Kerala. Studied like one possessed, topped the university and joined St Stephen’s as a graduate student. Excelled enough to be invited to join the faculty.

The rest is history.” He says he hopes the candidates who didn’t make it “feel challenged and energized” as “excellence results from lifelong pursuit”.

It may be mentioned that recently, a resolution was passed by St Stephen’s College’s Supreme Council stating that its alumni have not right to interfere in its internal matters. This comes in the backdrop where a group of former students, Association of Old Stephanians, have alleged “rampant illegalities” in the functioning of the college.

The college’s Supreme Council, which is the decision making body of the institution, resolved that certain alumni are resorting to “false propaganda” and the college shall not be forced to deviate from “its time-tested traditions, conventions and convictions, nor forego its Constitutional rights, through any tactic or strategy based on it.”

Marathi in all board curricula in Maharashtra Maharashtra State’s education department has decided to incorporate Marathi language in their curriculum. However, the State Education Minister Vinod Tawde clarified that the language will not be compulsory.

The state has also decided to amend the Maharashtra Official Languages Act, 1964, to declare Marathi as the official language of the state. This move is to ensure that students from schools affiliated to CBSE, ICSE, IB, IGCSE and CIE boards in the state know Marathi.

Tawde further informed that a politicallyinfluenced decision in education was not desired, and the government will take advice from educationists on how to incorporate Marathi in the curriculum; whether it should be a 100-mark or 50-mark paper or taught without conducting an exam.

It may be mentioned that according to reports, Marathi schools are losing their sheen, and English medium schools are gaining prominence in most parts of Maharashtra. The state government has now decided to reject the 4000 pending applications for new Marathi-medium schools, saying there is simply no need for them. It has even barred existing schools from expanding.

digitalLEARNING / June 2015

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INTERVIEW C OVER STORY

Safeguarding Education

GATEWAYS

Online learning and technology based education has become an important part of the curriculam today. The technology has revolutionised the way we learn, teach and collaborate. Schools have embraced BYOD and internet as key tools in the advancement of education. Bhawna Satsangi of Elets News Network (ENN) finds out from the key stakeholders about the importance of network security and anti-malware protection within schools 16

July 2015 / digitalLEARNING

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T

he use of Information Technology in education has seen a surge over a period of time. Today IT is no longer just a field or vertical that people just study or work for. It is being used almost in all the sectors to make the most out of the technology to keep the business going. And education sector is not far behind, where the use of IT is so prominent that no one would dream of working without the use of it.

The adaptation of IT in education is particularly noteworthy as in this field IT is not only taught to the youth but it is also used as a medium through which education is imparted. Nowadays, educational institutes aim to provide an environment in which every pupil can achieve their full potential. Many schools impart education using online sources. The dependence on the Web places greater emphasis on the importance of anti-virus and network security protection within schools.

Deepak Maheshwari, Director, Government Affairs, Symantec believes, “With the technology adaption in the education space children are getting additional spaces and opportunities for learning through the use of computer labs, smart classes, tablets etc. and even at home they access these technology. The scope of learning has gone way beyond teachers, parents or friends today and with the use of technology they could be learning anything from different sources and exposes them to lot of security challenges, safety and vulnerabilities especially for the under aged.”

According to Cyberoam, schools and higher education institutions strive to build adaptive and cost-effective network infrastructures to support the current sophisticated styles of teaching and learning. Use of technology and Internet access has become an essential part of a student’s curriculum to encourage comprehensive learning. IT is no longer used as a mere research tool, but most of an institution’s processes have gone online: whether we consider attendance, examinations, creating and submitting assignments, declaring results, and various other tasks. Use of laptops and tablets for classroom assignments has turned out to be a necessity.

Cyberoam security enables educational institutions to maintain network security while keeping security investments low and protecting students from malware and inappropriate content. It enhances productivity and minimises bandwidth consumption by controlling unproductive surfing, music video downloads, gaming, chat and social networking.

Key Highlights

CIPA Compliance-controls indiscriminate surfing Cyberoam’s web filtering and application visibility and control prevent indiscriminate surfing by blocking direct access to inappropriate websites.

WebCat

It enables educational institutions to enforce an internet safety policy that filters inappropriate internet usage helping compliance with federal CIPA requirements.

Shared Computer environment User identification and control

Cyberoam’s unique Layer 8 Technology with identitybased security identifies the username despite the dynamic Wi-Fi and shared endpoint environment in educational institutions. This allows the institutions to enforce flexible, yet effective controls based on the type of user, study requirements, level of access required and time of the day.

Layer 8 identity-based reporting

Offers visibility into the institution’s surfing trends, bandwidth and system utilisation, internet usage in addition to intrusion alerts and more.

Committed bandwidth to users

Identity based bandwidth management assigns committed bandwidth based on users, users groups, web category and applications with bandwidth allocation based on study requirement and time of the day, ensuring optimum bandwidth utilisation.

Secure Wi-Fi access

The unique layer 8 technology identifies internal source and destination of WLAN traffic by username, preventing rouge users from connecting to the institutional Wi-Fi network and avoiding detection.

Source: Cyberoam Sophos

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

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INTERVIEW C OVER STORY

Educational challenges

Educational institutions are a hot target for hackers who seek student’s personal information or simply to tamper with results or grades. Network of educational institutes are particularly vulnerable because they tend to be more open and less secured as compared to other verticals. Lesser experienced IT staff and undervalued IT budget are some of the main factors contributing to this gap.

The education sector face challenges related to unproductive, inappropriate use of the internet, managing traffic from a myriad of BYOD devices, managing different internet requirements for different users at different time schedules. All schools often the most rigorous malware environments, schools and universities help shape not only the minds of the children, but also the character of the communities. ESET helps educational organisations around the globe achieve their missions. Pallav Agarwal, Marketing Director, Eset informs, “Educational institutes represent a more challenging IT and network security issues than corporate networks. As the students are more prone to internet threats, a virus or worm on one student’s computer can quickly spread throughout the entire campus. So, it is of utmost importance for the school staff to deploy anti-virus solutions to keep the malware attacks at bay. Also it is important to give students proper training to tackle the Trojan or mal-

With new technologies in the market available, it is only imperative to use such innovations for a suitable security system in educational institutions. There should be awareness about the potential dangers/risks associated with the use of IT which if not understood or addressed can very well become a reality and can come to haunt you.

Rana Gupta Vice President, APAC sales for Identity and Data Protection (IDP) business at Gemelto

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ware.”

Every educational institute needs a strategy to secure its information resources and balance the utilisation of this technology to its full potential for academic purpose and avoid misuse. Hackers today have become very sophisticated.

To safeguard from intrusion and other malware it is important to use an anti-malware product which is best suited as per the requirement of an institution. Cyberoam’s firewall acts as armour around the network periphery, shielding it from any hostility from outside. The intrusion prevention system acts as a second layer of defense.

To tackle the intrusions from outside, it is also necessary for the institutes to restrict the use of internet surfing so that they do not spend their quality time in unproductive activities like social networking, gaming, chat, porn sites, etc. which could take a toll on the academic performance.

“Over the past few years, the focus have been mostly in just getting the access, which means getting the computers in the classrooms, at home, getting internet connectivity etc. so the security and safety of the children have become more of an afterthought and rather rare. So in many cases, if a student is going to a computer lab, they would allow access to any site.

However, students should be going only to certain sites which schools allow to access,” feels Maheshwari.

Protecting educational environment

Safeguarding the interest of the students and the educational institutes, Alok Gupta, Director, Unistal who has also launched Protegent Suraksha, an anti-virus for the BYOD world. It is a combination of multiple products which has internet security, activity monitoring. It is important to maintain the secrecy of the work that is done or the sensitive data to be secured. So, this helps in retracing the error. This product also helps in device tracking and also tracks the IP address. There is speed enhancer and data recovery software included in the product. So, it has a combination of six modules.”

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The activity monitoring helps the teacher and parent to identify the sites that the child has browsed. This will help in safeguarding the child. With this software, student can use any site but the entire browsing pattern of the work will go to the mail-id of parents or the teacher.

There is a monitoring of the student’s work.

“We are running a course on data recovery with assured placement for the students who want to make their career in security industry. The fee of the course is `50,000 and if the government gives its own infrastructure we take `30,000 as the fee from per student. We have initiated the proposal with the government. The duration of the course is two months and 96 hours. The salary scale starts from `10,000 onwards,” informs Gupta.

Anti-virus is necessary and one cannot survive without anti-virus product. The adoption of the anti-virus product has been 100 per cent today. 80 per cent of the machines are pre installed with the anti-virus and by the time their buying time comes, they become habitual of using anti-virus.

“The government has got a flagship project on security which is called National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology.

We did a report which is called Norton report and we learned that one out of two children in India were victims of cyber crime or online negative situation. We also learned that one out of five children in India are being cyber bullied while 84 per cent of the parents believe that no such thing existed. So, the fact is that often times the parents and the teachers might be in a state of denial that they may not even perceive that these are the types of dangers the children are facing. For us it is important to bridge this gap,” informs Maheshwari.

As a global security leader space, Symantec do take its responsibility very seriously and be committed to educate consumers towards cyber crime and keep them protected against many challenges. Symantec play a key role in providing institutions sources to help them discuss appropriate online behaviour with teachers and parents.

“We are providing Norton safe search which helps children when they are surfing the net. We also have Norton facebook which scans the facebook news feed for dangerous links, infected downloads and unsafe website.

This is something which improves the safety for those children,” says Maheshwari.

The real benefit of using anti-virus is directly related to the consequences of not having the anti-malware protection. Viruses are the most well known computer attackers, and they can do all sorts of damages. So protecting from spyware and identity theft is utmost important. Spyware is a kind of software specifically designed to infect your computer and spy on you. This means that spyware will all your personal information stored in your computer.

Anti-virus rules

CDo have a written anti-virus policy that details the responsibilities of management and staff, how antivirus is to be maintained, and specific instructions on what to do in an emergency.  Do make sure that anti-virus software is installed on every machine, even if the machine is not capable of running e-mail. Viruses can sit undetected in files on any machine.

 Do update anti-virus signature files and scanning engines regularly. A weekly update is good, although daily is better. If your company has a central anti-virus server, it can install updates on other machines on the network. However, a computer must be turned on for this to work. If a machine was not turned on at the time of the update, it will have to be updated manually.  Do run the anti-virus program in full-time, background, automatic, auto-protect, or similar mode.

 Do enable scans of the memory, master and boot records, and system files upon start up of every machine. It doesn’t take long for an anti-virus program to complete these scans and it’s just plain silly not to enable these features.  Do configure the anti-virus program to scan all files — not just executable programs.

Viruses come in all sorts of files and just scanning executables is not enough.

 Do enable the anti-virus heuristic controls (if they are available). A heuristic scan takes longer, but not so much longer that it makes much difference to users.  Don’t allow Windows Scripting Host (WSH) to run on machines that don’t need it. Although some Windows programs need WSH to run, most machines can have this removed without harm. WSH controls the Visual Basic Language and many viruses have been written with it. By removing WSH, the virus can’t operate.  Do enable Macro Virus Protection in all your Microsoft Office programs.

 Do disable the Preview Pane view in Outlook and Outlook Express. Some viruses can be launched by simply previewing them, even if the message is never opened. Disabling this feature saves you a lot of grief.

