digitalLEARNING MARCH 2013

Asia’s premier Monthly Magazine on ICT in Education

volume 9

I issue 03 I march 2013 I ISSN 0973-4139 I ` 75

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virtual labs

Innovation in education takes off

digital LEARNING

world education summit 2013

digital LEARNING Prof (Dr) Louis Vernal Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Goa

Prof (Dr) Sandeep Sancheti Manipal University, Jaipur

S Harihara Sudhan Kovai Public School, Karumathampatti

Sindu Aven Zee Learn

Prof (Dr) SD Agashe College of Engineering Pune

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Contents

ISSN 0973-4139

volume 09 issue 03 march 2013

08 Feature

Robo Calling!

Pragya Gupta, Elets News Network (ENN)

24

32

58

S Harihara sudhan Kovai Public School, Karumathampatti

Sindu Aven Head – Academic, Design & Content, Zee Learn

Prof Sandeep Sancheti President, Manipal University, Jaipur

72 Prashant Bhalla Chairman, Manav Rachna Educational Institutions

industry speak

cASE STUDY

10

Gagan Goyal, CEO, ThinkLABS

64 Refining Learning, Experimentation

Sajeev Karuthody, Director-India & USA, Edutech

perspective 12

Boosting Creativity, Imagination with Robotics

Fr Magi Murzello, Principal, St Andrews High School

20 Online Labs for Schools on Low Cost Tablets

Prof Raghu Raman, Director, Center for Research in Advanced Technologies for Education (CREATE), Amrita University

68 Linking Industry-Academia

Prof (Dr) Louis Vernal, Member – National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), Western Region

82 “Integrate Skill Labs in the various district level colleges to include the rural and semi-urban youth in the Skills Movement,”

Says Bikram Dasgupta, Founder & Executive Chairman, Globsyn Group

K-12 sPEAK 14

Hands-on Approach to Education with Robotics

Robotics Lab at RMK Residential Senior Secondary School, Chennai

28 “Math is Our Buddy Now” Sreenarayanan PC, Principal, Podar International School, Ahmedabad

30 Dispelling the Fear of Math Among Children

4

Math Lab at Algar Public School, Tuticorin

education.eletsonline.com

College of Engineering Pune (COEP)

65 Labs at Jagran Institute of Communication and Management, Bhopal

66 Triggering Students’ Creativity, Curiosity

Labs at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Feature 16 English Vinglish 54 Traversing the Digital Divide project showcase 60 Virtual Labs Changing the Future 63 Learning Independent of Place, Time and Pace

Labs at IIT Guwahati

event report 76 Punjab State Education Summit Inspires Teachers to Use Technology

corporate diary 70 Rajeev Pathak, CEO, eDreamEdusoft 74 Casper Grathwohl, Senior Vice President – Group Strategy, Oxford University Press

Asia’s premier Monthly Magazine on ICT in Education Volume

09

Issue 03

March 2013

President: Dr M P Narayanan Editor-in-Chief: Dr Ravi Gupta Group Editor: Anoop Verma

Partner publications

Advisory Board Prof Asha Kanwar, President, Commonwealth of Learning

Dr Jyrki Pulkkinen, CEO, Global eSchools & Communities Initiative (GeSCI)

Dr Subhash Chandra Khuntia, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Govt of India

Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai, Executive Vice President, Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment

Prof S S Mantha, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE)

Prof Parvin Sinclair, Director, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)

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Editorial Team education Sr Correspondent: Pragya Gupta, Mohd Ujaley Correspondent: Rozelle Laha, Ruhi Ahuja Dhingra

Executive Officer – Accounts: Subhash Chandra Dimri Admin Executive: Gurneet Kaur

governance Manager – Partnerships & Alliances: Manjushree Reddy Assistant Editor: Rachita Jha Research Assistant: Sunil Kumar Correspondent: Nayana Singh Health Sr Correspondent: Sharmila Das Correspondent: Nikita Apraj Research Assistant: Shally Makin SALES & MARKETING TEAM: digital LEARNING National Sales Manager: Fahimul Haque, Mobile: +91 - 8860651632 Associate Manager – Business Development: Amit Kumar Pundhir, Mobile: +91 - 8860635835 Subscription & Circulation Team Sr Manager – Circulation: Jagwant Kumar, Mobile: +91-8130296484 Sr Executive – Subscription: Gunjan Singh, Mobile: +91-8860635832 Design Team Shipra Rathoria: Assistant Art Director Team Lead – Graphic Design: Bishwajeet Kumar Singh Sr Graphic Designer: Om Prakash Thakur Sr Web Designer: Shyam Kishore All India Distribution by Ibh Books & Magazines Distributors Pvt Ltd Editorial & Marketing Correspondence digitalLearning - 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@digitalLearning.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 - Ravi Gupta, Printed at R P Printers G-68, Sector 6, Noida, UP and published from 710, Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30, Sector - 50, Noida, UP Editor: 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.

education.eletsonline.com | egov.eletsonline.com | ehealth.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.in

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EDITORIAL

The Changing Dynamics of Education The changing delivery-mechanism of education in India makes us wonder how, with the advancements in ICT, education is taking a new shape. The increasing use of tablets in education, education through the cloud, content repositories and smart classes unanimously signify that the transformation in the education sector is immense.

The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) has been envisaged to leverage the potential of ICT to provide high-quality interactive education modules over the Internet/ Intranet in anytime and anywhere mode for every student of higher education institutions in the country. The thrust is on augmenting the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in the higher education sector. For over a decade, even the policy framework has been emphasising on the importance of ICT for improving the quality of education in the country. However, even well-framed policies and sophisticated technologies would fail if there is lack of adequate capacity building – be it training of teachers in using technology or content development.

Although India has been witnessing tremendous growth in the IT sector, there still remain large chunks of population who are untouched by technology advancements.

In this issue of digitalLEARNING magazine, we are telling a new tale about – how virtual labs are all set to revolutionise the Indian education sector. We invited learned people from the academia, both schools and higher education institutions, to share their insight on how the use of virtual and robotics laboratories is empowering students and making overall learning experience fun for them, and also how this is helping address the core issues of lack of teachers and poor quality of teaching equipment.

We organised the State Education Summit 2013 Punjab, at Chandigarh, on February 7th-8th, 2013. The event highlighted the achievements made by Punjab in the field of education. It was attended by more than 1,500 delegates from all areas of the education sector, who exchanged knowledge and ideas on how to improve the education outcomes in Punjab and the rest of India.

To actively share knowledge, showcase existing governance, education, health and IT initiatives in Odisha, we are also organising the eOdisha Summit at Bhubaneswar, Odisha, on March 6th, 2013, along with the Department of IT, Government of Odisha. The summit will see participation of eminent speakers and delegates from various government departments, central and state PSUs, International Development Cooperation Agencies, International Education Missions and Leaders of Professional Associations, and NGOs and other policymakers. We look forward to your participation at the eOdisha Summit!

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

digitalLEARNING / march 2013

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Feature

robotics LAB

Robo Calling!

R obotics and robots fascinates and engage attention of people of all ages. In the education space, they are catching attention of students while also imparting creativity, experiential and hands-on learning. The Robotics lab market in the Indian education sector is close to Rs 1,000 crore, and the space for Robotics lab is an unexplored market so the potential can actually be much more. It is a predominant

experiential learning tool in the UK and US. Now, Robotics is also catching interest among schools and higher education institutions across India and is becoming an unmatched tool for imparting STEM education. Robotics has, in fact, emerged as the fourth ‘R’ in education after reading, writing and arithmetic.

These labs not only make STEM learning fun, but also give better knowledge of learning thinking, leadership

and life skills, and teamwork. The demand of the 21st century learners is not based on rote learning. Instead, the future workplace will require students who can adapt to the situation and excel with problem-solving skills. digitalLEARNING invited views of various Robotics solution providers and educators on how Robotics labs are changing the dynamics of STEM education...

“Robotics strengthens students’ understanding” Ranjani, Program Manager, UniMity Solutions Pvt Ltd, shares the need for Robotics in education Students desire to gain an understanding of emerging science and technology areas while at school. Schools are vested with the responsibility of tracking, identifying and providing an exposure to these emerging subjects on a continuous basis, like we have experienced during the growth in Computer Science field over the last 10-15 years.

Now, the most premier schools have excellent infrastructure to teach computer-related subjects. The scenario in

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Robotics is similar. International trends are already pointing towards the growing popularity of Robotics as an industry, and of Robotics training at the school level.

Further, exposure to Robotics strengthens students’ understanding of core subjects – Mathematics and Science. Schools and teachers would, therefore, need to ensure that Robotics training is provided to their students, to ensure that they get prepared for the new opportunities in the 21st century. Local, regional and international

competitions attract participation from school students from across the world to build robots in different categories.

In India, at the leading engineering colleges, Robotics is becoming a part of the core activity. At the school level, exposure to Robotics is in its nascent stages. However, awareness is increasing and interest for Robotics among the student community is palpable. In the last four years, we have observed Robotics receiving a lot of interest in the upcountry schools.

Industry Speak

robotics Labs

Instilling Scientific Temper in Students Gagan Goyal, CEO, ThinkLABS on the acceptance of robotics as a new wave of teaching STEM in India Transforming teaching-learning Robotics lab completely transforms the way science and computer programming are taught in schools. It focuses on creation and application rather than just exploration. Our approach truly utilises the power of hands-on learning and creates a multi dimensional study platform, which involves simultaneous appreciation of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and computer programming.

The pedagogy gives visual grasp of Math and Science concepts, teaches through discovery, builds logical and analytical thinking, nurtures creativity and innovation and, enhances problem solving attitude.

Keep the learners engaged Through a series of hands-on activities,

competitions, and engaging discussions, the students exercise their problemsolving skills and creativity in a fun and exciting environment. In a nutshell, Robotics is an application of the principles of science and programming. Since school children study the basics of physics and mathematics from theoretical point of view, it becomes very critical for them to appreciate the practical aspects of this education. Robotics is a medium that fascinates a child and encourages him to apply the knowledge into real time applications. In addition, robotics allows young students to develop invaluable skills such as problem-solving, logical reasoning, critical thinking through creativity. These skills greatly progress their competitive edge and aid them to excel in the future.

With so many aspects of learning being addressed solely through a very engaging and futuristic medium of Robotics, it is finding recognition as a one-stop solution amongst all progressive educators.

Why a must have?

Students develop science projects and make robots for real life applications. For example, a blind-man’s stick that senses obstacles and guides. Unlimited number of projects can be created by the active use of same kit components.

Tips for teachers It provides scope for teachers to teach with their own style. Robotics content should not be looked at as a fixed curriculum, but as an expert recommendation. Teachers should feel free to customise the content as per their school ecology and students skills. The value of Robotics will be much more if the teachers conduct the sessions with the right attitude in their own style.

“The existing computer labs can be used as a Robotics lab” Sajeev karuthody, Director-India & USA, Edutech, on the magic that Robotics labs can do in education Revolutionising STEM Education Robots teach basic life skills such as problem solving, decision making, goal setting and logical thinking. It represents a practical application of Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, and may be used to speculate about concepts of humanities. Robots have an intellectual and emotional appeal that transcends any other type of engineered product.

Robotics offered by Edutech helps teachers the opportunity to bring together many different areas of study especially STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math).

Robotics is a transformative technology that is changing the way we live and work. Global industries are integrating technologies to their products and services making it more efficient and smarter.

Robotics in India offers more than USD 100 billion that today’s students must capitalise on. Robotics are widely used in

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Manufacturing, construction, security and defense, Medical and healthcare, Domestic, Education and Assistive services and products. Only two percent of the processors manufactures goes to personal computing remaining ones went in to various embedded systems.

The market is picking up with more and more schools understanding that only focus on academic results do not guarantee learner success in life. Educators today realise that intangible skills like creativity, problem solving skills, team work and project management skills are going to be as important as academic success in ensuring students are successful in life.