Source: Dummies.com

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

19

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW INTERVIEW

Protecting growing threats The importance of Internet has come a long way and has been constantly growing in its approach to the end users. Today, the world is inevitably connected to the internet for online networking and operations. Rajesh Babu, CEO and Founder, Mirox Technology shares with Elets New Network (ENN) about the growing usage of Internet and threats observed that pose a severe threat on the education sector.

What is the scope of providing security solutions in education sector?

In future the education industry is one of the largest users of Internet and Advance Wi-Fi mobility communications.

This will give birth to the great demand in high speed connectivity and security tools. With wireless connectivity on campuses there is an increase in threats, particularly educational institutions who want to ensure full proof defence against any attacks. New technologies in mitigating such attack by implementing advanced security system such as Next Generation UTM, IDS, APT, SIEM,

Mirox offers comprehensive security solutions to secure campuses

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Device and Applications Control have wide scope in education sector. There is an ample opportunities in providing security solutions. Nurseries, kindergartens, schools, universities, technical colleges, further education institutes and research establishments- no matter how large educational facility but still there is more chances of unexpected and expected threat.

What are the threats and security issues in education institutions?

Education sector has long struggled to find a balance between academic freedom, supporting local communities and cyber security. Cyber security challenges in educational sphere is more. The educational institutions play a great role in their communities, and in cyberspace.

Nowadays, most of the educational institutions face common information security issues- insufficient funds, mobile devices, lack of security risks awareness.

These common challenges make easy for hackers to target institutions. More and more users are online using unprotected and vulnerable devices. They don’t understand threats and their impact consequence. But technically malicious software (malware), phishing, unwanted downloads, infrastructure attacks, social network targeting, and peer-to-peer (P2P) information leakage are daily potential threats.

Most universities’ systems are accessible through a campus network.

Similarly, student records, many employment-related records, library use records, management-client communications, and certain research and other intellectual property-related records are housed on campus servers. As such, they are vulnerable to security breaches that may compromise confidential information and expose the university extremely sensitive research information.

Multiple personas and legacy access: Faculty, students and staff require access to different administrative systems, many of which contain sensitive information such as two students records, performance evaluations or donor data. As the personas shift, outdated and inappropriate legacy access pose security risks when not removed.

A student who spent a semester through a work-study programme with the registrar’s office should not retain access that was provisioned for that role if she is placed in the Development Office the next semester. Institutions can leverage their identity management systems to better track who has access to what and ensuring that this risk is mitigated by deprovisioning access in a timely manner.

Rogue data in the cloud: Institutions have already signaled to their users that cloud-based data is ok. However, users don’t understand the contractual protections provided for these services, or the absence of these protections when they adopt free or low-cost solutions simply by signing up and storing insti-

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tutional data in the cloud. This cybersecurity threat must be addressed on two fronts: educating and training end-users on the security issues and working with procurement and finance to flag these kinds of purchases for review.

Opening doors to the community: Many institutions of higher education view themselves not just as resources for their students, faculty and staff, but also to their local communities. The range of services provided to the wider community include programming, use of libraries

and access to free Wi-Fi The dangers for a university or college network can lurk everywhere from e-mail to the Internet infrastructure itself.

Keeping track of the cyber security threats in higher education is not an easy task, but is imperative to protect the integrity of institutional assets, the network and infrastructure.

How can your solutions help education sector to be secure and safe?

Mirox offer a range of services and solutions, at a level of perfection that not many others can provide, from the most

“

Nowadays, most of the educational institutions face common information security issues- insufficient funds, mobile devices, lack of security risks awareness. These common challenges make easy for hackers to target institutions.

”

ordinary to the most extreme. Our services are always more than satisfactory to our clients. We allott right person for the right job and dedicate ourselves to deliver before deadlines, we forever try

als with school districts, colleges and universities are contending with vanishing budgets, an explosion of mobile devices, reckless users, infected machines, unpatched software and more.

to go further with every new project we undertake. Our goal is not to set records or prove a point, it’s just an effort to keep up with the global market and an effort to achieve perfection.

Educational institutions of all sizes are contending with a growing list of cyber security challenges. They are not only responsible for protecting the personal information of students and faculty, but research three institutions like medical, technology – are encountering sophisticated cyber espionage campaigns from overseas governments and corporations.

Moreover, cyber security profession-

The challenge to provide students with the access to the latest technology, while keeping networks secure is an everyday reality. From end point protection to cutting-edge defenses against today’s most sophisticated malware – like APTs, targeted attacks and Zero-days – Mirox has the next generation customised campus comprehensive security solutions such as IDS/IPS, Encryption, DLP, Risk and Compliance Management, IDS/IPS, UTM, Firewall, APT, Antivirus/Antimalware, SVM/SIEM, Disaster Recovery, DDoS Mitigation, Web Filtering, Security Services to secure campuses - from small center to the largest universities.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

21

INTERVIEW

Cracking threats with Kaspersky With the use of Internet increasing on several devices, cyber threats are also expected to increase in the long run. Altaf Halde, Managing Director- South Asia, KasperSky Lab, in conversation with Nirmal Anshu Ranjan of Elets News Network (ENN) talks about the various solutions to get rid of these risks Tell us something about your security solutions.

Kaspersky have been into the business of providing security for digital assets for the past 17 years. We started with the consumer security segment, then headed towards home users, followed by small offices. After that, we stepped towards the SMB space. Having covered these three segments, now we are getting into the enterprise segment.

Nonetheless, what the customer should look at is, if there is a problem, how fast the company reacts to give him a solution, and that is where we feel lies our expertise. We have a very strong team of researchers who are looking out for threats which are coming up. KasperSky is one of the organisations which comes with the maximum number of detections.

Which are the segments you primarily cater to?

Our traditional solutions include endpoint security, which talks about antivirus in a device. So, irrespective of verticals, a virus or malware can attack any of the segments. As of now, we are quite strong in education space and are thinking of getting into the enterprise. Our focus is going to be IT/ITeS, BFSI and government segments.

Cloud is a big thing these days. Do you oer security solutions for that as well?

About a year ago, we did not have a Cloud solution, but now we have two of them. The first one is for the consumers, which we don’t sell them directly. We appoint a service provider for that, like Airtel or Vodafone. These will charge subscription for end point anti-virus security on the Cloud just like it takes charges for a ringtone on a monthly basis. We had recently launched it globally.

Now, we have done the first step of ty-

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ing up with one service provider who is based in Mumbai right now. The MoU is going to be released in 10-15 days time.

With initiatives like Digital India, cyber threats are also set to increase.

How do you react to it?

Earlier, we used to sell our solutions only to Local Area Network companies.

However, now people have got several devices like tablets, smart phones etc to access internet leading to the increase of threats. Today, there is no solution which can offer 100 per cent security.

What is the next big thing at KasperSky? For us, protecting our users is the biggest thing. Further, we need to sell our solutions to get into this particular space putting the money back again. KasperSky is an organisation which develops its own solutions. For instance, if you look at Symantec, it acquires a company and thus integration becomes a huge problem. In KasperSky, we have developed everything. Our mobile device management (MDM), data encryption, virtualisation security, system management, all are developed now. So, what we believe in is that we are probably developing everything ourselvses making integration much easier.

We have also got a programme called KasperSky Kids, which we run with schools to provide newsletters or do events in schools and to talk about how to be safe with Internet. We believe in educating the users. These involve not only the corporates but also the children, who are going to be the next generation Internet users.

digitallearning.eletsonline.com

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

23

INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

New Vocational Landscape On one hand, India has a large number of educated unemployed youth and on the other, the industry is in need of skilled workers. The solution to it lies in popularising vocational courses in educational institutes. Nidhi Sharma of Elets News Network (ENN) talks to educationists and digs out the importance of vocational training stressed alongside formal education

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I

ndia would need over 500 million skilled people by 2022 across various sectors such as auto and auto components, building and construction materials, building and construction, real estate services, electronics and IT hardware, education and skill development services, food processing, gems and jewellery, healthcare, textiles, leather and leather goods, organised retail, tourism and hospitality. Besides courses in these, information technology, fashion designing, animation, clinical nutrition and many other such vocational courses are ruling the list of top favourite.

Vocational courses is a discipline which enables individuals to acquire skills which are traditionally non-academic and totally related to a specific trade, occupation or vocation. They are also known as technical education, carrier and technical education (CTE) or Vocational Education and Training (VET) as they directly develop expertise in a particular group of techniques or technology through manual or practical activities. On one hand, India has a large number of educated unemployed youth and on the other, the industry is in need of skilled workers. The solution to it lies in popularising vocational courses in educational institutes. Just two per cent of India’s youth and only about seven per cent of the whole working age population have received vocational training, a survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation revealed.

If India wants to emulate countries where the vocational education system has succeeded, sweeping reforms are needed. This will require significant commitment on the part of policymakers. Many of these reforms are similar to those being proposed by the 2005 Central Advisory Board for Education (CABE) Committee report on Universalisation of Secondary Education.

700 million Indians will be looking for jobs by the year 2022. What skills will they need to make a living in an economy which is increasingly based on knowledge and services?

In this backdrop, a large number of schools and colleges are encouraging their students to go for vocational training to enhance their skills. Today, a large volume of students are choosing a set of skill sets that they want to gain expertise into. Training in vocational skills is gaining strength across colleges as it prepare students for future challenges and enable to groom them for future leadership. Especially today, more and more students want to go for higher education and not just rely completely on getting skill training through vocational courses. So, there has to be an arrangement where students can get additional skill qualification with vocational course in

The Challenges in becoming a skilled nation Age is significantly higher for introduction to skill development as compared to foreign countries. Some states don’t want students to be exposed to automotive at an early age, but abroad, 12-14 year old go to automotive companies.

Only two-five per cent of skilled population While South Korea has 95 per cent – 96 per cent skilled population. We don’t have a transfer space between the vocational space and the education space.

There is no aspiration The capacity in the country does not exist. If we have to train 500 million people, or 50 or 20 million, we have to double or triple this capacity.

No industry standard The industry has to recognise the set standards and give preference to those with certificates. The whole thing has to create a whole eco system where it will create a pull which will in turn address other three things.

Private and industry participation is lacking No incentives for private players to enter the field of vocational education. Moreover, the present regulations are very rigid and there is no provision is there for in-service training and continuous skill up-gradation.

Lack of experienced and qualified teachers. Bachelors of Vocational Education (BVE) is often a mandatory qualification for teachers abroad. However, in India, no specific qualifications are being imparted for vocational education teachers.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

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INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE About 12 million persons are expected to join the workforce every year, and an existing skill development capacity of about 3.4 million, it is thus required to enhance the skilling and technical education capacity to about 15 million (considering that even sections of the existing workforce would have to be trained)

Just 2 per cent of India’s youth and only about 7 per cent of the whole working age population have received vocational training

addition to their formal education.

Bhartiya Mukt Vidyapeeth, New Delhi , Delhi NCR, City Group of Colleges, Lucknow , City Industrial Training Centre, Karauli, Rajasthan, ASMACS Industrial Training Center, Cuttack , Odisha, Audyogik Tantra Shikshan Santha, Pune , Maharashtra, Azam Industrial Training Centre, Anantnag , Jammu and Kashmir; Bi Bi Raza Vocational Training Centre for Women, Gulbarga, Karnataka, Anand Institute of Business Studies, Anand, Gujarat are some of the top colleges offering the best vocational

courses across the country.

A World Bank Survey says that vocational education courses are offered in schools at grades 11 and 12 (in most states with vocational streams, vocational and general courses are offered by the same institution). These are aimed at preparing students for entry into the labour market. There are 6800 schools, almost all in the public sector, enrolling close to 400,000 students in the vocational education scheme – utilising just 40 per cent of the available student capacity in these institutions. These

MOOCs provide great benefit for Vocational Courses Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can provide great impetus to institutes providing vocational courses . A FICCI research paper says that they institutes can expand the availability of skilled labour with the help of MOOCs. Released at the FICCI Higher Education Summit, the paper, ‘MOOCs and the future of Indian higher education’, says that the traditional industrial training institutes can also benefit from integrating MOOCs for students and trainers.

The FICCI paper said MOOCs offer a way to gain skills not taught in the format sector, demonstrate them to potential employers and stay abreast of developments at the workplace. These courses are conducted online for students across the world. Over 10 million students globally have enrolled in thousands of such courses offered by just the top three to four providers of MOOCs, the paper said.

It also said MOOCs have garnered investments from institutions and venture capitalists. In this space, Indian students form the second largest pool of students attending MOOC courses.

FICCI said in the formal sector, MOOCs offer an alternative to lecture-mode classroom instruction using digital content that can be downloaded. This is on the back of huge faculty shortage in higher education. However, it said that clarity on completion and certification (drop-out rates are in excess of 90 per cent) and revenue models would have to evolve over time.

Even for branding, publicity and recruitment of foreign students, FICCI said Indian institutions and teachers could use MOOC platforms to create and conduct MOOCs for students all over the world, similar to universities abroad. Since employability of graduates continues to be an issue, FICCI has suggested that there could be language, communication and soft skills MOOCs to bridge the gap.

While the government has recently launched Swayam - an Indian MOOC platform - FICCI has said the government should develop systems to certify competence of people who have taken MOOC-based courses. It added that National Assessment and Accreditation Council (Naac) and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) can accredit MOOC programmes and courses for use in credit transfer between MOOC providers and formal and non-formal educational institutions.

Apart from having MOOCs to train teachers, FICCI has suggested that employers may encourage their own human resource departments to arrange for continued education of their employees in emerging areas of technology or management. This will also help boost their vocational skills.

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schools offer a total of over 100 courses in various areas - agriculture, business and commerce, humanities, engineering and technology, home science and health and para medical skills.

The report further says that overwhelmingly, students who get through the vocational stream want to proceed to further education. This is not surprising given the relatively weak labour market outcomes. The few rigorous evaluations of programme impacts that have been undertaken point to low levels of gainful employment of these graduates.

Captain Sandeep Malhotra, Director, Alliance Educare and Research Private Limited says, “At the outset, we all acknowledge that institutions follow very fine academic practices for imparting regular curriculum. However, the country’s employment data shows that 82 per cent students face employment crisis due to the gap between their acquired knowledge and the industry needs. As we know, India is a nation with 65 per cent population below 35 years. It poses a tough challenge of skill training of 500 million people by 2022. However, if achieved, it offers a great opportunity of being a large pool of skilled workforce available to us and, to the world.”

“Existing institutions are faced with new challenges as education can no longer only be conveyed in the classrooms, students and trainers require more and more modern means of communication for knowledge pass. Further, the institutions have limited knowledge resources, whereas, large pool of experts is available outside their boundary wall. This expert pool may be utilised by digitally connecting the institutions with the outside world”, Capt. Malhotra added.

Speaking in this regard, Dilip Chenoy, Managing Director and CEO of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), informed that presently there are three programmes that are running across schools and colleges. “The first is the traditional one in schools - the 10,000 vocational schools that existed when they were introduced in vocational education. Second, is the introduction of vocational courses by CBSE

and the other boards. The third, which is actually integrating the other two and is spread across the country is the National Vocational Education Qualifications Framework (NVEQF), now the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF), which is introducing skill development classes between 9 and 12 in the different states.”“There are two models operating. While some states are doing it

skill knowledge providers. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has set up community colleges and they have the bvoc programme going on. NSDC is partnering with them. NSDC hopes to double the number of states this year and take the number of schools and colleges to at least three times”, he further informed.

It may be mentioned that in the high-

700 million Indians will be looking for jobs by the year 2022

While the school education sector is about 227 million in enrolment, the combined enrolment in higher education and vocational training is about 15.3 million. on their own, in majority states NSDC is partnering with the state governments to introduce training partners and set up labs and get people skill trained. Two very recent examples are in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh where school children who passed out of 12th and not wanting to continue higher education have got jobs upto Rs. 50,000 a month based on their skill certificate. In many cases where they have not even passed 12th but passed their skill certificate, they have got jobs in the market, say for example in the retail sector, where they are earning an average of `12,000`13,000 per month”, added Chenoy.

“Moving on from the school space to higher education, AICTE has set up community colleges and they have the

er education space, institutions such as the Delhi University (DU) and Pune University, students are getting an add on course on the payment of fees where they get assessment certificate from SSC. It helps them with jobs. A very good example is that of Dayal Singh College of DU where a batch completed a banking and financial course. Some of them have got placed in global consulting companies with decent packages.

While Haryana and Himachal Pradesh are very robust states in the field of vocational training and courses, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Telengana and Andhra Pradesh are also making good progress. The response varies from state to state.

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27

GUEST COLUMN

Enabling online transparency

In one of its kind e-initiative endeavours, the Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) has launched MEMORY-My Exam My Online Review, which enables students to take review of the exam they appear from the comfort of their homes, writes Akhilesh Mittal

I

n order to safeguard the interests of the citizens of the State, the government’s every recruitment authority’s main objective is to adopt transparency for each and every process at each level. The Rajasthan Public Service Commission took e-initiatives since 2011 and regularly upgrading themselves with latest technology and innovations so that the demands for the services and solutions can be made available to the all with transparency.

Unlike in online exams, candidate of offline exams have the advantage to take home the question paper and carbon copy of OMR sheet. In online exams, candidate feels lack of transparency as neither the question paper nor OMR copy is in their hands, leaving them with lot of uncertainty. For example

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candidates could have doubts, like why negative marking was done when they didn’t even attempt those specific questions, or some questions were out of syllabus among others.

For last few Memorise your exam: The MEMORY enables students to years, RPSC had monitor their actions during the examinations been trying to good response from the candidates. find some innovative solutions for such The software runs on windows platissues in online examination where the forms and the size of software is known candidates can see the answers they to be less than 150kb, only in unzipped give. Finally the commission has come form. In addition to that, this softup with a system, developed by an Asware has ensured highest security and sociate Online Examination 24x7availability across geographies.

Consultant that takes care of the The commission has kept simultaneous candidates’ concerns. log in limits for three candidates. They MEMORY – My Exam My Oncan log in with the allotted roll numbers line Review- software has been and the one time passwords that would designed and developed in such be received on the candidate’s registered a manner that after completion mobile number. of online examinations, the canThe MEMORY will take candidates didates can view start-to-end authrough all action and activities executtomatic action replay of their exed across by them during examination amination on the RPSC website. period and time spent time on the exThe Public recruitments are amination screen. With this innovative quite a critical and sensitive task move, RPSC has taken online examinaand the MEMORY software intions to next level of digititsation. creases chances of transparency in an unique and innovative way.

(The author is Joint Director - System The RPSC launched the Analyst, Department of Information software from School Lecturer Technology, Govt of Rajasthan, (COACH) exam, which was held Rajasthan Public Service Commission, on April 11, 2015 and garnered Ajmer.)

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digitalLEARNING / July 2015

29

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Facilitating IT in

Education

With a mission to enable educational institutions to achieve excellence in their field of business, Microsoft has designed varied solutions for education sector, which help the teachers and students to keep pace with the newer technologies. In an exclusive interview with Rajiv Arora, Director-Marketing, Microsoft, and Alok B. Lall, Director-Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft, Bhawna Satsangi of Elets News Network (ENN) finds out the innovative solutions the company has developed to cater to the needs of the education sector.

What are the solutions Microsoft is focusing to provide to education sector?

Our mission is to enable every individual or every business on the planet to achieve more. We are looking to enable the technological environment in the education sector. All our solutions designed for the sector leverage students to get hang of technology concepts better, be able to collaborate with other students and teachers on projects they do, get a better understanding between students on concepts they need to clarify and how can parents play a critical role in assessing the students progress and participate along with teacher to make sure that the student is successful. We do that across K-12 and higher education.

For the institutes, we have launched ‘Microsoft Edu cloud’. It helps a teacher or a faculty how to create a content which teachers can deliver to students. Then we have also defined how to deliver that content. Using a productive tool how a teacher can deliver content to a student and how a student can consume that content. We are going to help them through technology to automate the entire institutes so that the students know what assignments they have, what merits are they getting etc.

Fourth pillar what we have on edu cloud is how do we enable the teachers, faculty both in K-12 and higher education. All this is powered by Microsoft platform. We are providing the content to make them ready for the 21st century. Education is not just the ability for a teacher to deliver a course, we also look at how we provide the tools that help teachers create a learning experience that just goes beyond the textbook. A lot of our tools are free and are available for students to download and use it to understand the concept.

Our licensing programme for Rajiv Arora, Director-Marketing, Microsoft academy are very

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attractive so that every institution can actually look at great to get all the students covered with the best of technology that Microsoft provide so that they can have access to the devices that they use. A lot of our technologies will work on windows, android, ios. We are more pervasive in how we believe the access to services should be. In India, we are also focusing on local language computing and we have our operating system MS office available in 14 languages so that they can actually use local language computing to be able to drive that.

For us, the next big wave is powered by the cloud so the edu cloud is about how we enable the access to technology through the data centers that we have globally and in India.

What are the security solutions you offer with edu cloud?

Security is needed in the device that the student carries so that he gets a safe and secure environment. Second is to maintain privacy. Schools don’t want information related to students to be leaked out. Maintaining a security of the content is also another concern. In higher education there are people working on a very critical projects where they may want to patent something, so the security is much required and lastly we have solution for administration. The solution ensures that the environment stays secure and the administrative staff will have a parent login that will be restrict-

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ed only to them. So, our solutions pan across all of these verticals whether it is protecting the device, whether it is protecting the content through information rights. We also give the platform very stable access control so you may have the ability to read, but cannot write or you may not have access to certain types of folders like mark sheets, exams, content etc. We define the security at varied roles.

What are the innovative solutions Microsoft has developed for students with special needs?

For us, technology should be accessible to a great level and there is no bar to learning for students with special needs.

Windows has been designed to keep in mind the accessibility factor for these students. There is very diverse set of settings that people can use depending upon the impairments that they have. The second is around Microsoft Office, which is used by people widely and people don’t realise that since the last 5 years, we have capabilities within the product to have documents that can be created for people with impairment. We have also partnered with JW Micro to provide a screen download of a very powerful screen reader that people with the visual impairments can take because they are a genuine copy of Microsoft office.

Kinect comes as a part of Xbox. We believe that kinect can really measure what movement you are doing, where your hands are rising or feet are moving.

On the basis of that we can guide certain types of behaviour and this is specifically being successful among children with autism. We use games which make an autism child excel and has the desire to

perform. We are focused on creating an inclusive environment within education whether it is K-12, higher education or whether it is special scenarios.

Are the training required for the teachers before using your solutions?