Adoption in India Most international schools have a robotics lab as either an after school activity or an in-curriculum programme. It is gaining traction in the mainstream CBSE schools. In higher education, the study

of robotics provides learners exposure to electronics, mechanics, programming and embedded systems. Edutech has seen its robotics market grow by 50 percent the past year. A wide range of research projects in autonomous vehicles, space research and unmanned vehicles are done in our engineering institutions.

We foresee demand for quality robotics.

Tips for teachers The existing computer labs can be used as a Robotics lab, which makes starting up a lab very cost-effective. Edutech offers courses that use brick programming that can help start a robotics program without computers. Having sufficient floor space for conducting activities/building challenges would be advisable. By using some of the Robotics challenge mats we have designed, we can conduct Robotics classes even in very small spaces. We recommend student to Robotics kit ratio of 3:1.

k-12 speak

robotics LABS

Boosting Creativity, Imagination with Robotics Fr Magi Murzello, Principal, St Andrews High School, speaks on how the Robotics lab in the school is creating interest in STEM education among the students

Fr Magi Murzello

S

tudents are very excited about Robotics as it involves a lot of mechanics and hands-on experience. They look forward to this class always. Some of them have made creative things like boats using sensors, and tried them in a fish pond. It makes them creative and imaginative, and gives them the opportunity to apply what they studied. We are seeing a very positive attitude and learning happening. Robotics is the one class that students never want to miss. They are quite involved and into it. We have invested a lot of money in this and can see very positive outcomes.

Challenges Initially, we faced a challenge in convincing parents about these labs for STEM education. Thereafter, we showed them what it was. Later, we moved on

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to get space, incorporate into our time table, and acquired good teachers who could develop interest among the students. The teaching experience with a teacher who loves teaching Robotics and with those who have been asked to do it is entirely different. Fortunately, we also have a teacher who loves the subject.

We have started using Robotics labs

this year. Students from classes 4 to 9 are using these labs.

Teachers’ training ThinkLAB spent innumerable hours in training our teachers. They allocated a resource person to give a very growling experience. They ensured that the teachers understand Robotics and are able to teach it peoperly to the students in the school.

k-12 speak

robotics labs

Hands-on Approach to Education with Robotics Robotics Lab at RMK Residential Senior Secondary School, Chennai Secretary: Yalamanchi Pradeep

T

he school is using Robotics labs from Edutech to provide robotics training to students. The Implementation of labs has led to higher academic standards in the school. It is very topical and fruitful as students enjoy hands on learning using these labs.

The successful implementation of Labs at the institution is due to vendor quality and commitment. The features of the robotics kit is loved by students and teachers due to the design of the curriculum, etc.

We are expecting more and more hands-on approach to education where labs will play a very crucial role. We encourage students to learn through experimentation that will lead to greater student engagement.

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K Preethi Sangeetha, student of class XI, shares her experience with robotics: “It is very interesting that we get to learn many new technologies about robots. Teachers take care of each student in the class and make them understand the theme properly.

We were given a Robotics kit for each group where we handled many electronic devices.

We had a very good experience and it was fun handling those instruments.�

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Feature

English lab

English Vinglish Crossing the language barriers with technologically-powered labs

I

ndia is the second largest English speaking populace in the world, a credit earned by a mere 12.16 percent of the population. This includes both native speakers and secondlanguage speakers of English. These are only speakers who cannot read or write necessarily, thus lowering the percentage of skilled users of English. Despite being largest English-speaking population, it is considered as a pain point and phobia for Indians, especially from tier2 cities to rural India. At the same time it is has become an important and ondemand employability skill. English language proficiency enriches the employment prospects largely, and also brings in personality, responsibility with personal, social and corporate etiquettes.

The challenge is to bring English to every child of India empowering the entire generation with complete proficiency in the English language, but there are not enough good teachers that can impart the skills to the learners.

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The emergence of English language labs is helping address this language barrier that we have across the country.

These labs have come out as a hope to many who are just lagging behind because of the language. Labs have come up with multiple benefits to teachers and students at the institutional level, and are also helping at the corporate level. Recently, the CSR wing of Ambuja Cement, Ambuja Foundation, has adopted the solution English Edge to impart language training to the foundation’s employees using the technologically-empowered portable language lab. Similarly, many corporate, private institutions, and the government are eyeing on these labs with the hope to bring in a better future for India.

There are many private players like Liqvid, Sanako, Words Worth, Clarity, etc, offering their innovative solutions to impart English learning using tech tools to make it far more reachable, interactive, and learned. It is notable that the

CBSE and ICSE are promoting enhancement of listening and speaking skills in the schools making it necessary to implement English language labs throughout our country. The other boards, too, will follow suit.

Sometimes, choosing inappropriate solutions, which is not apt for the institution’s learning environment, can leave no effect. Therefore, it is imperative to choose the right solution according to the individual learning environment. Here are some tips…

Choosing the right English labs for your institution English language lab is a very crucial tool to an institution and should be chosen with diligence. Its purpose is enhancement of skills of the students to the requisite levels of proficiency. The ideal solution should have the following features: • To provide a right blend of teacher and technology partnership in the

English lab

•

•

•

classroom to facilitate a very conducive learning environment for the learner It should be content based with a dashboard for the teacher to control and monitor each student’s activity The teachers should have flexibility to use the readymade content as well as create his/her own exercises and tests To reduce the total cost of owner-

industry speak

•

•

•

ship of a lab, it should use the best of technology, yet work with comfort on thin and thick clients Products should be backed by proper continual academic as well as technical support commencing with an in-depth training of the trainers post installation Learner material should be available to facilitate participatory learning by students such as work books Pedagogy precedes technology: It is

•

•

Feature

imperative that the buyers ensure that the technology is meeting the learning objectives and is not an end in itself The involvement of the faculty, who are the key stakeholders, in effective deployment of any technology solution. The managements must ensure that the faculty is fully trained and on-board with any technology solution Pilots and trials are a must.

English lab

Language Labs Empowering Teachers

Vivek Agarwal CEO, Liqvid

Good teachers can make good students. How are English language labs helping teachers address students’ phobia of language?

The prime benefit of language labs is empowering the teacher. The use of technology allows the teacher to engage learners in a way that is not possible otherwise. In English Edge Language

Lab, every student is able to record his own conversation into the tablet. There is no other way any teacher will be able to get 40 students to speak, because of sheer lack of time.

Are these labs addressing the issue?

I expect that there are at least 50,000 private schools that have or will have

language lab solutions in the near future. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of government schools.

English is the language of business and a key driver of professional and social success. We will see a billion people learn and speak English in India with these labs.

Please tell us about the adoption of language labs among Indian schools and higher education institutions.

Most schools and institutions do some form of English learning. But now, the use of technology is rapidly spreading.

One big driver is the tablets, which have unique benefits when used as a learning device. I expect that tablets will replace computer labs rapidly over the next few years.

What solution do you offer to educational institutions?

English Edge has a great portable language lab solution consisting of tablets and a customised trolley. It is found to be highly effective and a great aid to the teacher.

Please comment on your tie-ups with educational institutions.

Our software and hardware products are being used across the most prestigious institutions like IIT Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Shemford Schools, and Delhi Public School.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

17

industry speak

English Lab

Difficulty in Learning English is a Myth Jasvinder Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Words Worth shares his insight on how English language Labs breaking learning barriers naturally to the use of media. Linguists emphasise on the importance of speech over writing in language: children can listen and speak before they learn to read and write. All languages of the world are spoken, but not all have a writing system. Language labs are solutions that use the natural pattern for learning the language.

Why is English learning considered difficult by Indians?

It is a myth that English is a difficult language to muster by Indian students although it may be difficult to do away with the clutches of regional language and its common use at home that serves as the convenient medium in daily life.

All languages have the same natural learning cycle and it is important that training a child in English language skills aptly uses a similar paradigm. The child should be exposed to role plays and participating activities that bring meaning to the context. The teacher plays an important role in being the guide and mentor, however, the teacher should be supported with convenient tools to present the language aspects and demonstrate their use. Learning begins with listening. Listening to pronunciations, expressions, and meaning rather than rules which evolve as the child goes along to speak by themselves. Spellings, reading and writing come way after.

An important observation made by most researchers on the subject is that foreign language learning lends itself

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Why is English considered a vital skill?

The realisation for the need of English skills has dawned in the wake of the new world order where the Internet and telecommunications have undone the borders and equal opportunities are now available to all. It did start with the cities and has been progressively reaching the remotest villages of India.

Employability and prospects are the most significant keys to the prominence of English. The world is now a small place and everything is accessible. English is the global communications platform for businesses. Ample opportunities are available for people competently skilled in their profession and English language.

How, in your opinion, do English language labs help do the push?

Language labs have enormously benefited by technology, however, many

Employability and prospects are the most significant keys to the prominence of English

have failed to satisfactorily address the learning outcomes. Words Worth English language labs include a progressive graded learning curriculum, ample practice time for each individual learner, several audio visual tools for the teacher to demonstrate listening and comprehension, pronunciation, syllable break and stress, intonation, removal of mother tongue influences, phonetics, and more. A teacher’s dashboard helps them to collaborate with students by text and voice, view remote screen, set up tasks and tests for students, and review comprehensive progress reports on several parameters. Academic support is provided to the teacher through an in-depth training on the product usage, supplemented with training manuals and flash cards.

How many institutions in the country have benefitted from English language labs?

Words Worth English language labs is installed in more than 2,000 institutions across the country catering to the language enhancement needs of over one million learners. Besides schools and colleges, Words Worth products are instrumental in the capacity building projects of the governments of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka.

Words Worth Papyrus is a special paper-based lab that is used in the rural sector where infrastructure including computers, electricity, etc, is a challenge. Words Worth also has adult learning besides self-learning solutions.

Perspective

LABS

Online Labs for Schools on Low Cost Tablets

By Prof Raghu Raman, Director, Center for Research in Advanced Technologies for Education (CREATE), Amrita University

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ndia’s educational challenge includes a large school going population, lack of science teachers and shortage of expensive science labs in schools. Online Labs (OLabs), the free and open-access, digital interactive multimedia-based science labs for schools, addresses this challenge by adapting the solution of low cost Android-based tablets like Aakash. The phase 1 of the project covers classes 9 and 10, to be followed by phase 2 which covers classes 11 and 12, and additional subjects like English and Maths and have regional language support.

Mata Amritandamayi, Chancellor, Amrita University, has inspired us to understand the educational challenges faced by our country and tackle them using research-based holistic solutions.

OLabs on low cost tablets like Aakash are guided by her vision of providing affordable and high quality learning programmes to lakhs of school-going children all over India, including those in rural areas to reduce the digital divide.

The research we do is focused on developing responsive UI-based content for the tablets and our approach is fully integrated into the formative assessment process and most importantly, coexists with the present e-Learning environment.

With tablets, we are foreseeing a renewed

Prof Raghu Raman

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A teacher trying out an experiment on the tablet during the Online Labs workshop held at DAV Public School, Chandrasekharpur, Bhubaneswar, 21 January, 2013

Students using the tablet during the Online Labs workshop at the DST Inspire Camp held at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam, Amritapuri Campus

Tribal students at Manathavady using the Aakash Tablet

Students using the tablet during the Online Labs workshop at t he Amrita International Conference on ‘Women in Computing’ held at amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam, Ettimadai Campus, 10 January 2013

effort on teacher empowerment.

A significant milestone for OLabs was the recent circular from CBSE recommending OLabs as a teaching aid for their 14,000+ schools. OLabs training has been provided at various workshops and conferences and we have trained over 1,200 teachers from 200 schools and have 19,000 registered students/teachers.

OLabs videos, animated demonstrations, mathematically based simulations, and self-evaluation exercises provide an interactive, life-like learning environment that optimises student learning. OLabs are designed by subject matter experts to arouse the curiosity of students and to motivate them to learn advanced concepts through interactive online learning. A recent study showed significant performance improvements in conceptual and procedural skills of high school students with OLabs.