For all solutions that we give, we have a programme whereby we train our partners who deliver the solutions to the target institutions. We also have the train the trainer programme for the teachers so they get to understand how they can use the technology. DPS Ghaziabad had been given the devices to use our technology to get students and teachers to work together. We have a great product for students named OneNote, which is used to store all your notes. Each teacher has a section for the student which is protected. So, the student and teacher alignment is about to understand the concept and the technology.

We also have a product called partners in learning, where we ensure that how do we enable the teachers for K-12, which is called a tablet academy. In this programme teachers from various K-12 schools are trained and we make them enable on how to use the technology.

We also have Technology Enablement Instruction programme (TEI) for higher education, which work for STEM and non-STEM colleges. Here also we call teachers for two days, give them devices, enable them with technology and how technology can help them in change the way in teaching the children and prepare them for the 21st century. We have trained around 77,000 teachers under partner learning programme across the country. In teacher training pro-

Alok B. Lall, Director-Microsoft OďŹƒce Division, Microsoft

grammes, we have identified some expert educators who actually get trained and further train more people.

Are you only targeting private universities and schools with your solutions?

Our solutions are universally applicable.

It’s just a function of how the decisionmaking process is. We have a lot of ICT projects running with state governments, and we also work with private institutions on how these stand to excel because they see that as an opportunity from other institutions. We have been involved in many ICT projects in down South.

What are the smart solutions on offer by Microsoft for smarter education in smart cities?

We believe there are 12 scenarios which essentially define what smart city is.

Sanitation, citizen safety, education, grievances etc are one of those scenarios. Education plays a pivotal role in smart city. We have many cities across the world where we have cities like Barcelona, a couple of cities in Europe, in India Surat is one such example of a smart city. So, our education solutions are very well fit in as a part of the entire smart city framework.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

31

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Ideating for smart education

Consumer behaviour, advancement in content publishing, adoption of technological solutions in the education sector to make it smarter are driving significant changes in the education sector. Presently, with the focus on 100 smart cities, Wipro is all set to deliver smarter solutions for smart education in a smart city model. Ashish Khare, General Manager and Business Head, System Integration Solution, Wipro, in an exclusive chat with Bhawna Satsangi of Elets News Network (ENN) finds out the roadmap of the company developed for smart education What will be the model of smart education in a smart city?

Education is a combination of two partsone to enable educational institutes on a self-sustainability completely and include a smart education aspect, which includes smart classrooms, web-based education, online evaluation, enabling the whole education process on a smarter platforms.

The second part is making a campus smart which includes campus surveillance, campus Wi-Fi, campus network, working out the Real Time Location Services (RTLS) which is one of the important aspects of education.

We have developed the solution for a women’s only institute in Saudi Arabia around four years back. In BITS Pilani, we have deployed RTLS solution in women’s hostel. There’s sensitivity involved and that’s the reason, security and access becomes an important part of educational institutes.

Another aspect is to enable overall curriculum and evolution system online. If these two things are taken care of, then the coverall education system can be taken care of. These days Idea Internet Network (IIN) is gaining grounds. But then what IIN teaches is a concept and if these are structured programmes, it becomes smart education. IIN is more of a web search.

But better and organised way is that you

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have more structured sessions which are mass communication without the dependence on the quality of a teacher sitting in front of students. Today, the biggest issue in the education in schools as well as in colleges is that education is dependent on the kind of professor or lecturer you have. By enabling these kinds of online sessions and facilitating that will help students.

Will depending upon only online education not fade away the traditional mode of teaching?

It’s always a mix. IIN might be okay from an understanding point of view but a proper education needs a moderator.

Smart classrooms, web-based education, online evaluation enable education process on a smarter platform

You can always have an intervention from an expert from the report as a part of smart education but a moderator in front makes a huge difference, especially in smaller classes.

What is the framework that you have developed for the smart solutions for smart education?

This is the area where we work along with our ecosystem partners and one of them is Samsung. The focus is more on enabling technology part. Content is something which we are not focusing at present. While we have an e-learning application, which organises learning session for various people, we also have evolution systems which are largely used within Wipro. We have 1,70,000 people and everyone has to go through certification process internally and that’s the qualification for people to continue in the job. As a process, it is anyway established and working. We do provide that platform but then the focus of Wipro is primarily enabling various technologies.

In your opinion, how will smart city facilitate the education sector?

Smart cities are coming up with various themes. Especially on the green field, education is one good theme which is with the least risk. In the brown field, it may not make a difference. Like Lavasa

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What opportunities does Wipro see while developing smart solutions for smarter education in a smart city?

Wipro plans to be a technology enabler and that’s why we will go in smart cities and many other educational institutes as an application. We deployed some solutions in Jindal Global School three years back but now looking at them, there are various other universities which want similar solutions. Having a basic communication platform with internet enablement has become a base in most of the higher educational institutes.

So, for us growth is in the education segment, from a smart education perspective is not limited to smart city institutes but also in other institutes. As a business company, we look at overall

Photo Courtesy: Wipro

was initially considered as a leisure city but now they are trying to bring education institutes and that has actually changed the basis. Education is going to be a good and easy enabler for greenfield cities or the upscale cities.

business and not just fixed to some 100 smart cities projects.

Are you also focusing tier 2 or 3 cities to deploy education solutions?

Yes, we are also deploying our education solutions in tier 2 and 3 cities. As an organisation, we are working for the smart campus as an initiative which will include educational institutes as a key driver. We will also work on smart refineries and smart manufacturing plants. Smart cities are one, the smart campus is another from a solution development perspective.

What are the features of smart campus?

The smart campus is basically developing overall community in a smart campus. Most of the modules which come in a city can easily be adapted in a smart campus because the environment is much more controlled and those cross-functional issues are not there. Today, India’s biggest problem in the smart city is that there is no single head.

Municipality head is heading three verticals, for telecom there

is somebody else, for electricity there’s someone else. In campuses, integrated solutions are easier to adopt. So, a true smart city replica will actually come in smart campuses or greenfield cities.

How does a smart school play an important role in improving the physical performance of the smart city?

Smart education is a term which is related to basic opportunities available in a city. A smart education needs safety and security inside the campus, where you can monitor, surveillance, access to safety system within that building to make sure students are secure.

You can also use the network layer to get best of the knowledge and best of the data technology into your institutes.

From an inclusion standpoint, the local concept within the smart city is not going to be relevant, what will be relevant is the smart education that child needs and the seats available in the school. All this can be integrated as a solution and can help in terms of better education.

A smart city is not a debate, it’s a reality today. And then you need to have this component in the smart city to cater to the needs of the people.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

33

IN NTERVIEW CONVERSATION

Technology for Transparency Implementation of technology brings about transparency in the process of governance and augments citizen services. S Raju, Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Uttarakhand, in conversation with Manish Arora of Elets News Network (ENN), enumerates the advantages of IT implementation vis-a-vis various initiatives undertaken in the State What are the various initiatives undertaken by the State Government to ease the process of citizen service delivery?

The transfer of teachers had been a major issue, which emerged as a huge issue in the past. But now, introduction of the system of display of their marks on website brought about the much-needed transparency and helped people know as to where they stand.

So, disputes relating to the transfer of teachers have now become almost nil. Feedback from the teachers regarding transfer system has also been quite good.

The payments of pension have now been made online

What has the government been doing to reduce complaints regarding pension distribution?

Earlier, lots of people kept running around government offices for their pension and complained of delays in

pension disbursements. It was due to manual and long process of releasing pensions.

The payments of pension have now been made online. We have implemented an IVR-based system, in which anyone can call and find out whether

ment. How has IT helped in doing that?

We have put all the court orders on a web-based system where one can see the deadlines for their implementation.

Based on these, delays in implementation of the court orders have seen a huge

‘We have introduced a web-based system for tracking the status of work projects. This has helped us track why one is not able to meet the deadline, and we can easily identify and rectify the problem’ his pension has been released or not.

It has helped us in easing the process of pension distribution and the people also don’t have to keep standing in office queues.

Implementing court orders has been always tough for the govern-

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reduction. We are trying regularly to improve that system in the coming days.

We have also introduced a web-based system for tracking the status of work projects. This has helped us track why one is not able to meet the deadline, and we can easily identify and rectify the problem.

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INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

Securing Cyber future India is ranked third in cyber bullying worldwide and 30 per cent of Indian children accessing the Internet have experienced some kind of cyber harm.Cyber bullying is no less damaging than physical assaults in many ways and can have serious consequences. Nidhi Sharma of Elets News Network (ENN) talks to educationists who believe that students should be trained to handle cyber bullying from early age

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T

he world that is increasingly connected has various other technological platforms for victimising people. Many cyber criminals are refraining from physical assaults and going for round the clock bashing via email, social media, instant messaging and other online platforms. Present times face a lack in cyber hygiene and netiquettes, a major issue with educational institutes across India as youngste are the largest victims as well as perpetrato. Cyber bullying is no less damaging that physical assaults in many ways and can have serious consequences.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently made a call at NASSCOM’s silver jubilee in March 2015 to focus on global cyber security challenges. Nasscom stated that the Sector Skill Council, Nasscom and DSCI along with Symantec, will focus on developing five prioritised job roles in cyber security along with a master training programme. In 201415, the Department of IT has set aside `116 crore for cyber security. The country has proposed to set up a national cyber coordination centre (NCCC) with a separate budget of `1,000 crore.

According to a study by telecom operator Uninor, about one-third of school going children surveyed in some states of India have experienced cyber crime including cyber stalking, defamation, hacking and cyber bullying. The Uninor report, which spanned across seven states in India indicates that 30 per cent of Indian children accessing the internet has experienced some kind of cyber harm. This includes cyber bullying, cyber stalking, hacking and defamation.�

The findings are part of the survey of the company conducted across 29 schools covering nearly 10,500 children for its Web Wise programme. Unfortunately, 34 per cent of children rarely speak to their parents about their online activities.

According to a recent report by McAfee, part of Intel Security, half of Indian youth have had some experience with cyber bullying. The Tweens, Teens and Technology 2014 report, which

CYBER BULLYING

Statistics Worldwide 2014

25%

Around

52%

young people cyber bullied

teenagers have experienced repeated bullying via cell or internet

33%

reported that their bullies issued online threats

Often, both bullies and cyber bullies turn to hate speech to victimise their target

95% 55%

of all teens who use social media have witnessed outright bullying

of teens bullied on social media report that others, like them, have ignored the behaviour

Above

80%

of teens regularly use cell phones, making it a common medium for cyber bullying

Courtesy : http://nobullying.com/cyber-bullying-statistics-2014/

examines the online behaviour and social networking habits of Indian tweens and teens, aimed to educate on the impact that risky behaviour has on their privacy, reputation and social media experiences.

According to the research, 50 per cent of the youth in India have had

some experience with cyber bullying (been cyber bullied online or witnessed othe being cyber bullied), out of which one-third (36 per cent) have been cyber bullied themselves. This behaviour was perceived to result in anger and embarrassment, showcasing how online behaviour translates into offline impact.

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37

INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

The study highlights how risky online activity can possibly make them even more susceptible to cyber bullying, substantiated through some of the following statistics.

An eye-opening trend is that half (52 per cent) of India’s youth even access their social media accounts while at school, with tweens (57 per cent) being more connected during school hou than teens (47 per cent). Even though the minimum age to register on to social networking sites like Facebook, Snap

Psychologists are welcoming initiatives by schools’ to launch awareness programmes for cyber crimes chat, Pinterest, Tinder, Tumblr, and Vine is 13 yea for children, 10-12 yea old children report higher daily access to their teen counterparts.

Earlier in 2013, A Telenor GroupBoston Consulting Group study had said

Trusting the unknown in

VIRTUAL WORLD Despite a majority (80 per cent) of Indian youth being are aware that their online activity can affect their identity, 92 per cent have done or posted something risky online. An added fact is that of these, 70 per cent have posted their contact details like email, phone and home address.

53per cent have met someone in person that they first met online. 63per cent of youth do not turn off their location or GPS services across apps, leaving their locations visible to strangers. 64per centeven admit to trying to reinvent their online person as making themselves appear older, creating fake profiles or posting photos that are not their own. Moreover, 46 per cent say they would put themselves in danger to see more engagement, activity on their posts (e.g., more likes, comments, shares or retweets).

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that 134 million Indian children would be active on the Internet by 2017, up from 39.5 million in 2012. This study was done in 12 countries and had showed that Indian children face the wot risk combination of high access and low resilience.

Not long back, India was ranked third in cyber bullying, in youth online behaviour survey, after China and Singapore. According to Microsoft’s ‘Global Youth Online Behaviour Survey’, India ranked third among 25 countries with 53 per cent of respondents (aged 8-17) saying they have been bullied online.

India is only behind China (70 per cent) and Singapore (58 per cent). The study found that more than 50 per cent of Indian children, who surf the Internet, get threatened or are harassed online.

About 45 per cent of parents (respondents) said they teach their children online manne.

Furthermore, students in the city are taking to cyber crimes just for fun or carrying out small acts of revenge on their teache, girl friends and even colleges in which they study. The fact has come up during an investigation into several such incidents recently, police officials said. Morphing pictures and positioning them on social networking sites to defame othe have landed some such students in trouble recently.

Several schools, NGOs and individuals are working towards educating children and young people about the dange of sharing information online, but often find themselves at a loss when confronted with real situations every day.

Pratibha Kohli, Principal, Maharaja Agrasen School, says, “The last decade has seen a spurt in young students becoming a victim of cyber crime. With the information technology boom witnessed in India, accessing the Internet has become plain sailing. But the crux of the matter is, that using the Internet is like two sides of the same coin. While it does provide the students with an ocean of knowledge, it may also make them susceptible and vulnerable to cyber offences. Hence, it is imperative for the schools to make students aware of

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IT laws and educate them about how to stay protected in the virtual world.

Keeping in view the use of Internet by the young generation, the HRD Ministry and the Education Department should make it mandatory to introduce lessons in IT laws and cyber ethics as a part of curriculum in schools.”

Kohli opines “One very important aspect that needs to be addressed is that of plagiarism. Students often copy-paste material from the Internet for their projects and homework, without realising that the act of copying someone else’s

dents about safe Internet practices.”

Sudha Goyal, principal, Scottish International School, shares, “The loss incurred through cyber crimes is irreveible as it may even cost a peon’s life.

Thus, awareness among teenage is the best remedy to prevent them from such offences.”

On the international front, a new computer science GCSE coue, developed by examining body OCR, looks set to bring cyber-security education to secondary school children in the UK. A distinctive feature of the coue is

A study by Wichita in the United States suggested that schools should better educate students about how to engage in online activities without increasing victimisation opportunities work is a serious offence. There is a need to make them aware of copyright laws.”

“Teachers and parents should monitor the activities of their wards on the Internet, especially on social networking sites, and advise children to follow net etiquettes and cyber ethics. In fact, in our school, we hold orientation sessions for the parents where we tell them to keep a watch on the activities of their ward on the Internet. Teachers often have discussions and educate the stu-

that a significant portion of it is dedicated to cyber-security matte, including phishing, malware, firewalls and that old-adage of humans as the weak point in secure systems. Students will also study ethical and legal concerns around computer science technologies, a timely theme in light of FBI claims of a security researcher hacking airplanes.

A study by Wichita in the United States suggested that schools should better educate students about how to en-

gage in online activities without increasing victimisation opportunities. For instance, this study found that participating in online downloading increases fear of computer virus.

So to reduce unnecessary fear students should learn how to carefully choose the source of downloads as well as how to properly scan downloaded files for viruses before activating them on a computer.

Commercial websites should ensure consumer safety by showcasing the mechanisms in place to protect online shoppers from scams.

Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook ought to make a better effort to discourage malicious commenting that could amount to cyber bullying.

Online publishe, such as Amazon Kindle and YouTube should protect intellectual property more effectively.

Meanwhile, psychologists are welcoming initiatives by schools’ move to launch awareness programmes for students. Experts stress that students should not believe anyone online as their profiles might be fake, explaining further that if someone tries to isolate you from your family and friends, or turn you against your parents or make you keep secrets, these are all warning signs.

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39

INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

Learning to chalk the mouse The advent of new age technology has brought a pleothra of innovations in learning. Gone are the days when teachers and professors imparted knowledge to us with a chalk and a blackboard, it is the age of social learning. Some members of the educational sector share their views with Elets News Netwrok (ENN) on the swift learning through social media

T

he new era of technology has replaced these blackboard and chalk with a click of the mouse! Even though the digital learning is being experimented upon, what is fast gaining momentum is the social media networking platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, that are acting as research textbooks for the tech-savvy students.

The concept of learning through the New Media and the conceptulisation of incorporating social media sites as part of learning in the students’ curriculum, for e.g., the Facebook is often seen as a suitable research engine for various groups, forums for engaging students in fruitful debates. But how far can we utilise this tool, as every explosion of information can be either utilised or exploited by the cyber criminals. To optimally use these platforms and thrive digital learning through social media, experts and gatekeepers of the sector are still hoping for best.

As per the McAfee’s Tweens, Teens & Technology Report 2014, a thorough survey across Indian online teenagers aged 8-12 years old and 13-17 years old, comprising respondents from Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune, there is a dangerous trend. Some 70 per cent of online youth in India spend more than five hours on the internet in a normal week. The Internet access is still predominantly desktop based (41 per cent), however, 36 per cent use laptops and 27 per cent use smartphones among the Indian youth, these statistics only alarms the guardians and teachers to initiate necessary steps.

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Necessary dosage of socialising

them. The key is moderation and reaching out to them in a manner they are comfortable with.”

“Social learning enables a broader and new age approach to absorbing information. Through social media you’re Bombarded with able to educate yourself through new information forms and with flexibility, while being Sumit Vohra, Founder, Educaable to share your reviews and opinions tion for All and Social Activist to benefit others. Social media acts as a opines that the concept of the social facilitator to exchange informasocial media is booming in this tion and expertise. I believe, social media fast paced age of technology with has made it faster to absorb information children, youth and even adults engagand provides for a continuous learning ing and leaning onto the digital world environment,” says Zafar Rais, CEO, for minute references.

MindShift Interactive Pvt. Ltd. “Children engaging themselves in India’s youth are constantly connectsocial media is rampant. One of its caused, feels the McAfee’s report. In ative factors being peer pressure terms of social networking but anything done under platforms, Facebook is by supervised attention will far the most popular reap no harm and will site used (93 per cent), ensure protection from followed by YouTube the otherwise cyber (87 per cent) and threats that are loomWhatsApp (79 per ing in the cyberspace. cent). About 10-12 The digital world has Zafar Rais years-old social acaccess to voice ones MindShift

count users report higher Interactive daily access to Snapchat, Pinterest, Tinder, Tumblr, and Vine than their teen counterparts, even though the minimum age to register to these social networking sites is 13 years.

An eye opening trend is that half (52 per cent) of India’s youth even access their social media accounts while at school; 57 per cent being 8-12 years old v/s 47 per cent 13-17 years-old. ▼ Siddarth Bharwani, Director of Jetking, shares, “Social media has enabled us to communicate in ways that may have seemed unorthodox a decade ago. ▼ Today Wikipedia and YouTube are the most preferred resources for students who turn to the internet for information online. Jetking taps Facebook and Twitter for posting updates regarding ▼ upcoming events, opportunities for our students and highlighting their achievements. And we upload lectures by our ▼ faculty on YouTube for students to refer to again in case they miss something in class. We realise today’s students are the internet generation and social media definitely helps us in connecting with

opinions and thoughts to the numerous in the cyber-

world. The future of digital learning I believe is the IB cur riculum, which is widely accepted abroad, where students are Sumit Vohra required to do Founder, Education more of research for All work for their subjects.” Vohra added.

Youth often share what would be considered private information publicly, both intentionally and unintentionally.

The report shows that despite majority (80 per cent) of Indian youth being aware that their online activity can affect their identity, out of 90 per cent who have done or posted something risky online, 70 per cent have posted their contact details like email, phone, home address.

“The acceptance however of children engaging on social media platforms is still lacking as they are bombarded with negative perceptions of this space.

The learning however is that children

Stark Reality of the

VIRTUAL SPACE Two-thirds (66 per cent) of youth in India say they feel more accepted on social media than they do in real life. 72 per cent feel important or popular when they receive a lot of “likes” on the photos posted of themself on social media.

Keeping up to the social pressure, 64 per cent even admit to have tried reinventing themselves online by trying to appear older or creating a fake profile. Moreover, 46 per cent say they would put themselves in danger to see more engagement/ activity on their posts (e.g., more likes, comments, shares or retweets).

While cyber-bullying continues to represent a serious problem for youth, the 2014 survey found 57 per cent of youth would not know what to do if they were harassed or bullied online.

Youth share a variety of fears regarding risks they face online, including: fear their privacy will be compromised (26 per cent) and fear of being hacked (23 per cent). Notably, these fears are greater than the fear of being cyber-bullied (18 per cent) or unpopular (12 per cent).

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41

INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

According to a study by Go-Globe, social networking accounts for 28 per cent of all media time spent online are not guided properly into the world of the internet and therefore there is a gap between the needs of a parent and a child in the online world. With the internet community beginning to accept that children have different needs when it comes to social media, there is change in content that is more responsible and beneficial to the child. Taking this first step in creating responsible content for kids in the online world not only enhances access to digital learning, but also ensures quality content for the child,” informs Monish Ghatalia, founder,worldoo.com.

“The way we engage on the internet has changed over the past few years. It is no longer just a highway of information, but has also become a source of entertainment, engagement with friends as well as a platform of work. When we are engaging with so many different things online, our children are also catching up with the content that we consume,” Ghatalia says.

According to a study by Go-Globe, social networking accounts for 28 per cent of all media time spent online. How can we then deny that social media has no benefits at all? Yes, for every activity that we send our child to, we ensure that they derive some learning experience from it.

In the same way, when social media content is directed towards children, it ensures that the amount of engagement is high and conversational in nature that can help the child come back to learn something more, adds Ghatalia.

However, a disturbing fact reveals that the youth are becoming more trusting of the virtual world to familiarise themselves with unknown people, in spite of being aware that it is risky.

Some 63 per cent of youth do not turn off their location or GPS services across apps, leaving their locations visible to strangers, and only 46 per cent enable their privacy settings on their social networking profiles to protect their content.

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would be able to express their ideas more freely that leads to learning, he adds.