“Online labs is one of the advanced teaching systems which can make a revolution in education, especially in science. It is one of the modern methods which helps to teach science and helps the student to smoothly conduct the lab,” says Niranjan Parida, ODM Public School, Bhubaneswar.

OLabs project is jointly developed by Amrita University and C-DAC Mumbai, under a research grant from DeitY, Government of India. OLabs is available free for schools at its website. Other innovative educational technologies from Amrita University include Computer-based Adaptive Learning, Vocational Education with Haptics, Virtual Labs for Higher Education and A-VIEW, a distant learning platform.

Special Feature

MathsLab for Next Generation Teaching-Learning

W

ith Mathematics playing a dynamic role in our lives, it is evident that applications of Mathematics are advancing at a spectacular rate. However, often students are found struggling with mathematical concepts. When teaching relies on generic formulae, theorems and concepts, students lose interest and find Mathematics dull and boring. This results in lower grades, eventually leading to a ‘Math phobia’ among students. The use of boards, notebooks and instructional learning often do not address the Math needs of a class of diverse students. For those students who require experimentation and visualisation, a variety of interactive teaching methods are needed.

Next Education, with an aim to cater to the needs has come up with an innovative platform, MathsLab, which allows students to develop deep insights into various mathematical concepts by experiential learning. MathsLab is a zone created with projectors, computers and various handson kits where children do various activities, projects and simulations to discover mathematical ideas and validate formulas.

What is MathsLab? Next Education’s MathsLab is an innovative platform that allows students to develop deep insights into various mathematical concepts by experiential learning. Based on the ideology of Learn-Analyse-Build, MathsLab features pedagogically appropriate content, where students can learn through activities and perform simulations to discover mathematical ideas. The aim is to merge the three dimensions of understanding Mathematics: teacher sessions, student practice and hands-on activities.

Complying with the NCERT and NCF guidelines and catering to all school boards such as CBSE and ICSE in India,

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Next Education’s MathsLab aims to fill the gap between learning and practice.

Key features Next Education’s MathsLab is a complete and comprehensive solution that encompasses all classes from KG to 10. One of the key differentiating aspects is the pedagogically-appropriate content based on the class and age of the students. It not only helps the students develop higher order thinking skills, but also gain holistic understanding.

• Classes KG to 3 are taught Maths using a story-based approach with engrossing visuals that ensure the kids are focussed on the lesson.

• For the higher classes (grade 4 to 10), Next Education has built Mathematical understanding by relating Maths to real-life applications. For example, MathsLab helps students understand how Maths can be applied to organise a school fete or how pictographs can be used to collate data.

• Maths Lab also features numerous simulations, where a child can create various scenarios, perform multiple trials and thereby observe the results.

Next Education’s MathsLab’s comprehensive approach of incorporating activities with hands-on models provides avenues to cover Math topics by doing a teacher-led activity or hands-on activity.

With the exhaustive list of physical models called Manipulative, teachers and students can perform hundreds of activities.

Next Education MathsLab’s learning laboratory presents an opportunity for teachers to reinforce concepts through thousands of exercise questions. On one side, the exercises provide personalised learning environment for students and on the other, they can also be used by teachers as formative assessments.

For easy integration into a school’s system and structuring lab classes, MathsLab comes with a ready-to-use lab plan. Additionally, the teachers and the management of the school can gain performance insights using the student and teacher usage reports. For instance, the ‘Individual Student Performance Report’ automatically generates and tracks each student’s progress in every chapter. The ‘Teacher and Student Usage Reports’, used by the management, tracks usage by teachers and students.

case study Math Lab

Math Lab at Kovai Public School, Karumathampatti Objective of deploying labs Ä To provide the practical experience of the abstract concepts of Mathematics, Science, etc Ä Enabling the child to visualise, investigate, explore, experience, enjoy Math concepts Ä To reach every child of the classroom in the way they understand Math

Principal: S Harihara Sudhan Type of lab deployed: Math Buddy – Hands-On Math Lab Teaching Maths From the child’s perspective, VAK – Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic approach of Math Buddy, helps the children understand the complexities and abstractness of Mathematics easily. This encourages the child’s confidence during the learning process.

From the teachers’ point of view, the kit approach provides another dimension of teaching Mathematics with ease, backed up by an audio-visual interactive software support for reinforcing the learnt concepts and building speed with accuracy and confidence while solving Math by applying the understood abstract concepts.

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Ä To enable, empower, provide the teachers to experience all dimensions of the process of teaching and learning Mathematics Ä An effective initiative for children to get rid of their Math phobia Ä Encourages children to understand Math by the “learning-bydoing” methodology and successfully carrying it out, advocated by the NCERT

S Harihara sudhan

Math Lab

case study

Students’ Feeback T Pradeep, student of Grade6 says, It has developed my confidence and I have clearly understood the concepts of integers, fractions and decimal fractions using the manipulative.

S Aswath, student of Grade1 says, I have understood the concepts of Math easily using the manipulative.

The above two implementations lead to the desired meeting point which enhances the teaching and learning process more effectively resulting in higher academic standards.

servation sheets of every activity, the teacher evaluates the learning. Apart from these, worksheets are created by teachers with the help of QB available with MB.

Evaluation

Enhanced teaching-learning

At KPS, evaluation is done in two ways – While learning with hands-on activities, the teacher has an opportunity to observe children while their are doing the activities and can assess their understanding.

Secondly, with the help of the ob-

Children are able to understand concepts through experience clearly, quickly and effectively. The time taken to explain the concepts with the traditional method gets reduced drastically. The “to know more” factor enhances the exploring attitude of every child and

Teachers’ feedback Indrani, a Math teacher, says, “I felt comfortable while teaching the students the place value concepts, comparision of numbers, 3D shapes and data handling using the manipulative.”

JayaLakshmi, another Math teacher, says, “Teaching Math was made practically easy especially while teaching the abstract concepts of algebra, integers, and 3D shapes in Math lab.”

facilitates him/her to understand Math the way he/she can.

Teachers’ experience with labs Labs enable teachers to take children from the known to the unknown very effectively with lesser time. They also empower the teachers to provide an opportunity to every child to experience the abstract Math concepts. Teachers love to see the excitement among the children while they are in the lab.

Factors for successful implementation of lab at the school The complete support extended by the management to provide the necessary training and infrastructure acts as a catalyst for the teachers’ learning.

The training support and continuous handholding provided by Math Buddy makes every step of the implementation a success.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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industry speak

Math Lab

“ Digital labs can help bring about consistency in the teaching process�

Bharathy Bharadwaj, Founder & CEO of Concept Learning Technologies Pvt Ltd/Math Buddy LLC How are Math labs making students fall in love with the subject?

Mathematics is a subject which is learnt best through exploration. It is not a subject where a student can just watch a video or an animation and understand the concepts. Towards this end, we believe that a Math lab should be an integral part of every educational institution so that students can learn the concepts through interactive hands-on as well as virtual activities. When students learn Math this way, they explore, experience, and enjoy the subject, and many a times, they are made to figure out the formulae by themselves by making them observe patterns.

Once the children explore concepts with traditional instruments under the supervision of the teacher, they can practice the concepts using similar instruments in virtual space. The advantage in digital labs is that the teacher does not have to be present to see if the children are modeling correctly. The system will provide feedback to the children and the teachers can monitor their progress through detailed reports.

In higher classes, digital labs can help children visualise and understand difficult concepts and help eliminate the need for rote learning.

Lastly, digital labs can help bring about consistency in the teaching process especially when new teachers come in.

How do you see the adoption of Math labs across India?

We believe there is a huge potential for Math labs. Many of the schools have been using Math lab instruments for sometime to illustrate concepts. However, when we talk about a Math lab,

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the instruments are not to be used just for illustrating concepts, but to get students to explore by themselves sitting in groups of four or five. More and more schools are warming up to this, and are showing interest in setting up dedicated rooms for Math labs with seven to eight sets of instruments for students to do hands-on activities.

In addition, schools are beginning to realise the benefits of virtual software based math labs where students sit in front of the computers and interactively play with activities and learn the concepts.

We believe the combination of handson and virtual Math labs provides a lot of benefits and with newer technologies offering the ability to access virtual activities from desktops, tablets and even phones, the future looks very bright.

With Internet access becoming more affordable and more people going online, there is a tremendous opportunity for products that allow students to access from home as well.

We have more than a hundred schools across India including Lawrence School, Sanawar, Podar International Schools, Global Indian International Schools, Navrachana group of schools, Chennai Public Schools and many more using our solutions.

Do the schools understand the concept of teaching Math with new ways over traditional ones?

Most of the schools are familiar with traditional Math labs with hands-on instruments. However, very few have actually set up a dedicated room for a Math lab and the penetration of digital components is even lesser. However, in the past year or two, schools are beginning to see the val-

ue of a complete Math lab with hands-on instruments and software, and the adoption rate is increasing. As we go forward, there is a tremendous opportunity since the penetration, even at this time, is less than one percent of the private schools, let alone government schools.

What are the innovative Math lab solutions that you offer to educational institutions?

We develop a complete range of Math lab solutions. Our flagship product is Math Buddy Digital Plus Math Lab, which is a unique combination of hands-on kits to help children explore concepts using hands-on instruments and a digital lab with more than 1,200 interactive activities to help reinforce the concepts from grades 1 to 10.

The digital lab can be accessed from classrooms for teachers to illustrate concepts as well as from a computer lab for children to interactively practice the concepts. We also have our product online to enable children to continue learning from their homes.

This year, we are also introducing Math Buddy for tablets and smartphones, which should bring down the cost of setting up a virtual Math lab tremendously and make Math learning even more enjoyable for students.

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A cost effective solution on the lines of “Bring Your Own Technology” based classrooms. Pupils can use their own laptops, tablets or smartphone using ActivEngage App.

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k-12 speak

math Lab

“Math is Our Buddy Now” Sreenarayanan PC, Principal, Podar International School, Ahmedabad, shares his experience with Math labs

W

ith the objective of practising Mathematics concept easily with immediate feedback, Podar International School deployed Math Buddy Math Labs in the school.

The implementation of these labs has led to higher academic standards among the students. Children are evaluated through various modes like pen and paper test, online assessment through smart sheets, assignments and activities.

There are multiple benefits for students and teachers. Students can visualise and understand concepts in Math-

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ematics related to real-life in a very easy manner, perform better in standardised tests, and show keen interest in the subject taught.

Teachers find these labs very userfriendly and easy to understand. These

labs help them in preparing customised worksheets and assignments and multiple options to bring in interactivity in the classroom. Students in the school feel that it makes the classroom come alive with thousands of ready-to-use activities and customised worksheets in minutes.

Online support and periodic training of teachers by experts, keen interest and hard work put in by the teachers, parental support and cooperation, has helped the school in the successful implementation and getting benefits of Math labs.

“We are using iPads, therefore, we expect that various apps can be evolved that can work well with them.”

k-12 speak

math lab

Dispelling the Fear of Math Among Children Alagar Public School in Tuticorin who have been using both hands-on instruments and software for teaching maths in the school. Deepashree, Principal of the schools shared their insights on how math labs changed the way of teaching and learning math…

Math lab is one place where numbers truly come alive. It also helps children to visualize and understand the concepts.

Benefits of Math lab

Math Lab at Algar Public School, Tuticorin Principal: Deepashree

T

he privatisation of education in India a decade ago was welcomed as it was aimed at enhancing the size and availability of skilled talent pool that India IAlagar Public School started in 2009 when the eight decade old business conglomerate Alagar group of companies under two aegis of our chairman A Jeyaraman first conceived the idea and developed it into reality.The school offers the renowned CBSE Curriculum and aims at academic excellence, positive social values and creative freedom. At Alagar students have exposure beyond books and academia.