RK Sharma, Director, Ahlcon Public School, however feels, “The world of social media is very good for digital learning, if used constructively, the platform will be beneficial in holistic learning, For the better or worse? apart from academics and can also garGhatalia speaks in favour of how social ner behavioural aspect of the youth as media has changed digital learning for well. Starting from the primary to the the better. higher education it depends on “The rules of engagement with the the teacher on how they online world have completely impart the neceschanged in today’s day and sary and the corage. The internet has been rect knowledge accepted by both parents on the students and teachers alike who that will progress have identified the crucial the learning in role that it plays in exthem.” panding the horizons of a Kalpesh Banker Founder and child’s learning.”

Managing Partner, Kids want to imitate Optimum EduShine Advisory what their parents and their research tool Group peers do, so if there is a large numApart from interaction, ber of comments on a particular topic, these networking sites have they will also feel encouraged to join gained popularity because of its social the discussion and share their opinion. method of attaining necessary research, This cross exchange of ideas may not be while engaging people and so on. possible in a classroom set up if a child Kalpesh Banker, Founder and Manis shy, but in the online world, a child aging Partner, EduShine Advisory

Virtual Mindspace: Has social media paved in way for a plethora of virtual tools that kids may or may not comprehend with

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Group, feels, “Digital is certainly a major part in learning in terms of social media, it is the future as independent forums provide a platform for the students to interact likewise.”

“A curated social network can be created, gap in personal and learning oriented is the drawback in terms of adoption for the university or higher education sector, their administration is apprehensive in the adoption process.

Students use Kora, Youtube for learning generally and social media. My probability is higher and my learning is higher than my classmate. My classmate will contribute equally then social media can contribute optimally. Groups of research like the Gate research and academia are gaining popularity among the students because it is the new generation learning and is considered as the mandatory thing for research among the students.

One cannot stop the coming generation in utilising the social media as it has penetrated the current generations’ mindset,” he says.

But, keeping tab on the numerous sites is also essential. “They need guidance for sure, for social media networks like Facebook, cyber crime is prevalent with cases of hacking and all. These predominant issues should be made aware for the students as they lure you into the web world easily,” Says Banker.

As per the McAfee’s report, despite significant efforts to discourage cyberbullying, and its negative effects, twothirds (66 per cent) of youth in India have had some experience with cyberbullying.

The explosion of social networking finds a parallel in the spread of Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs). Digital learning today is essentially an online social activity, with learners joining communities and studying together, unhampered by distance or time. As social media changes, from broad-based networks and unfiltered social sharing to perhaps the resurgence of vertical Whistling Woods Internanetworks and micro-local tional, “Social media has networks, so will digital become part of life and learning- MOOCs are therefore it has not overhyped and underonly found its way whelming as a learninto curriculum and ing technology, and syllabi but also into stand to make way for learning.”

Rahul Puri emerging social Students can get Sea of change Head-Academics, learning platinstantaneous feedEven though the conWhistling Woods International forms, which back on ideas and gain cept is gaining momay combine access to wider reaching mentum, it still has mobile technology, markets across the world. This scope of change peer-to-peer learning, allows a wide range of learning opporwhile adapting to virtual presence and fotunities that teachers can develop which the nuances of cused learner communiare practical and have real world results, new-age learning. ties. So, social media and says Puri.

Nitin Putcha, Nitin Putcha digital learning are inter“It’s here to stay and we use it extenCEO, ITM Group of CEO, ITM Group of Institutions twined, and someday may be a sively in our teaching and practical’s at Institutions, says, “Both single platform.”

Whistling Woods and will continue to social media and digital Opines Rahul Puri, Head-Academics, develop these techniques,” he added. learning are in a state of volatile change.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

43

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW INTERVIEW

Uttarakhand eyeing Private Varsities

Uttarakhand, known as the education hub of the country faces the challenge of last-mile connectivity, but the State Government is determined to overcome it at the earliest, so that all schools and colleges get connected through ICT. The Government is infact focusing on PPP model and wants the private sector to come to Uttarakhand to set up private institutions, says Radhika Jha, Secretary, Higher Education, Government of Uttarakhand, in an exclusive interview with Gautam Debroy of Elets News Networks (ENN) What is the overall scenario of education sector in Uttarakhand?

Uttarakhand as a state is very favourably placed. It is the State, which is actually known as the education hub of

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the country. It’s a state, which has several premier educational institutions.

Whether it is the IAS Academy, Military Academy, Doon School or any other school, our government is keen to lever-

age advantage of such institutions.

In terms of our people and their temperaments also, we have a lot of interest towards education. There are some great personalities, who hailed from Ut-

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mined to accomplish that, so that all our schools and colleges get connected through ICT. In higher education, we have a good programme called EDUSAT. Through this system, our teachers can deliver live lectures to a number of colleges, even if no teacher is present at a particular time in a given college. Now the State Government is in a mood to review the EDUSAT, so that each and every college in the remotely-located areas can avail the facility through the webbased classes.

tarakhand. So, our government wants to make Uttarakhand the hub of higher and school education. The government is also taking steps to encourage private institutions to invest in Uttarakhand. If the level of education is higher, the overall growth of a state follows.

What is the extent of use of ICT in the education sector of Uttarakhand?

We have not done so well in ICT, as we could have done. In schools, we have made a good start in terms of upper primary and secondary education. We have computer labs in lots of our schools. But we have lots of problems in terms of electricity, infrastructure, etc. There are several areas in our state which are remotely located. But our government is very keen. Our Chief Secretary reviews the situation every fortnight, along with the Secretary-IT, Secretary-School Education and Secretary-Higher Education to explore the possibilities of taking the IT infrastructure to the remotest corner of the State.

The last-mile connectivity is, in fact, a challenge for us, but we are deter-

In what other ways the PPP model can benefit the education scenario in the State?

We are in fact focusing on PPP model.

When we talk of facilitating a private partner, we want a private partner to come to Uttarakhand. We want the private partners to also look at our local needs in terms of employment opportunities, in terms of demand and supply, etc. We encourage them and facilitate them, because if you have good educational institutes and job opportunities in your own state, people will not migrate.

Apart from ensuring development, we also want to arrest migration, we also want the state’s economy to grow.

How can private players play a role in developing the education sector of Uttarakhand?

Uttarakhand is one of the pioneering states in this sector as far as encouraging private universities to come here is concerned. We have a single-window

clearance system available for private universities. We have given lots of relaxation to the private players interested in setting up educational institutions in the hills. There is a high density of these institutions in the plain areas, but there is lack of such institutions in the upper reaches per say. So, the government is pro-actively encouraging the private players to come to the State.

In fact, we do it in a collaborative way. If any private player comes, we make them understand the vision of our government, so that they could adjust to our aspirations. We always encourage private players. However, we make sure that if a private institution comes up, it must give priority to admission of the local people.

Does Uttarakhand see a large number of students going to other states to pursue higher studies?

This is true. In fact, we have a peculiar situation; people from all across the country come to Uttarakhand to get school education, as we have some very good schools in Mussoorie, Dehradun and Nainital. But for college education, our students go to places like Delhi, Mumbai, etc. This is really a matter of concern for the government.

We want to maintain that edge which we have in terms of school education. So our government has decided to set up very good universities. We have the University of Energy and Petroleum Studies, which is one of the finest universities in the energy sector in the country and has very good placements. We have Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya, which is doing very good in its domain. We need to have many more specialised universities, so that there is fewer outward movement of students.

We, in fact, want to attract people from neighbouring states and countries to our educational institutions.

Uttarakhand boasts of the Doon University, which is based on the pattern of JNU. It has very good schools of language and management. It has good school of life sciences as well. But we also want private sector participation.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

45

INTERVIEW

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OPINION

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Changing literacy dynamics To ensure quality education for the future of India, the government sought to innovate literacy policy

T

he National Policy on Education was framed in 1986 and modified in 1992. Since then, several changes have taken place that calls for a revision of the Policy. The Government of India would now, like to bring out a National Education Policy to meet the changing dynamics of the quality education, innovation and research, aiming to make India a knowledge superpower by equipping its students with the necessary skills and knowledge and to eliminate the crunch manpower in the field of science, technology, academics and industry.

The Ministry of Human Resource and Development website talks about ‘Themes and Questions for Policy Consultation on School Education. The entire document highlights the changes in elementary education, improving the drop out ratio in the school, strengthening of vocational education, reforming school examination systems, revamping teacher education for quality teachers, accelerating rural literacy with special emphasis on women, SCs, STs and Minorities through adult education and National Open Schooling system to ensure proper education system in the country.

Ensuring learning outcomes As per the document, despite improvements in access and retention in elementary education, the learning outcomes for a majority of children continue to be an area of serious concern. According to a research, children are not learning the basic skills during their schooling.

Many children who reach grade V cannot even read and do simple arithmetic calculations. The states are implement-

ing reforms such as early grade reading, writing, comprehension and maths programmes in conjunction with defining and measuring learning outcomes. The NCERT has completed three rounds of National Level Achievements Survey for Classes –III, V, & VII/VIII. States have been given funds to conduct state-level achievements surveys.

Extending outreach With Universal Elementary education becoming a reality, near universalisation of secondary education is the next logical step. Further, universalisation of quality secondary education implies creating secondary schooling provisions of a defined standard irrespective of the location and management of the institution to accomodate all those eligible grade VIII and grade X students, who are willing to participate in the secondary and higher secondary education.

A wide range of centrally sponsored schemes are being run by different secondary school institutions and bodies so as to ensure greater geographical coverage, social and gender inclusion and use of ICT for quality enhancement.

Emphasising vocational learning A knowledgable and skilled workforce is seen as the most important human capital required for the development of a country. Both vocational education and skill development are known to increase productivity of the individuals, profitability of employers and national growth. Vocational education aims to develop skilled manpower through diversified courses to meet the requirement, primarily in the unorganised sector and to inculcate self-employment

skills in children through a large number of diversified vocational courses.

Only 7 to 10 per cent of population is engaged in formal sector of economy.

The development of vocational education will provide skilled labour force in the informal sector which would further enhance the productivity.

Reforming examinations Examination reform that focus on problem solving, critical thinking and reasoning skills are critical to improving quality at the elementary and secondary levels. Such reforms will change the teaching and learning processes. CBSE has introduced a wide ranging examination reforms in schools affiliated to it, like for eg the class X board exams has been made optional, a system of grading in place of marks has been introduced.

Comprehensive Evaluation has been strengthened so that the students are accessed on an ongoing basis for their holistic development. State Boards have also made efforts to update curriculum and impose examination systems.

Quality teaching Quality of teachers has been a major cause of worry in the education system and one of the basic pre-requisites to improve quality. Competence of teachers and their motivation is crucial for enhancing it. Several initiatives are being taken for addressing the shortage in number of teachers, shortages of secondary school teachers in mathematics, science and languages, improving the pre-service teachers and in-service teachers professional development, enhancing the status of teaching as a profession.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

47

INTERVIEW O PINION

Enhanced technology encourage duping?

About a dozen major question paper leaks reported recently has affected lakhs of students across India. The latest scandal of the hi-tech cheating in the All India Pre-Medical Test, resulted in cancellation of the entire exam by the Supreme Court, shaking the moral ground of the academic world, and compelling experts to opine that cheating in India has gone beyond personal ethics to practice such a crime through enhanced use of technology.

H

ere is a disturbing reality.

In the past one year, about a dozen of major question paper leaks have been reported, affecting lakhs of students across India. From the latest All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) to the Uttar Pradesh Combined Premedical Test in 2014 and Jamia Millia’s BTech and BDS courses entrance exams, cheating has organised itself into an industry.