Alagar Public School introduced Math labs with Math Buddy programme last with an aim to dispel the fear of Math among children. It has indeed made Math easier and fun with choice of manipulatives and the software. It is heartening to see kids working with the Math kit in groups and are fully engaged. Our

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• Math Buddy helps in improving the standard of the students as well makes math more interesting.

• Evaluation is done by the software itself.

• Since Math Buddy software contains lots of examples and exercises, it helps the students to improve their mathematical skills.

• Students feel to be an interactive informative method to understand the concepts of Math.

• Students find Math lab an interactive method interesting to learn math. They feel it is an easy method to understand the concepts through online games.

No more Math fear among students Now, I like learning Math because we can develop our skills with exciting tools.

We understand the problems in the first time. I will invent such Math software in future, Says S Motheenath.

Math has now become very interesting to learn and it is very easy because if we don not know any concept we can learn in Math Buddy. Math Buddy is more easy than math text. We can do learn many concepts in Math buddy for example Decimals, Fraction, Angles, Tables, etc. It is easy to learn. It makes us to improve our math skills, says N Lohesh.

Maths is fun now and we can learn something by playing. There are many forms of learning in this like a quiz, choose the correct answer etc. Learning is fun, says R Shakthi Niveha.

Math Buddy is very useful. We can get many information about Math. We can learn much sums. I like Math buddy very much, says R Dharun.

Math buddy is an interesting math software which helps us to improve our math knowledge. There are many chapters like number, metric measures, Geometry, Fractions. I like math buddy very much, says A Vidhu.

Math Buddy is a very interesting website. We all like that. The math games of math buddy improve our knowledge of math. We get more ideas about math.

The game can be won easily. In playing the game we understand some difficult sums, says A Flavin.

PERSPECTIVE Prespective LABS

lab

Blended Objects in Math Labs can Increase Application Areas Immensely

By Sindu Aven, Head – Academic, Design & Content, Zee Learn

Sindu Aven

A

lthough laboratories have been associated with science subjects historically, the national focus on activity-based learning encourages us to think about using laboratory methods for priority areas like Mathematics, language and Social Sciences. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) mandates schools to have labs for varied subjects like Social Sciences, language, Mathematics, Bio-Technology etc. Goals of laboratory classes may differ according to subjects, but they overlap over the objective of providing opportunities for experiential learning. Our future labs will, therefore, need to focus on creating more opportunities of experiencing the subjects studied even within the budget constraints and large class sizes. Judi-

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cious use of technology can help us kick start this process.

The focus in science education in schools has been evolving from the activityobservation-documentation framework to a more inquiry-based learning approach for developing scientific literacy. Instead of simply conducting a pre-identified activity, students should be encouraged to create explanations of the outcomes of an investigation by using evidence and logic.

The future science labs will have a greater focus on the learning process along with conducting experiments. Online laboratories and experiments are useful in capturing the entire learning process without significant additional teacher intervention for individual students. Any number of students can dissect leaves and animals or mix hazardous chemical in online simula-

tions without requiring a scaling up of the actual facilities and minimising system errors in experiments. Questionnaires with immediate feedback test their evidence and logic as they use pre-defined formats to build their reports. An online repository of experiments can be linked according to concepts so that students can perform related experiments or activities even if the rest of the class is not. Such relevant application assists students to move from guided activities to independent exploration and testing of laws and rules. The ubiquity of next generation computing devices has already transformed the experience of using computers has from click to touch. With the immediacy of touchscreens and the portability of tablet devices, discrete lab activities managed by lab instructors can be transformed

Labs

into complete learning experiences leading to greater concept understanding with individual attention to all lab participants.

In Mathematics, the use of technology can transform the learning experience as well. The CBSE manual on Mathematics lab shows how simple paper and charts can be used for introducing object-based application of mathematical principles and application of geometry in real life. However, using the many available software and simulators we can make our Math labs truly futuristic. Free and open source software like GeoGebra offers online activities that join geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus. There are other geometry, algebra and graphing software that can be leveraged for

While planning for the labs of the future, we have to ensure that they provide answers to the problems of today greater application of mathematical principles. Integration of Mathematics and subjects like graphic design and music should be explored to make the Math lab an experimental one. An effective mix of computer-based applications and hand-held objects in Math labs can increase the areas of application immensely without requiring considerable

Perspective

expenses. Networking with experts and practitioners online can augment the expertise of laboratory instructors and it will also allow them to explore the application of Mathematics principles in various fields.

The concept of Social Science and language labs in schools is still a nascent one in India. A language lab is less of an experiment lab and more of an activity lab where students develop their speaking skills through listening to audio clips and recording their own audio for the teacher’s review. As effective communication skills appear increasingly important, we see the emergence of finishing schools for engineers and managers in many Indian cities. A language lab helps reduce the need for such later-day interventions by honing speaking skills at an early age. Social Science labs in schools, on the other hand, offer opportunities for exploration and analysis. The Social Science lab of the future would rely heavily on multimedia. A collection of films and documentaries can bring alive the issues, cultures, communities and events from textbooks. A Social Science lab can remove the perceived dryness of the subject and engage students in topics of human interest. Apart from exploration, reflective use of technology also helps students develop media literacy through critical thinking and directed analysis of the practices in the popular media. Social Science simulation software is not useful at the school level, but students can be made familiar with the various survey mechanisms essential in Social Science study through online survey tools.

While planning for the labs of the future, we have to ensure that they provide answers to the problems of today.

From heavily guided activity centers for a limited number of experiments, they need to become safe zones for independent exploration and application.

From the isolation of schools, they need to make avenues for working on issues relevant to the community outside.

Above all, an inquiry-based and experiential pedagogy needs to be adopted so that students can formulate their own ideas about the subjects taught.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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Industry Speak

labs

Waterford Early Math and Science Programme provides a comprehensive early Math programme with instructions in the five big ideas of early Math: numbers and operations, geometry, algebra, measurement, and data analysis. The programme also emphasises exploration and the scientific method through an integrated science curriculum that covers earth, life, and physical science.

Please tell us about the benefits that the programme offers to the students.

Because Waterford Early Learning assumes no background knowledge and automatically individualises instruction, it has been proven to help a wide range of students to achieve academic success, including: Preschool through grade 2, response to Intervention differentiated tiers, English language learners, at-risk students, advanced students, and special education (IEP) students

Building a Comprehensive Learning Foundation Pranab K Bose, Managing Director, Waterford Institute India, shares how Waterford Early Learning is empowering both the teachers and the students Please tell us about your digital lab solutions.

Our comprehensive early learning suite, Waterford Early Learning, comprises of Waterford Early Reading and Waterford Early Maths and Science programmes, which includes English language, Math and Science curricula; early literacy assessment; and innovative teacher tools that provide a richer learning experience that inspires and empowers both the children and educators alike.

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How do the programmes help learners?

Waterford Early Reading Programme provides a complete digital language arts programme that has created dramatic results for young learners across the country. Systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, text comprehension, vocabulary, print concepts, readiness skills, writing, and oral fluency provide a comprehensive foundation for English language learning.

Please shed light on your tie-up with academic institutions to extend the reach of the programme.

Yes, institutes and schools including the Aga Khan Education, Sujaya Foundation, Children’s Academy, Chennai Public School, Gudecha Academy, Chitkara International, Sneh International, Hills Nursery, and Klay Schools are using the programme.

Please tell us about the infrastructure required to set up a digital lab.

Typically, a digital lab includes a networked lab with a central server and client nodes (as per the requirement of the school) complete with microphones, and headphones etc. The application software and media (content repository) would reside on the server and the student application software in the client nodes.

Please share with us your future plans.

The next version of our programme, which is slated to be released this year, would involve the application server residing in the Cloud. This will result in reduced cost of acquisition for the customer.

Perspective

Labs

Reanimating the Humble School Laboratory

By Anil Goyal, Director, Mexus Education

Technological innovations in education are set to revolutionise the traditional labs in schools. The new generation, future digital labs seek to re-invent the pedagogy and learning experience

A

lthough India is trying its best to bring as many children as possible under the fold of education, issues relating to the quality of pedagogy employed, and not to mention the ineffective teaching infrastructure, continue to produce halfbaked results. Our traditional rote-based education system has been inadequate in nurturing students’ inherent curiosity and quest for exploring knowledge. Going forward, this has made them ill-equipped for the dynamic work-situations of today that require application of knowledge for out-of-the-box, resourceful and instant

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decision-making.

As the business environment becomes increasingly dynamic and competitive, the gap between industry expectations and skills is widening. This situation cannot be salvaged with late stage interventions through learning programmes and trainings; skills need to be developed from the very beginning with the help of newage labs. Clearly, if the present stock of students had a learning experience better suited for a hyper-competitive, every changing work environment that encouraged independent assimilation, reasoning and innovation, India’s workforce

Anil Goyal

Labs

would have been radically different today.

The missing elements School laboratories are not a new or breakthrough concept in the Indian schooling system. Whether public or private, schools were always required to house science labs at higher secondary levels. Of course, the adequacy of these labs is questionable, since they largely depend upon how well schools were funded. Essentially, the significance of ‘practicals’ or experiential learning has always been recognised in our system, if not applied in spirit. The idea that each child is unique and that a combination of learning methodologies reaching out to all seven learning orientations is required for learning, can revolutionise Indian schooling today. A complete learning system by complementing classroom learning practices with engagement through activities is the master key to

unlock the minds of all children by infusing interest and interactivity into an experiential mode of learning.

Experiencing lessons first-hand augments curiosity among children about why things are the way they are; a much more effective method of learning than spoon-feeding them with knowledge. Through hands-on activities and by putting theory to practice, students can gain knowledge of subjects, and understand their relevance with improved retention and recall. There are several schools in India with high-tech laboratories which team up with existing infrastructure in schools to reinvent pedagogies, with surprising results.

Bringing the change More and more schools are now taking up experiential activities through ‘Digitised Activity Lab’ sessions to educate students that study between grades 4 and 9.

Perspective

These labs facilitate activity-based learning aided by audio-visual and kinesthetic simulation, which motivates, involves and connects with students in process of learning through interactivity.

The sessions complement instructions on subjects taught in class and do not upset classroom learning, thereby allowing students to revise theoretical concepts in a meaningful manner. In addition to hundreds of practical sessions, labs are also an avenue through which children can access learning resources, tools, kits and activities that schools do not generally provide.

These labs fundamentally serve the purpose of development of a scientific temperament among children, by encouraging them to explore new concepts through investigation and reasoning.

Previously, the responsibility of imparting education was shouldered solely by teachers and quality lapses occurred when they could not live up to what was expected of them. The virtue of experiential learning is that students are now responsible for how much they learn; and they will, because learning has been made fun and interesting. The time invested by teachers in reiteration of concepts can be invested qualitatively in strengthening fundamentals by means of experiential learning.

The labs facilitate schools to grab and retain the interest of students in Science and Technology by allowing them to experiment scientific theories and knowhow for problem solving through project-based activities leading to early development of ‘Design Thinking’.

Conclusion By enhancing teaching methods to incorporate experiential education, it is possible to ensure better outcomes in terms of reality-orientation and employability of students, by motivating them to pursue science and technologyoriented fields in the future. Experiential learning through modern-age labs is perfectly poised to prepare solutionseeking, industry-ready professionals contributing to the intellectual wealth of the country.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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www.nixi.in

Contact IRINN: Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers C/o National Internet Exchange of India Incube Business Cenre, 5th Floor 18, Nehru Place, New Delhi - 110019

www.irinn.in

Phones: +91-11-64670009/24363126/30614624/25 Fax: +91-11-24361464 Email: helpdesk@irinn.in

IPv4

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IPv

The Government of India, Department of Electronics & Information Technology, earlier endorsed the operations of the National Internet Registry (NIR) to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). NIR is an entity under the umbrella of the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) which is the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). The NIR is entrusted with the task of coordinating IP address allocation with other Internet resource management functions at the national level in the country. NIXI was recognised by APNIC in March 2012 to become the NIR for the country. The NIR has been named as the Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN). Collective efforts of NIXI and ISPAI have led to the formation of IRINN in the country.

IRINN is a division functioning under NIXI, and provides allocation and registration services of Internet protocol addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) and autonomous system numbers to its affiliates to the Indian Internet communities. It is a not-forprofit, affiliates-based entity, with the primary goal of allocation of Internet resources to its affiliates. It also encourages/promotes activities related to research, education and training covering the areas of Internet resources.

IRINN structure IRINN is a division within the administrative structure under NIXI. IRINN Policy is allied with the Global and Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) policies and following bottom-up process for any policy changes. IRINN affiliates have the freedom to choose the registry (IRINN/APNIC). It operates in a way that is consistent with regional and global resource management policies. IRINN will be developing local policies and taking public positions in the best interest of its affiliates and participating in regulatory consideration where ever appropriate.

Who can become an IRINN affiliate?

F To become an affiliate, an organisation/ individual must submit their allocation proposal with supporting information (documents like copy of company registration documents, PAN, TIN and TDS registration details; PAN in case of an individual, who is a resident of India) to justify the requirement F The affiliate should provide the required information to IRINN for registering Whois database. The affiliate should use MyIRINN portal to register information in the IRINN Whois database and ensure the information is correct and up-to-date F For any support/queries, the affiliate can open a ticket through MYIRINN portal or can send an e-mail to helpdesk@irinn.in

special feature

Bridging the Digital Divide

O

ne of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to bridge the digital divide that exists in the world population. Most new technological inventions and gadgets are primarily focused on the developed first-world populations which have the purchasing power for such innovations and services. Billions of people are still without access to Internet, which is now being considered a human right in the Western world. Datawind believes that its products and technology are a solution to this problem.

Datawind has broken this price barrier by creating an Internet-capable device, which costs the equivalent of a typical week’s salary in India, about `2,500.

Datawind’s products are built around its breakthrough web-delivery platform, covered by 18 US patents, which reduces network load and delivers a fast and efficient web experience on today’s congested mobile networks. The content delivery is accelerated by factors of 10x to 30x – resulting in a superior mobile web experience at a lower cost. Rich web content can be now be downloaded at a fraction of usual costs. Datawind products will be delivering anytime, anywhere Internet

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Datawind Accolades • Shiksha Ratna Award by digital LEARNING State Education Summit 2013 • UK’s Most Innovative Mobile Company Award – 2012, by UK Trade & Investment, a government department • Datawind CEO honoured as “Entrepreneur of Year 2012” by The Sikh Directory, London • CNBC TV 18 and Mercedez Benz “Young Turks Innovation of Year” Award 2011 • Datawind founders received the “Technology Achievement Award” by the Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce presented by the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources, Joseph Oliver, and ICCC President, Satish Thakkar (Toronto) • Datawind CEO listed among “Forbes Top 15 Classroom Revolutionaries List” for Education Innovation

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Datawind has been named a finalist for the Global Mobile Awards 2012 (GSMA) in the category for the Best Mobile Innovation for Education. Datawind’s innovative solution at breakthrough pricing was chosen from six hundred applicants, and this recognition validates the critical need to break the affordability barrier for devices and network access in bridging the digital divide in the developing world.

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23rd-24th APRIL, 2013, Le Méridien, NEW DELHI

Bringing Together Global Thought Leaders in Education School Education

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orld Education Summit is the world’s premier platform for sharing of knowledge and ideas on the best practices in education. The summit seeks to bring together thought leaders who are engaged in making seminal contributions in the field of education. The leitmotif of the summit is to create a platform where discussion can be held for the emergence of innovative ideas for learning in the 21st century.

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Education Policy Makers, Ministers, Secretaries Vice Chancellors, Directors, Deans, Registrars and International Higher Education Institutes Education Regulatory Bodies and Professional Association Representatives School Principals, Key Management, Senior Functionaries and Global K-12 Representatives Edupreneuers, Entrepreneurs, Private Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists Education Technology Providers

• • • • • • •

Innovation in Open and Distance Learning Industry-Academia Interface Global Exposure to B-School Students Innovation by Engineering Institute Innovation by Medical College Innovation by Management Institute Virtual Classroom Initiative

Skills Development & Vocational Education • •

•

Vocational Education & Training Innovation in Open and Distance Learning in Vocational and Skills Development Public-Private Initiative in Vocational and Skills Training

Private Sector Initiative • • •

Test Preparation, Evaluation and Assessment Tool Provider Use of Assistive Technologies in Education Multimedia Content for K-12 Education

• • • • • • • • • •

Training Provider to Working Professionals Financial Service Provider in Education Technology Solution for Engineering Institutes Technology Solution for Management Institutes Technology Solution for Medical Education mLearning Initiative Digital Library Solution Provider Innovation in Teaching Pedagogy Technology Providers for Virtual Classroom Sports Infrastructure Facilitator

Start-ups •

Innovation in Education

Govt & Non-Govt Sectors • •

Government Sector Initiative in Education Non-Government Sector Initiative in Education

To nominate please visit: wes.eletsonline.com

The two-day exhibition will attract more than 1,00 companies, government bodies and educational institutes.

Book your space at: • Higher Education Pavilion • School Education Pavilion • Open and Distance Learning Pavilion • Education Technologies Pavilion

Leaders at Our Past Events

Hon’ble Dr A P J Abdul Kalam Former President of India

Kapil Sibal Hon’ble Minister of Communications and IT Government of India

Loynpo Thakur S Powdyel Minister of Education, Royal Government of Bhutan

Dr. Narendra Jadhav Member, Planning Commission, & Member, National Advisory Council, Government of India

Ashok Thakur Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India

Dr Sunil Nawaratne Secretary, Ministry of Higher Education, Sri Lanka

Watch out for Speakers at This Year’s Summit

Higher Education

Dr Akshai Aggarwal Vice Chancellor, Gujarat Technological University Ahmedabad

Prof Indranil Manna Director, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur

School Education

Rajeev Katyal Country Director, India, Global Indian International School

Manjula Pooja Shroff Pro Vice-Chairperson, Delhi Public School, Ahmedabad

Dr Francis C Peter Vice Chancellor/President, Dr K N Modi University

Dr G Viswanathan Founder & Chancellor, VIT University

Prof Dr Mansor Fadzil Senior Vice President, Open University of Malaysia

R P Agarwal Chairman of the Board of Management, Delhi Technological University

Prof M J Xavier Director, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ranchi

Prof D Fong Soon Fook Professor, School of Educational Studies, Uniiversiti Sains Malaysia

Dr Pascal Chazot Elected MP in France for the French Overseas; Founder & Head of School, MGIS, Ahmedabad

Mark Parkinson Executive Director and Head of School, Kunskapsskolan Gurgaon

Kartikay Saini Chairman, Scottish High International School

Monika Mehan Principal, DAV Public School, Khera Khurd, New Delhi

And many more...

Amol Arora Vice Chairman & Managing Director, SHEMROCK and SHEMFORD Group of Schools

And many more...

a i c t

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Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd Stellar IT Park, 7A/7B, 5th Floor, Annexe Tower, C-25, Sector 62, Noida, Uttar Pradesh - 201309 Web: www.eletsonline.com For Programme enquiries Mohd Ujaley, Mobile: +91-9910998065 ujaley@elets.co.in For Sponsorship and Expo enquiries Fahim Haq, Mobile: +91-8860651632 fahim@elets.in

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Special Feature

Interactivity in Education Led by Technology

By Jaivardhan Varshney

T

he rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has dramatically increased the ways of teaching and learning. From the typical classroom to online courses – all learning processes are witnessing changes. However, most of such technologies are finding it difficult to merge seamlessly with the pen and paper method of learning.

Before we understand the importance of interactivity lets broadly classified learning interactions under three categories: i) learner-instructor, ii) learner-learner, and iii) learner-content.

With advent of smart boards and online content, classrooms are witnessing a change, though not the one we would like to see. The content gets played on the smart boards. Though it may help the school to standardise the content, the teacher gets marginalised and the learning flow gets compromised leading to a lot of to and fro between the content and the teacher, when actually the interactions should be more between the teacher and students.

Moreover, the learner-learner interaction also gets impacted to a large effect. Students fail to learn from amongst themselves. The class assumes a shape of lecture based learning rather than a discussion based one.

Thanks to Anoto’s dot-patterned digital pen and paper technology, classrooms are getting efficient without losing the golden touch – the touch of pen and paper.

The education solutions built around this technology are capable of capturing everything students write with digital pens on their paper notebooks and show it on an interactive whiteboard in front of the class. The content so displayed

Technology in a classroom should focus on enriching learning without compromising on any of the three types of interactions involved in the learning process can be used as a basis for discussions.

The entire classroom progress is digitally saved and stored along with audio so that teachers can continue from where they left or playback classes. This solution allows to save individual student’s work, and track progress seamlessly and effectively.

All this to bring the focus back on learning, where it should always remain.

These solutions enrich the overall learning process by: • Encouraging discussion-based learning • Enhancing students’ attention in class • Leading to increased content retention The teacher is able to carry out oneon-one interaction in a classroom setup

where all the content is saved digitally.

Automatic Test Administration and Grading frees up teachers’ time to focus on teaching. All this is achieved with simple pen and paper technology that does not require teachers or students to change their habits. Nor do they have to undergo extensive training on using the solutions.

Technology in a classroom should focus on enriching learning without compromising on any of the three types of interactions involved in the learning process. And that can be achieved only when the level of interaction remains as high as it was before implementing the technological solutions, if not less.

(The author is the Chief Operating Officer of Xcallibre India. He can be reached at jai@xcallibre.com)

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

45

Perspective

Labs

Skilled Youth for Services Sector:

Addressing Skills Deficit through English Labs Strengthening the Indian services sector is the one way of sustaining the Indian economy

F

or a country that ranks number one on the Global Services Location Index year-after-year, it is natural to assume that the world with all its MNCs will make a path to this place. This ranking translated into a number of corporate giants coming to India and establishing outlets that threw open possibilities that even a Shakespeare would not have the imagination for. The other thing that has been in India’s favour is that in spite of the global economic slump, India has seen considerable economic stability. However, for sustained growth, India needs skilled labour in sectors that make the Indian economy go around sectors such as the services sector.

It is this sector that makes more than 60 percent of the GDP and which absorbs the youth for its various sub-segments.

“With sectors that require a highlyskilled workforce – financial services, IT/ITeS, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals – set to expand briskly over the next decade, India’s transition to a knowledge-based economy would require a new generation of educated and skilled workforce.” (Skilling India: One Billion Challenge, 2010, page 16) Favourable demographics position India to fill the void created by countries with an ageing population, and become a major player in global business. The manner in which India uses this opportunity will determine whether it will reap its demographic dividend. Apart from tackling spatial challenges arising from a remarkable disparity in the demographics of its states, India will have to address the critical issues of creating

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Dr Haresh Tank Director, Station-e Language Lab

Labs

jobs and preparing its youth to participate in its economic growth.

India will need to alter its policy framework and give incentives for creating sufficient jobs and alleviating workforce skill-mismatch. If status quo persists in India’s policy frameworks for education and training, and workforce management, economic growth will soon hit a speed breaker. If labour and industrial policies are not reformed, people with different education and skill levels, or from different states, would have unequal economic prospects. India’s industrial sector may not be able to scale up to absorb the excess workforce in agriculture. This could, in turn, block efforts to reduce income inequality in India. (20-21) While the services sector requires so many of the skilled youth, the mind numbing stat that paints the whole thing in black is that only 10 percent of nontechnical graduates are readily employable. It is this sort of unpreparedness that will pull India back from the gates of glory and the aggression with which countries like China are skilling their youth will take them to the top. It must be borne in mind that if we do not do enough, China is right on our heels on the Global Services Location Index. The Indian economy rests heavily on the services sector and hence, the efforts not only to sustain it but to strengthen it further are required on war footing. These efforts would involve up-skilling of the youth.