CCTVs, mobile jammers, armed guards, India is taking a host of measures to stop cheating in examinations. Flying squads with police protection, surveillance cameras are deployed to stop students from copying, but still, it remains rampant.

The recent scandal of All India PreMedical and Pre-Dental Entrance Test (AIPMT) shook the education industry, and an uncertainty prevails in uprooting this viral problem. The Supreme Court cancelled this year’s AIPMT after some tech-savvy students attempted to

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cheat in the examination by getting answers through electronic devices, which were smuggled into the test centres across the country.

In today’s digital times, high-technology forging strategies are mostly being misused by the students, and it seems like a cakewalk for them too, with numerous ideas and several electronic goods available on websites, providing a fodder for the criminal bent of mind.

For example, the ‘Spy Bluetooth Glasses Earpiece Set’, is a product that markets itself at users who want to “pass exams without a hassle, and conduct successful business negotiations overtaking competitors or simply strike others by their knowledge…” In fact, the company has offices in several major Indian cities. Another hi-tech device is a wireless earpiece, which can be placed into your auditory canal for receiving a signal through your cell phone for a stretch of five hours, an ideal device for any agent lurking outside the school with a copy of the question paper.

In fact, these products are known to be extremely popular and in demand among the desperate students who wish to just crack the exam by hook or by crook, resulting in finishing of the stocks fast.

However, this does not mean that the traditional mass cheating is out of fashion or authorities are not part of the these unfair plots.

There have been instances in various states where students resorted to violence when the control machinery such as flying squads tried to stop them from indulging in unfair practices of passing examination.

Furthermore, cheating has become so institutionalised that even the rates are fixed. The situation is worse as students take plunge in committing suicide if they are unable to clear the examinations, like consuming poison and set themselves on fire. States like Uttar Pradesh score high on being notorious for such high percentage of such institutionalised cheating.

In 1991, the then Education Minister of the State that Rajnath Singh had instituted the Anti-Copying Act that made cheating a non-bailable offence. While all states have legislations pertaining to examination malpractices, this is the only one specific to ‘copying’ from another student’s paper.

Today, experts claim that cheating has long gone beyond the issue of personal ethics, and gained a prominent position in the system. Today, cheating is a bailable offence. There is an ardent need of a mechanism which needs to be put into practice to stop cheating at such a large scale. The question still remains -- should we blame our education system, which has stooped down on a level just to help gain marks and get a degree through unfair practices?

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Event

Month

Place

Vertical

July - August - September, 2015

Healthcare Summit Rajasthan

July

Jaipur

Health

PSU Awards & Summit

July August August

New Delhi New Delhi New Delhi

Governance Governance Education

Maharashtra Cooperative Summit

August

Mumbai

BFSI

September September September

Punjab Bhopal Mumbai

Governance Governance Infrastructure

4th Smart City

World Education Summit Knowledge Exchange

Smart City Madhya Pradesh Elets Port Summit

FIPS

October - November - December, 2015

eMeghalaya Cloud Gov

Secure IT Maharashtra Knowledge Exchange eIndia

eJharkhand

World Education Summit Knowledge Exchange

School Leadership Summit eUttar Pradesh

October October October October October November November November December December December

New Delhi Shillong New Delhi Mumbai Srinagar Hyderabad Ranchi Dubai Port Blair New Delhi Lucknow

January - February - March, 2016

BFSI Leadership Summit eOdisha / Smart City eBihar

Healthcare Leaders’ Forum Secure IT

Smart City Rajasthan Knowledge Exchange

January January February February February February March

Mumbai Bhubaneswar Patna Mumbai New Delhi Jaipur Shimla

BFSI Governance Governance Governance Governance Governance Governance Education Governance Education Governance

BFSI Governance Governance Health Governance Governance Governance

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

49

START-UPS

Cementing the learning gap To identify the distress areas in schools while bridging the gap between the teachers, students and parents, C-Link, a cloud-based solution by LearnOn Technology Solutions provides a platform to integrate into the existing pedagogy, ensuring teachers to spend optimum time on students, says Sameer Ahmad, CEO, LearnOn Technology Could you brief us on the reason behind starting LearnOn Technology Solutions?

As parents, we always wanted to be more engaged in our children’s education than what the schools were able to provide. We realised that while most teachers wanted to really provide individual attention to students, they were loaded with a lot of mundane and administrative work that didn’t quite add any value to the students or teachers.

Classroom sizes were also another issue because with the limited time the teacher had in the classroom it was simply impossible to identify concept understanding for every student in the classroom itself.

While the technology available today did provide a lot of content for the teacher to use in the classroom, there was no way to identify learning levels and customise and distribute content-based on those learning levels without changing the way the classroom was taught.

Therefore, we have developed C-Link a cloud-based learning platform that can be seamlessly integrated into the existing pedagogy, automating a lot of the administrative work freeing up teachers time so they can spend more time preparing learning strategies and plans based on each student’s learning level.

The product is supported by powerful analytics that will allow teachers, students, parents and management to understand various facets of a child’s learning. Teachers can now start to identify the specific needs of every student through C-Link, strengthening the bond between the teacher and the student.

What were the difficulties encountered on the ground level?

The schools we spoke to were all very much interested in implementing our product however, a major concern in getting schools to move to cloud-based platforms are the availability of reliable internet connections in general.

What is the market size of the services offered in India at present?

Experts have pegged the Indian education market to be 5.9 trillion in 2014-15 and

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growing fast.

What are the major benefits for organisations adopting your solutions?

C-Link benefits all stakeholders involved in the learning process. Teachers can easily identify learning gaps in the classrooms, distribute customised study material based on specific learning levels.

The automated assessment evaluations will free up a lot of teacher time and they can focus on developing learning strategies and holistic development of students.

Students will be more engaged because they will start receiving study material catered to their personal learning levels, no more heavy school bags since all the books can now be accessed from the tablet or the laptop, students will start taking ownership of their learning as reports will help them understand their strengths and areas of improvement.

Parents can continuously engaged in their child’s learning and development through the automated reports, letting them know what was taught in class, what their child’s learning levels are and how they have been progressing.

Class diaries will be a thing of the past as teachers and parents can easily communicate through the notifications module.

Parents can come better prepared for discussions with teachers with regards to their child’s overall development.

For management, C-Link creates a

platform to share best practices among teachers, over time the school will create a knowledge database of notes and question banks that will be of immense value for the teachers and students in the future. C-Link facilitates to create a more engaged teacher-student-parent community which will bode well for the brand of the school. Implementing C-Link will provide an opportunity to explore increasing class sizes without impacting quality because a lot of the teacher time will now be free.

What is the vision of your company for next two years?

Our vision is to revolutionise the way technology is used in the classrooms by ensuring the educators are equipped with solutions that allow them to provide the individual attention that every child deserves. In the next two years, we aim to implement C-Link in 100 plus schools in at least 50 plus countries globally.

How you can differentiate your services from competitors?

C-Link is a cloud-based platform that will work on any device (laptop, tablet or a desktop). Unlike existing services, C-Link does not require students to purchase a new device to use the product.

We are encouraging schools to allow students to bring their own device.

Linking learning: C-Link benefits all stakeholders involved in the learning process. Teachers can easily identify learning gaps in the classrooms, distribute customised study material based on specific learning levels. The automated assessment evaluations will free up a lot of teacher time and they can focus on developing learning strategies and holistic development of students.

We believe that teaching methodologies followed by different schools are unique, therefore, C-Link provides an open platform allowing teachers to easily create their own content and reuse existing content available at the school.

Our analytics will lead the path of making the methodologies even better since now the decisions can be based on data.

What are the ways of engaging the customers with you? Any case study you wish toshare?

Our training team regularly meets with teachers and the school management to help them understand the information from the various reports and how to maximise the product features to improve the learning experience for students. These sessions also provide feedback that we use to enhance product features.

What are the major stakeholders and sectors you are focusing on?

We are currently focusing on the K-12 segment.

What are the various initiatives taken by your organisation to emerge as a market leader?

We are constantly looking at ways to add features to the product that will make it easier for teachers and students to use. This is done through discussions with teachers and school management.

JMR Infotech was brought in as a key stakeholder in LearnOn to leverage their global footprint, they have clientele in 50 plus countries and a direct presence in 22 pluscountries. With such an extensive sales coverage, we will be able to take this solution globally in a short span of time.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

51

INTERVIEW S TART-UPS

Making enrollment easy To ease the admission process while assuring placement to their wards to a right school, Rajan Arora, CEO, SchoolAdmissions.in talks to Elets News Network (ENN) about his new platform, SchoolAdmissions.in, that helps streamline the admission procedures of schools and also help parents choose an institution without missing their office.

Can you brief us on the reason behind starting SchoolAdmissions.in.

One of the major challenges I as a parent faced during the admission of my own son few years back has brought my life to a complete standstill and confusion for months. There is no central resource to help parents across the country facing the same problems. To aid parents to choose from choices under one platform led us to start SchoolAdmissions.in What is the market size of the services offered in India at present?

Around 40 million kids take new admissions in schools every year, out of which 38 per cent enter private schools and this figure is increasing every year. They are our target group.

What are the major benefits for organisations adopting your solutions?

We can see increase in admission inquiries, applications and admissions by spreading awareness about schools, pedagogy and reach out to a larger target audience (parents) who are members of SchoolAdmissions.in and are looking for a right school for their children.

Our solution is a one-stop solution for parents for school research, admission information, applications and

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results. Instead of spending months doing everything themselves, they can simply use SchoolAdmissions. in to manage the entire admissions process of their child without leaving their home or taking off from work for weeks.

We have joined hands with Corporates to provide our services to their employees. The organisations can ensure that their staff is not stressed or absent during the admission season thus leading to no work loss for the organisation. The entire admissions process will be managed by SchoolAdmissions.in for both, entry level nursery admissions or senior class admissions for employees moving to a new city.

What is the vision of your company for next two years?

Our vision is to reach out to every nook and corner of India and help millions of parents make the right informed decision related to their child’s school education and admission, whether it is for nursery class or K-12 admissions.

What are the various methods to increase the visibility of your organisation?

We are focusing on strategic partnerships, social media and presence at relevant events.

How you can differentiate your

Photo Courtesy: skymetweather.com

digitallearning.eletsonline.com

Around 40 million kids take new admissions in schools every year

services from competitors?

We provide complete school admissions support from verified research to results including personalised admissions management and counselling for parents as compared to our competitors who are more focused on generating unverified content to increase page views. Our objective is to find the right school for a child and make the school admissions process as smooth as possible.

What are the ways of engaging the customers with you? Can you share a case study?

We had recently launched nursery admissions helpline and have completed nursery admissions management service for parents in Delhi-NCR. An interesting case study is of a parent who had just got transferred back to India and wanted us to manage the nursery admissions process for his daughter as

Getting it right: We provide complete school admissions support from verified research to results including personalised admissions management and counselling for parents as compared to our competitors who are more focused on generating unverified content to increase page views well as mid-session admission for his elder son in 4th standard. Our team completely assisted him even though he and his family were still in Canada by taking over the complete admission process for his both kids. We constantly engaged with schools in Gurgaon for 3 months and helped him secure admission for both the kids in the same school.

What are the major stakeholders and sectors you are focusing on?

Major stakeholders are playschools, schools, parents, corporates and the

government. Our focus sector is education especially the K-12 Segment.

What are the various initiatives taken by your organisation to emerge as a market leader?