The services sector depends on the soft skills of the youth who would carry out the various processes of the transactions that make the business today. In the olden times, the business processes were simple enough to be carried out by anyone willing to put in the hard work with or without education, but today, the bar for the skills has been raised very high in the services sector and it has led to a sort of emergency of skills and employment. Sample this, the services sector requires highly skilled youth even for the simplest of its business processes and the situation is so dire that we do not have enough skilled youth – not more than the celebrated figure of 10 percent. This has the makings of a breakout of economic slump because

the services sector will never be able to find the skilled youth it wants, and on the other hand, there would be an unprecedented rise in unemployment as today the market requires highly skilled youth as the workforce. It is sheer indifference of the policy makers due to which we are sitting on this volcano and playing the fiddle while the Rome is about to go to ashes, in spite of all the prospects of economic superpowerdom.

If we realise that our economy rests heavily on services sector, which relies heavily on skilled youth, particularly communication proficiency, we have to ensure that firefighting and symptomatic treatment of wherever there is dire situation will not work. If we want to save the services sector, the backbone of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), we will have to inject the skills in the system through drastic measures of up-skilling, and if we want to inject the remedy that can heal the communication incompetency of the youth, the 21st century English lab addressing this skills deficit is the only way out. This would also mean that the labs have to be high-tech and innovative, and not a stockpile of computers fed with old-fashioned audio files. It has to be a model that uses the most advanced technology coupled with innovative training modules prepared with Activity Based Learning (ABL) as the central tenet of training.

Station-e model of English Lab Higher education In all, higher education faces the issue of accountability today. To address the issue of skills deficit, particularly communication proficiency in general graduates, Station-e envisaged the concept of Digital English Lab. It is a unique construct, aiming at up-skilling the youth of the country.

We have established several Digital English Labs at various educational institutions across the country. The lab serves as the training wing of the university/college, operated in a digital learning lab and powered by highly sophisticated technology. It comes with in-built training programmes on soft and life skills. Customised to the core, these modules have astonishing

Perspective

transformation value as they produce remarkable results in virtually no time. The youth across the country have benefitted by the innovative Digital English Labs and carved a niche for themselves in their chosen area of endeavour. What it means for a university/college is that it proves its worth, and demonstrates its relevance through the skills training that the youth passing out of the system will be equipped with to operate in today’s world.

Engineering colleges Digital English Lab at engineering colleges can ensure that students receive the skills training where they are studying. The lab has a rich array of courses pertaining to skills enhancement with special focus on engineering education. All the modules are run through highly advanced technological tools. The lab would work in close coordination with the engineering education and cater to the diverse skills development needs that the engineering education faces today.

Management institutes Digital English Labs at management institutes aim at impart skills training to the students. The lab has the provision for a variety of courses related to skills development with an emphasis on management education. All the training programmes are conducted in a technology-defined fashion and environs.

All things considered, the equations of the situation are quite clear. The Indian economy has stood its ground in spite of all the economic gloom and doom across the world. The backbone of this economy is not exports as it is in the case of China, but the service sector which constitutes the lion’s share of our GDP. Sustaining it in the era of global competitiveness calls for a highly skilled workforce that we are not likely to get from our universities and colleges. We need to inject it as add-on from the level of policy and granting it a special status and special funds as a mass skilling drive. Producing skilled youth for the services sector is not only the goal but also a challenge and the way to achieving economic prosperity, and eradicating unemployment and inequality.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

47

National Internet Exchange of India

INRegistry

How to become “.in” Accredited Registrars?

To become accredited, one must begin by submitting an application. (Refer link: www.inregistry.in/registrars/ become_a_registrar/step_1). When the application is accepted by the registry, the applicant needs to sign a contract with the registry, set up a financial account, and prove his/her technical ability to interact with the registry system. Each registrar will use the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) client to connect to the “.in” registry database. The registry provides an EPP toolkit to selected parties.

Where to find “.in” Registry Policies?

The registry has formulated new policies for the registration and administration of .in domain names. The goal is to make .in domain names easier to use, and a way of making the Internet available to more Indian citizens. The general policies are listed on the website (Refer link: http://www.inregistry.in/policies/)

Domain Levels

The Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) is the word or abbreviation to the right side of the final dot in a domain name, such as .com, .net, .org, or .in. The gTLDs presently available for the Internet users are .com, .net, .edu, .gov, .int and so on, the Country Code Top level Domains (ccTLDs) correspond to the top level domain pertaining to that country.

“The policy followed by NIXI is basically focussed on addressing the concerns of the large as well as the small ISPs, while at the same time keeping the larger national interests in mind. The idea is to promote domestic hosting of content as well as saving foreign exchange by keeping domestic traffic within India” Dr Govind, Senior Director, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications & IT, and CEO, National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI)

special feature

Promoting

Collaborative Learning The inability to provide a continuous talent pipeline to meet industry requirements is forcing companies to move jobs out of India

By VSN RAJU

T

he privatisation of education in India a decade ago was welcomed as it was aimed at enhancing the size and availability of skilled talent pool that India Inc could showcase to establish India as the most preferred destination for business and trade in the globalisation and IT & ITeS boom phases. According to the University Grants Commission (UGC), India has added nearly 20,000 colleges in a decade that had increased from 12,806 in 2000-01 to 33,023 in 2010-11 which translates into an over 150 percent growth. The number of degree-granting universities more than doubled from 256 to 564, primarily due to deemed and private universities. This growth in the education space has had a positive impact on the Indian economy not only by bringing in the much needed foreign investments, but also by generating diverse and progressive employment opportunities for the graduating youth of our country.

But lately, this growth is losing its sheen as colleges are struggling to overcome challenges like scarcity of competent teachers, rising infrastructure costs and the growing discord between the industry and academia; which is forcing them to adapt to unscientific and lowcost means for imparting education to students, thus affecting the quality of the talent pool. The inability to provide a continuous talent pipeline to meet industry requirements is forcing companies to move jobs out of India.

Empowering the colleges with best practices in teaching-learning and facilitating active collaboration at all levels, be it fellow-students, fellow-institutions, industry experts and leading academicians, will address the challenges faced

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VSN RAJU by colleges to a great extent.

Established in the year 2000, Globarena Technologies is an education service provider and has been providing scientific and technology-enabled teaching and learning solutions. For the past 13 years, our teaching, learning and assessment solutions have benefitted many institutions, universities and government education departments in their skill development and capacity building efforts. All our solutions are technology-enabled and are designed to suit the changing teaching-learning processes and impact a wide spectrum of colleges operating in the urban, semi-rural and rural regions of India.

Our solutions have evolved from just being PC-compatible to being a scalable 24*7 or 365-days accessible solutions compatible with the latest gizmo’s and come with a multi-mode delivery possibility. The analytics incorporated to our solution in the form of usage statistics, and validated assessment (pre-during-post) gives a 360-degree feedback to teacher and learners in their respective endeavours.

Globarena Technologies, in consultation with universities, industry bodies and renowned academicians from across India, has recently rolled-out the Centre of Excellence (CoE) solution and

OnMark – Examination Management Solution which has been tested in realtime environments with encouraging results that have been endorsed and accepted by all consulting parties as very helpful solutions to empower colleges/ universities to overcome the present day challenges they face in teaching, learning and assessments.

CoE follows the Teacher-Learner Delivery Mode (TLDM) that enables colleges practice collaborative teaching-learning using two-way HD virtual classroom with an option to record and archive lectures, e-Resources for teachers and students (both on LAN and/or online) in line with the university curriculum and knowledge management tools to impart education; the framework of CoE enables colleges/universities to run Industry Strength Programmes (ISP) to prepare the students on the industry required competencies while at college.

The OnMark – Examination Management Solution addresses the challenges that universities face to ensure transparent and error-free examination conduction, answer-script scanning, on-screen evaluation and preservation of answerscript. It has been designed with our experience of conducting assessments for national industry bodies like NASSCOM and online examinations for over eight state universities and comes with built-in student, colleges and university modules.

Globarena Technologies, in its 13th year of operation in the education services space, wishes to be a change agent and redefine the way the universities look at teaching, learning and assessment during knowledge dissemination and evaluation.

To expedite our efforts to reach out to universities, institutions and government, we have successfully delivered many pilots in live environments involving government education departments and universities which have been well received and appreciated by all. We are hopeful that our solutions will enable Indian universities to promote collaborative learning and conduct transparent and error-free examinations.

(The author is CEO of Globarena Technologies, Hyderabad)

Celebrating 12 Years of Excellence in Skill Development

“ Innovative Solutions to Power Excellence�

Center of Excellence (CoE) - A Comprehensive Teaching - Learning Solution.

CoE is aimed at creating and disseminating knowledge to all the stake holders for enhancing the teaching - learning effectiveness by channelizing various sources of knowledge. Quality content to faculty as per curriculum is provided that ensures lively environment and helps faculties in standardizes classroom deliveries; self-learn student modules enable students to access the content 24x7 to reinforce the concepts taught in the classroom.

Bi-Directional virtual classroom solution at the University and colleges to beam to all the colleges and vice versa. The setup can be used by the colleges to practice collaborative teaching - learning and also helps the University/Colleges to interact with expert faculty, connect to industry experts, HR experts and eminent personalities in their efforts to understand changing industry trends, recruitment parameters of companies and participate in Industry Strength Programs.

Key Advantages

Live virtual sessions: Expert faculty | HR talk | Eminent personalities | Academicians Interactive bi-directional virtual classroom

Bi-directional Virtual Classroom

Develop Knowledge Repository

Leverage for Distance learning / Certificate Programs

Live Sessions by Expert Faculty

CoE Center of Excellence

24 X 7 Access to Content

Interactions with Eminent Personalities

HR Interactions

Engineering eLearning Content for Faculty and Students

Recording and archiving features Engineering content for ECE | EEE | Civil | Mech. | CSE | IT

covering 4 years of B.E. or B.tech.

Multimedia content rich with images, animations & quizzes for faculty and student.

Flexibility for Universities or colleges or faculties to add content and quizzes 24X7 access to content through multimode delivery; accessible online or offline through PC | Laptop | TAB Conduct distance learning programs, industry-endorsed certification programs, and international University certificate programs.

OnMark - Examination Management System End-to-end examination management service for universities or educational institution to enhance their examination processes using technology to ensure fair and transparent evaluation and result declaration. OnMark includes the following:

Student Application form

Hall Ticket Generation

Tabulation

Automation of pre-examination processes Secure delivery of question papers online e-Evaluation of Answer Sheets Answer script scanning Online evaluation of scanned answer scripts Automation of post-examination processes Customization based on unique customer requirements Scanning Answer Sheets Managing large scale scanning Complete online evaluation using proven technology tools Practice high level data security

OnMark Examination Solution

Pushing Question Paper

Examination Center

Sending Bundles of Answer Sheets

Globarena Technologies Private Limited East Block 605 to 612, 6th Floor, Swarnajayanthi Complex, Ameerpet, Hyderabad-38, Phone:+91-40-23750190/91, Fax:+91-40-23750194, www.globarena.com Enquiry can be mailed to sales@globarena.com

Special Feature

Edtech-based programmes Enhances Learning effectiveness and overall learning experience

By Manish Upadhyay, Preetika Gupta & Nitin Mehra

C

omputers have significantly changed the face of education over the past decade. They have not just revolutionised learning methodologies, but have also changed the outlook of traditionalists. The classic learning methods of using blackboard, pen and paper, and books, have given way to an innovative pedagogical approachthat makes learning more effective and interactive.

Our research team has worked extensively in drawing a comparative study between digitised and non-digitised courses.

The team found that the technology-driven (Edtech) programmes create a more conducive learning environment for learners with the help of unique and innovative learning tools such as student presentations, personality development training sessions, English-speaking sessions, games, quizzes and lab practicals. Learners get to participate in discussions and group activities rather than being mere passive listeners. The Edtech programme helps learners gain confidence and hone their technical skills by not just imparting quality education but also by conducting periodic assessments as a performance check.

Let us understand through this case study, and the ramifications of using the Edtech programme for increasing overall learning effectiveness.

better performance. The new Edtech programme is designed to control and manage these variables in order to improve educational outcomes for all learners.

Methodology of the Edtech programme The research was based onseven session out of the overall course content of 150 sessions. This particular course prepares students in technical subjects like networking and information technology as well as soft skills like spoken English and selfgrooming. After completing the course students get placed in various organisations as Technical Support Executives. To test the hypothesis, the research looked at four major areas of study namely: • Process • Attitude • Knowledge • Skill (Technical skills) Key Hypothesis to be tested: Intervention of educational technology in the new Edtech course is resulting in increased learning effectiveness/student performance.

Need of the Edtech programme Though the non-digitised programme is well received and accepted, it has multiple constraining factors and variables such as quality of the trainers, standardisation of programme delivery (course coverage and abilities of different trainers), student motivation levels, and

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A typical EdTech (Digitized) Programme

Two different groups were formed – • Control Group (running the nondigitised course) • Experimental Group (running the new Edtech course) Student batches for the two groups were created on the basis of – • Educational qualification • Number of students • Geographic location • Family background Othertools that were implemented – • Same trainer conducted both the control group and the experimental group sessions.

• Each session duration data was gathered through centralised LMS by Liqvid.

• To measure student performance, knowledge and skill-based assessments were carried out at the end of each session and after all seven sessions for both the groups. Each assessment carried 10 objective

Special Feature

questions. The questions were a mix of multiple choice and fill in the blanks.

• Learner and trainer feedback were also captured by means of a questionnaire.

Key findings of the Edtech programme The key findings of the programme were based on four main output indicators: Process indicators: • Indicator 1 (Improvement in course coverage by the trainer): o 88 percent of the learners in the experimental group perceived that most of the sessions were covered end-to-end in comparison to a mere 33 percent in the control group. The trainer agreed that the study methodology in experimental group was more structured with use of timer in interactive activities.

• Indicator 2 (Clearer and effective presentation by the trainer): o 88 percent of the learners in the experimental group said that use of audio and video in the sessions helped them comprehend much better and retained their interest in the course. o 50 percent of the learners in the control group perceived that they were equipped to answer questions on at least 80 percent of each session taught whereas the same proportion of learners in the experimental group perceived it to be 88 percent. Attitude indicators • Indicator 3 (Trainer more interested and focused to teach): o While the trainer took greater interest in teaching, 94 percent of the control group and 78 percent of the experimental group perceived that not all the topics could be covered in detail due to delay in starting sessions.The reason for delay wasscheduling of back-to-

back batches and finalising of labs to conduct practicals.

• Indicator 4 (Increase in student participation in the class): o According to the trainer; the motivation level of the experimental group was 90-95 percent while that of the control group was 85 percent. Both the batches stated knowledge as the key source of motivation.Other sources cited were ambition and quest for learning something new. o 94 percent of the experimental group preferred group discussion activity over individual presentations in comparison to 72 percent of the control group.This indicates that learners in the experimental group were more participative.

• Indicator 5 (Regularity in student attendance): o No major inference could be drawn from the attendance data.

Outcomes: Knowledge (K) and Skill (S) • Indicator 6 (Increase in student performance per session): o The average score at the end of knowledge-based session assessments was 53 percent for the experimental group and 42 percent for the control group. o The average score at the end of skills-based session assessments was 77 percent for the experimental group and 65 percent for the control group.

• Indicator 7 (Increase in student performance in the final assessment): o The average score at the end of all knowledge-based sessionswas 71 percent for the experimental group and 32 percent for the control group, which is more than the double. o The average score at the end of all skill-basedsessions was 75 percent for the experimental group and 71 percent for the control group. There is only a marginal improvement in the skill factor.

Smart Learning Techniques of the Edtech programme: • The trainer asks three learners to come forward and give a presentation on the previous day’s topic. This is to know how much they have understood. The duration of the activity varies between 3-5 minutes.

• After the presentation is over, the trainer rates each student (on a scale of 5) based on five parameters: Knowledge (KN), Grooming (GR), Presentation (PR), Confidence (CF) and Language (LN).

• The trainer uses whiteboard as a primary teaching aid, but wherever needed, displays relevant procedures on a computer, which is projected through a TV in the classroom. The trainer also carries relevant hardware like motherboard for hands-on feel.

• Each session has one or more group discussion activity wherein each group discusses a topic. A group leader is appointed for each group who answers the questions asked by the trainer. The duration of the activity varies between 3-5 minutes.

• Depending on the content of the sessions, the practical/LAB sessions happen after every couple of sessions. Two learners share a terminal to do the practical.

• Learners attempt quizzes and assignments for each session in their books.

It is either done either as homework or discussed in the class depending on the practical nature of the content.

Conclusion Our education system is in a constant flux and those associated with it, whether learners or practitioners, should reap benefits from technology-enabled learning methodologies that give excellent performance support solutions. The Edtech product creates a motivating environment for both learners and trainers in the most effective way. Learners exposed to innovative approaches of study and practice will have better career opportunities as compared to those who simply reproduce what is given in their books.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

53

Feature Feature

Labs

Traversing the Digital Divide Virtual laboratories are the solution to Indian classrooms’ challenge of lack of faculty and new solutions that improve learning outcomes, writes Ruhi Ahuja Dhingra, ENN

E

ver thought how easy teaching and learning Science could be if students thought the way scientists do, or if they could control something from even the secluded areas of the country?

The digital revolution dates back to the invention of the transistor in the year 1947. Today, it has travelled far beyond.

A large number of institutions in the country, especially those in backward areas, are unable to offer a real laboratory experience to students. However, a lot of institutions that have these facilities follow the conventional method of teaching and lack in terms of the quality of equipment. Virtual laboratories or online laboratories or iLabs are here to build a connect. These labs allow a student sitting in any part of the country to do an experiment from anywhere, at anytime, and at any pace using the Internet. Even though virtual labs do not provide hands-on experience to the students, they eliminate the need to sit in a physical classroom and take a lecture to understand a concept, or visit a real laboratory to perform an experiment.

Apart from this, these labs also minimise the costs incurred in performing experiments in real labs and enable students to hone their critical thinking skills and repeat the experiments till they feel they have understood a concept fully.

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Experimenting for a well-rounded experience • Though not a real lab, a virtual lab gives the freedom to a student to perform an experiment and apply scientific methods without the fear of getting it right • Virtual labs ensure easily accessible and quality education to the students that they can take up at a time of their convenience • Using remote experimentation, students can learn an array of concepts from basic to advanced: a more wellrounded experience • High school students can be motivated to take up high studies and scientific careers • Virtual labs will also address the lack of faculty in India as they are very well-detailed and do not need a teacher • The experiments performed produce real scientific data and the software used simulates lab experiences • Virtual demos and presentations help students make sense of what is there in the textbook, thereby enhancing their thought process and critical thinking skills

Labs

Feature

How are virtual laboratories, the new interactive form of learning math and science disciplines, revamping how information is disseminated, obtained and processed? digitalLEARNING invited learned people from the academia to shed light on how, with the advent of virtual labs, education is transcending all geographical barriers and spanning to every nook and corner of the country, and how the student-centric pedagogy is empowering students. Let us have a look at what they said: Prof (Dr) Anil Sahasrabudhe, Director, College of Engineering Pune In an era of Internet and World Wide Web, the virtual laboratory is a novel idea of empowering students from remote corners of the globe.

The traditional education or content delivery is changing rapidly. This is true not only of theory, but now, even practical classes. The virtual laboratories will cost so much less because there are no consumables required and an experiment can be conducted at one’s choice at one’s will at anytime from anywhere. This is true empowerment for the 21st century engineering student. The team of faculty has put in lot of efforts to make this model a success. I appeal to students to start making use of this facility provided through funding by MHRD effectively.

Prof BP Sanjay, Vice Chancellor, Central Univeristy of Tamil Nadu Virtual labs seem to be reverberating in the policy making circles where competing technologies claim to realise the same objective.

New higher education institutions located in rural and remote areas are no doubt, ideal for extending the learning benefits of virtual labs. However, the last mile problems of connectivity suitable for high speed/volume data (AV format) and interactive costs are a deterrent. It is imperative that these are addressed at the policy level before advocating virtual lab solutions. While we are doing our best to leverage learning technologies, we are continuously dogged by frequent power outages, monopolistic telecom service providers and reliable vendors who can provide good installation and after sales service.

Prof (Dr) Indira Parikh, Founder President, FLAME Digital labs are going to have far reaching impact and will create a lot of enthusiasm and excitement and wonder at what is possible. But this is still not the end of the world. Unless students meet and interact with each other, the touchfeel factor will not happen.

Therefore, technology needs to be tempered by group learning to make it very human.

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Feature

Labs

Prof (Dr) Ranjan Bose, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi Virtual Labs not only arouse curiosity in students, but also permit them to learn at their own pace. The pedagogy is student-centric. Virtual Labs are truly ‘any-place, any-pace, anytime, any-type’ labs!

Prof (Dr) Lovi Raj Gupta, Vice Chancellor, Baddi University of Emerging Sciences and Technologies

Prof (Dr) MM Salunkhe, Vice Chancellor, Central University of Rajasthan Students enjoy learning though virtual labs. The shortage of faculty is debated at the national level.

I hope technology will take its own course and will make it possible to inculcate skill development in the students. There is great scope for this.

Virtual labs are going to be the next in thing in the academia in the times to come because they are going to provide students an opportunity to explore the set-ups at the premier institutes to learn more and more irrespective of their distance and remoteness. Virtual labs will also provide seamless opportunity for faculty members to upgrade their knowhow by learning from the design of experiments and they will try to frame better experiments in their organisations.

Unleashing Change in Governance, Education, and Healthcare

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academia speak

Labs

Access to Quality Lab Experimentation Virtual labs are a key for the establishment of virtual universities of the future, says Prof (Dr) Sandeep Sancheti, President, Manipal University, Jaipur How virtual labs are reinventing the pedagogy?

A large number of courses offered by professional institutions lack in terms of laboratory work and hands-on experience of a laboratory environment due to a variety of reasons. Even if such facilities are available, their efficacy is poor due to the quality of equipment, general instructions and readiness to challenge the standard conventions. Availability of virtual laboratories will bridge that important gap by providing access to quality laboratory experimentation with a feature of anytime, anywhere and by anyone. In my opinion, virtual labs are a key for the establishment of virtual universities of the future.

Innovation in virtual laboratories Virtual laboratories are expected to provide complete and correct experimentation principles and details as they can always expose students to the involved aspects by videos, animations, demonstrations and support through scientific blogs. They can help induce a great deal of interest as well as confidence in the students in performing experiments independently.

Virtual labs can also make students undertake quiz tests or Q&A sessions before they are allowed to perform the experiment virtually. Such a step is very essential to check the pre-requisite knowledge and preparedness of a student.

Finally, in parallel to experimentation, the learning can be fully supported through linked CAD tools, supported on

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a remote server to perform related simulations and make exercise complete in all respects, which one can refer as 360-degree learning.

Benefits to students and teachers It can be a very safe and secure learning environment which can operate on a 24x7 basis. The student can perform exercises without fear as built-in checks and balance can be implemented through interfacing and controlling software. Online and real-time help can be made available through variety of interventions and general IT-based tools.

All these aspects can be attained at a very low cost with better clarity and learning experience to the potential learner.

Learning outcomes and evaluation Since virtual mode can be a self-regulated mode, students can be allowed to perform higher levels of experimentation based on the performances attained. Hence, it can satisfy the learning appetite of student in a much better way. Similarly, as access to costly and well-scalibrated equipment is generally very limited in the current scenario, the same can also be easily taken care of through virtual experimentation.