We believe in constant innovation, right partnerships, use of technology and maximum focus on customer satisfaction as the key to market leadership.

We are taking various initiatives in this regard and would soon be making some announcements related to new product launches.

digitalLEARNING / July 2015

53

INTERVIEW S TART-UPS

Look-out for a Bright Future Aiming to cater to the internship and placement requirements of colleges and universities nationwide, Internkafe.com provides window of opportunity for students who come from small states. Amit Sohal, Founder, Internkafe.com shares with Elets News Network (ENN), how his company is connecting with colleges and universities situated in remote areas to help the students get the right job Give us the brief of the various reasons behind starting Internkafe.

While doing MBA from Central University of Himachal Pradesh, we realised that for students like us, who come from a humble background and do not move out of their home towns for higher education, getting industry exposure is very difficult. The main reason behind starting InternKafe was to provide a window of opportunity for students who come from such parts of the nation where industrial exposure is comparatively low, but have the caliber if not more, equal to those who study in metro cities. The bottom line is to bring the industry closer to those who have the employability skills.

What are the various difficulties and hurdles encountered in doing business on ground level?

We try to connect with the colleges and universities situated in remote areas of the nation, therefore, we face a huge challenge of connectivity and how to spread awareness. Although we try to overcome these challenges through offline promotions and awareness workshops, still such difficulties remain and our team works hard to overcome these. There are times when students do not join the internship after being selected. I think that in the service sector, the biggest challenge is to predict human behaviour.

What is the market size of the services offered by you in

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respective field. On the other hand, for the companies as our client, we focus on bringing to them the best of employable talent from different corners of the nation.

India at present?

We aim at catering the internship and placement requirements of colleges and universities nationwide. In a short period of time we have managed to make our presence felt in many states and cities like, Himachal Pradesh, Ranchi, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Punjab and Chennai. Our main focus will always be students in Tier I and Tier II cities who are comparatively less privileged in terms of exposure than their counterparts in metro cities.

What are the major benefits for organisations and individuals adopting your solutions?

As our tagline reads - “your perfect internship assistant”, for students adopting our solutions we aim at brining to them internship and placement offers from the best of organisations in their

What is the vision of your company for next two years?

Well, it can be said that our team is pretty ambitious for a rookie, but it’s the enthusiasm of our team that keeps us going. In the next two years, we intend to connect with at least 60 per cent of students of the country covering Tier I, Tier II and Tier III cities. Our special focus will always be the students belonging to remote and interior areas so that they are sensitised to the corporate industry during their study period itself.

What are the various methods you are using to increase the visibility of your organisation?

Ours is a young company formed just a year ago, with a vision “to be the best information junction for aspirants and one stop total marketing solution for educational Institutes and connecting the students to corporate world.” Our team members consist of young dedicated people from varied background who work remotely and are connected virtually. In order to spread awareness about our services, we are consistently active on social media. We also resort to offline advertisement through print media and education fairs.

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digitalLEARNING / July 2015

55

INTERVIEW S PECIAL FEATURE

Easing out payment vows smartly Traditionally parents and students have used the banking channels or ‘Over the Counter’ methods to remit school fees and college fees. In this digital age, where around Rs 3 lakh crore annual transaction happens in the education sector, it is imperative that educational institutes elevate online platforms for fee management. Nidhi Sharma of Elets News Network (ENN) talks to industry experts to find out the scope of profits for the target market as well as service providers

I

ndia is one of the world’s largest education markets.

Around `3 lakh crore annual transactions happen in the education sector. Ironically, unlike sectors like retail, travel, entertainment and food, the level of automation and e-commerce penetration is abysmally low in this sector. It’s astonishing that even the most renowned universities, colleges and schools in India are still collecting their fee in physical mode wherein the payers have to face issues like geographical constraints to travel to institutes, have to stand in long queues and encounter slow and manual accounting. Thousands of schools, colleges, universities and coaching classes across the country have similar arrangements for fee mobilisation. Millions of payers have to face hassle in the current scenario.

Experts opine that today the fee management market in the education sector requires an umbrella solution in terms of online payments. However, in order to integrate payment gateways, educational institutes have to incur a cost in upgrading their websites and technical upgradation.

According to Ankur Sharma, owner of White Sepal Services, which runs feepal, the online platform for payment of fees for educational institutions, says, “The other hurdles is trust deficit, inertia and status quo in the educational institutes.

Many educational institutes appreciate

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the value addition and technological improvement that Feepal brings, but are reluctant to adopt it because of trust deficit and the conventional approach of the decision makers, but now with about 100 educational institutes in our kitty the trust deficit factor is gradually getting diluted.”

In India, there are about 1.4 million schools, and 50 thousand institutes out of these offer higher education. In terms of volume the size of Indian education market is about 3 lakh crore per year. The re-

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quirement for fee management service providers is to tap this market with focus on the education sector. With preschools, schools, colleges, universities and coaching classes, the target audience is enormous in terms of numbers.

Furthermore, 21st century India is bestowed with favourable demographic dividend. As per census 2011 the population below 25 years of age in India is about 55 crore. With literacy rate of 74 per cent, there are around 35 to 40 crore students in various educational institutes across the country. About 13 crore of these are in urban areas where internet penetration is high. This target market includes students in preschools, schools, colleges and coaching classes.

Traditionally parents and students have used the banking channels or ‘Over the Counter’ methods to remit school fees and college fees. While these channels serve the purpose of collecting school fees and college fees, it does put an enormous amount of burden on the administrative personnel of the institution for reconciliation of payments.

On the other hand the long queues at Bank Teller Counters, which inevitably operate only on “working” days of the week, thereby forcing working parents to seek a leave of absenteeism to ensure fees are remitted.

Over the years new age banking channels like “Net Banking” have eased this by providing a facility for transferring funds electronically. Though this has eased the burden on the parents’ side, the administrative side continues to put-up with long hours of reconciliation efforts. This entire school fees collection or college fees collection can be a pleasant experience.

With today’s technological advances when people transact millions over stock exchanges, it should be possible for a school fees or a college fees to be collected through an online fees mode that provides the following: The opportunity lies in the growing size of the education sector - it was worth `3.83 trillion in the financial year 2013, according to rating agency CARE Ltd., Atom Technologies Ltd and Feecounter Online Services Pvt. Ltd are two other examples of service providers in this area.

The trend is more prominent in Tier 1 cities with the National Capital Region leading the pack, followed by cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore.

Gaurav Zutshi, CEO, MoneyOn Mobile, says, “It took 30 years for banks to move to being a digital economy. While it is not an uncontested space, security is paramount when it comes to digital platform for making payments. Therefore, providing bank grade security becomes indispensable.”

“There are competing solutions and both time and money cost can be avoided by having digital platform. I don’t think there is any huge pain which the students or parents are facing presently, so elevating to the digital platform for fee payment will take its own adoption cycle. We are in the early cycle of giving these digital payment option to parents. It has to be done in a collaborative approach

Growing online fee payment More than half of the country’s 1.2 billion population falls in the target market for education and hence it widens the scope of growth for the online fee payments industry, says Kumar Karpe, CEO, TechProcess Payment Services Kindly throw light on the Indian education sector as far as fee payment through the usage of technology is concerned?

India is an important educational center in the global education industry. Using credit cards to pay education fees has picked up in India. The repayment to the card issuers can be done in lump sum or through equated monthly installments (EMIs). The trend is new and the facility is available at many (but not all) pre-schools, higher secondary schools, colleges, universities and ancillary education service providers such as coaching institutes.

What are the stumbling blocks hampering the growth in this arena?

The major challenge in adopting technology and digitising payments solutions in the education space is the lack of awareness and readiness towards a change. Moreover, technical complexity makes digital implementation in education difficult. Scarcity of relevant technology due to the lack of infrastructure in the suburban and rural areas also poses hindrance towards implementation. Government policies on education need to improve along with the upcoming technologies and advancements in the education space.

How large is the Indian market size as far as fee payment through online portals is concerned?

India’s online education market size is expected to touch US$ 40 billion by 2017. India has almost around 439 million students. Education sector is a wide with exponential growth patterns. This expansion is creating a major need of technological advancements in terms of digitalisation. More than half of the country’s 1.2 billion population falls in the target market for education and hence it widens the scope of growth for the online fees payments industry.

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with service provider and schools”, Zutshi added.

Speaking on the market size and outlook, he said that it is definitely a big market.“There are around 5000 million students and even if each is giving around `1000 – `2000 fees per month, one can easily do the maths to see that the market is very promising. A lot of transaction is happening in cash, but if school gives incentive to pay fees by a digital mode, there will be a change.

It will be a win-win situation for both where parents will also save a lot of hassles through the online mode and get regular reminders and updates, and will have access to entire transaction history and the educational institutes will be getting the funds in time to manage their enormous infrastructure.”

Sridhar Pandurangiah, Chief Technology Officer, Sastra Technologies, which provides fee collection solutions on the cloud, says: “We have come a long way in electronic fee collections since 2010. We have seen social institutions move their Fee and Subscriptios to the cloud. People expect convenience and choice of payment methods when choosing a payment aggregator. However, The education sector currently is at a very nascent stage when it comes to electronic fee collection. We are likely to see traction in this space when Banks offer payment gateway facilities to them by announcing tieups with payment aggregators . This is because the current banking infrastructure like IMPS, NEFT is designed for Bank to Bank transfers and the education sector needs achoice of payment modes irrespective of their current Banking relationship. This is offered by the Payment aggregators like ATOM, CC Avenue, citrus, EBS, Pay U, PayU Money, PayTM etc.”

Furthermore, in terms of technology and products, fee management companies are looking to move beyond the core fee aggregation and have a vision to sell other education related products and services on there portal such as summer camps for students, school uniforms, online courses, online test series among others.

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Online fee payment market is huge More institutes moving to online fee collection and parents opting to admit their kids in the institutes providing the facility, informs Vikrant Khorana, Senior Vice President, PayUmoney

Kindly throw light on the Indian education sector as far as fee payment through the usage of technology is concerned?

Indian education sector has seen a tremendous change in last one decade. The most noticeable out of them is the conventional way through which fee has been paid till now. The introduction of online fee payment has helped the parents immensely as most parents are working these days and physical depositing fee becomes a point of concern for them. This has already lead to more institutes moving to online fee collection and parents opting to admit their kids in the institutes providing the facility. PayUmoney has helped the education sector immensely, especially in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. We have empowered over 6000 educational institutes across India till date.

What are the stumbling blocks hampering the growth in this arena?

Lack of education towards online payments is one block. A majority of Indian consumers are still not aware of the benefits of the online payments. Online payments are still confined majorly to metropolitan cities, regional to an extent and almost non-existent in the rural areas.

How large is the Indian market size as far as fee payment through online portals is concerned?

The market for online fee payment in India is huge. The number of education institutes which have shifted to this payment module in recent times is large.

Almost all private education institutes are opting for it and a major chunk or government institutes have also started following the trend. As an estimate there are over 18 lakh educational institutes including government and private in India which is a huge number itself.

What is the future of fee payment through online payments in the country?

With initiatives such as digital India by government of India, the online payment industry has just seen the tip of the iceberg. The impact is going to be at such a level that online payments will become a necessity for any sector, be it education or any other. It has already started playing a major role in the success of any business, with even the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) opting for online payments apart from big merchants. PayUmoney alone empowers over 1 lakh SMEs who have integrated us to grow their business.

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