As far as evaluation is concerned, the online process can easily record every step performed or omitted by the candidate and hence, it can be conforming to a more rigorous as well as uniform evaluation. However, a lot of work needs to be undertaken for proper development of online evaluation processes for laboratory examinations.

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Project ShowCase

Virtual Labs Changing the Future G

ood lab facilities and updated lab experiments are critical for any engineering college. Physical distances and the lack of resources often make it difficult to perform experiments, especially when they involve sophisticated instruments. Also, good teachers are always a scarce resource. The Virtual Labs project addresses this issue of lack of good lab facilities, as well as trained teachers, by making remote experimentation possible. With the present day Internet and computer technologies, these limitations no longer hamper students and researchers in enhancing their skills and knowledge. Also, in a country like ours, costly instruments and equipment need to be shared with fellow researchers to the extent possible. Yet another objective is to arouse the curiosity of the students and permit them to learn at their own pace. This facilitates the absorption of basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation. Internet-based

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experimentation further permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging skillful experiments being simultaneously performed at points separated in space. In the Virtual Labs project, web-enabled experiments have been designed for remote operation and viewing.

The pilot phase of the Virtual Labs project was started in April 2009.

During this phase, approximately twenty labs were developed as proof of concept.

The main phase began in April 2010. Virtual Labs has been operational since February 23, 2012, when it was ‘Dedicated to the Nation’ by Kapil Sibal, the then Minister of Human Resource Development.

Over 50,000 students (in approximately 150 colleges) have used the Virtual Labs and have provided user-feedback.

Virtual labs provide: • Access to quality labs to those engineering colleges that lack these lab facilities • Access to quality labs as a complementary facility to those colleges that already have labs • A complete Learning Management System around these labs • Teacher-training and skill-set augmentation through workshops and on-site training

Projectcase ShowCase study

Objectives Ä To provide remote-access to labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering Ä To cater to students at the UG level, PG level as well as to research scholars Ä To enable the students to learn at their own pace, and to arouse their curiosity Ä To provide a complete Learning Management System that includes web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self evaluation Salient features The salient features of virtual labs are: • Virtual Labs provide to the students the result of an experiment by one of the following methods, or possibly, a combination of these (see Fig 1): (i) Modeling the physical phenomenon by a set of equations and carrying out simulations to yield the result of the particular experiment. This can, at-best, provide an approximate version of the ‘rea world’ experiment (ii) Providing a corresponding measurement data for the virtual lab experiment based previously carried out measurements on an actual system. This will be closer to the ‘real world’ experiment (iii) Remotely triggering an experiment in an actual lab and providing Fig 1: The concept of virtual labs

Using the Remote Triggered Virtual Labs, the actual experiments are triggered remotely. The output of the experiment (being conducted remotely) is communicated back to the student over the Internet. This class of virtual labs gives the student the output of real-time experiments.

Typically, time-slots are booked before conducting such experiments.

All Virtual Labs can be accessed through a common website: www.vlab. co.in. At the user end, a PC and broadband connectivity enables the user to access virtual labs.

Beneficiaries of the project the student the result of the experiment through the computer interface. This would entail carrying out the actual lab experiment remotely • Virtual labs can be made more effective and realistic by providing additional inputs to the students like accompanying audio and video streaming of an actual lab experiment and equipment • For the ‘touch and feel’ part, the students can possibly visit an actual laboratory for a short duration In Simulation-Based Virtual Labs, the experiments are modeled using mathematical equations. The simulations are carried out remotely at a high-end server, and the results are communicated to the student over the Internet. These labs are scalable and can cater to a large number of simultaneous users.

The intended beneficiaries of the projects are: • All students and faculty members of Science and Engineering colleges who do not have access to good lab facilities • High school students whose inquisitiveness will be triggered, possibly motivating them to take up higher studies

Broad areas of virtual labs Virtual labs have been developed in the following broad areas: • Electronics and Communication Engineering • Computer Science and Engineering • Electrical Engineering • Mechanical Engineering • Chemical Engineering • Biotechnology and Biomedical Engineering • Civil Engineering • Physical Sciences • Chemical Sciences

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Project ShowCase

• Researchers in different institutes who can collaborate/share equipment and resources • Different engineering colleges that can benefit from the content and related teaching resources The project has fulfilled the targeted beneficiaries (and even gone beyond).

An ecosystem has evolved around virtual labs, where the community has become involved in evolving and benefitting from the project.

Value-add provided by the project Virtual labs provide immense benefit to Fig 2: Value-add provided by virtual labs

Fig 3: Feedback of the students and faculty members who have used virtual labs to conduct experiments remotely

Fig 4: The numbers of hits on the website and numbers of pages visited by the user on hourly basis (Dec 2012).

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those engineering colleges that do not have good lab facilities. The virtual labs project can also be used in a complementary fashion to the existing physical labs.

The value-add provided by virtual labs is depicted in Fig 2.

Virtual labs have provided both the students and the teachers the access to quality labs in a wide range of topics, spanning different branches of science and engineering. Over 100 virtual labs have been developed. The importance and effectiveness of these labs can be estimated from the user feedback (see Fig 3). The labs are also being used outside the labs hours, and also on weekend, as depicted by Figs 4 and 5.

project showcase

Learning Independent of Place, Time and Pace Prof Ratnajit Bhattacharjee, Head of Department, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, says that ICT tools make it possible to have laboratory experience available at the desktop of the learners who can use them as per their convenience and at their own pace

T

he Virtual Laboratory projectis a project is coordinated nationally by IIT Delhi, and IIT Guwahati is a participating institute in the initiative.

The project falls under the broad category of technology-enhanced learning which provides a unique learning experience: learning independent of place, time and pace. ICT tools make it possible to have laboratory experience available at the desktop

of the learners who can use them as per their convenience and at their own pace, not being under the pressure of finishing the experiments within some laboratory slots assigned to them.

Virtual laboratories may come in different forms: simulation models using measurement data gathered from costly and sophisticated experimental setup, simulation experiments based on mathematical models and real time laboratories using the actual hardware at the re-

IIT Guwahati has contributed seventeen laboratories, covering Electronics and Communication, Mechanical, Computer Science, and Chemical Engineering and other areas, under the NMEICT initiative

mote end. Apart from the experiments, each laboratory is also provided with background materials such as theory, experimental procedures and quizzes along with videos illustrating how the experiments should be performed. Since these laboratories are primarily targeted for use by the student community, mapping of contents to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) prescribed syllabus has been made for majority of the laboratories. Some of the laboratories are targeted for use by the research community. The laboratories undergo regular evaluation by a team of experts in the respective fields. User feedback is taken into account to continuously update their contents.

IIT Guwahati has been an active partner in this initiative right from the beginning. It has contributed a total of seventeen laboratories, covering the areas of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering and other areas like Design and Social Sciences. The developmental activities for many of these laboratories are almost complete and some of these laboratories are undergoing field trial. The laboratories are available online for use by the user community. There is also a provision for providing feedback.

Apart from this, the laboratory developers are also carrying out workshops and special sessions in selected institutes. The feedback from the user community has been encouraging. We have also received queries from an American university requesting us to allow usage of one of our laboratories in their webbased classes. Once the contents of the laboratories are fully developed during this phase of project, maintenance and scaling up issues will be addressed. The initiatives for this have already been taken. These laboratories will not only provide first-hand virtual laboratory experience to the user community covering a wide variety of topics, but will also supplement those cases where a real laboratory is not in place.

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case study

Labs

Refining Learning, Experimentation

Prof SD Agashe, Principal Investigator, V-Labs Project, College of Engineering Pune (COEP), talks about the virtual labs at the institute and how they help in increasing the effectiveness of scientific research

L

aboratory practice plays a crucial role in understanding a subject in engineering education. It has been observed that engineering students in many colleges lack hands-on experience. The reasons for this include nonavailability of adequate laboratory facility or equipment, non-functional equipment, lack of teaching/technical support, reduced hours for experimentation, and lack of expert support for correcting mistakes during experimentation etc.

In many engineering disciplines, the cost of the equipment/instruments is very high which prohibits the insti-

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tutes from buying these facilities. The innovation in laboratories comes only with freedom of failure, and analysis of experimental data. In today’s context, both the things are missing, resulting in fear of experimentation and failure

The innovation in laboratories comes only with freedom of failure and analysis of experimental data

in professional life. Another dimension to the dismal performance of students in the laboratories is fixed hours of experimentation and non-functioning of instruments. The number of teachers who have adequate knowledge of the technology and competency to pose challenges to students is another reason for reduced laboratory component and quality of experiments.

In contrast to this, many reputed institutes have good teachers with stateof-the-art laboratory facilities, good bandwidth, continuous support for up-gradation and maintenance of lab equipment, opportunities for applied research and consultancy, and industrial tie-ups. The utilisation of costly laboratory equipment is a concern for these institutes. The teachers are ready to support the weak students from other institutes, but physical distance prohibits this readiness.

The solution to this long pending problem is technology. Web-based experiments and online lectures will emerge as a lucrative solution. At the College of Engineering Pune, ICT Virtual Laboratories have been developed through the MHRD’s National Mission on Education. The pilot plants developed at the institute are industry standard and due care is taken for their safety. All the data related to the experiment is stored in the database and is shared with the student after the completion of the experiment. This ensures the post analysis of the results and helps in identifying weak areas of learning. The support is available through webinars and a camera is attached along with a live mimic to view the status of the plant online. A dedicated line of National Knowledge Network (NKN) which guarantees a high speed of communication.

Labs

Labs at Jagran Institute of Communication and Management, Bhopal Dr (Prof) Vivek Khare, Principal Type of labs deployed at the institute: Computer Lab and Language Lab Lab solution provider: Learnsoft Language Lab

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he objective of lab deployment is to help improve the language skills of students.

It provides students with a high-tech learning environment and a knowledgeable tutoring staff to guide them with any aspect of language and learning: from speaking, listening and pronunciation to reading, writing, grammar or punctuation.

multimedia materials in which native speakers talk in authentic contexts.

They can also record themselves and listen to these recordings and compare their speaking skills in the target language with the original material. Audio, video and multimedia provide culturally appropriate resources with which students can interact.

Higher academic standards

A language lab is a vital tool for enhancement of learning among students.

Following are some of the features that would enable a language lab to work successfully. To begin with, it should have an auditory orientation, that is direct sound transmission should give a step-by-step guidance from the teacher to the heads of students with crystal

It will lead to higher academic standards as students will have more opportunities for language learning, even though in a virtual environment, which definitely nevertheless provides them with substantial exposure.

Student evaluation Students can be evaluated by assigning various projects where they are required to practice their target language in a real life situation. The teachers monitor the situation and provide the required feedback. Based on this feedback, the students rework their areas of weakness.

Smoothening the teachinglearning process Language teachers have been using technological aids for many years, some of which have been around from the beginning of the 20th century and so, even today, language teaching utilises various forms of technology to enhance learning in the classroom. In a language lab, students listen to, and/or watch,

Salient features

Objective Ä To help improve the language skills of students Ä Labs provide students with a high-tech learning environment and a knowledgeable tutoring staff to guide them with any aspect of language and learning

case study

clarity, and it should be able to engage students with individual systems. It should also be able to increase the pace of comprehension of the students and be able to provide foreign language practise in a focussed setting that eliminates feelings of self-consciousness. Finally, it should use text, audio and video and easily integrate them with actual everyday situations.

Students’ feedback Students appreciate the opportunity to learn through multimedia. With every session, they become more conscious of the fact and the simulations of authentic learning context can immensely help them in imbibing the target language.

Teachers’ training Labs can be successfully implemented by giving proper training and orientation to teachers who can then help in facilitating an adequate learning environment. The students can also be made aware of the benefits they will get by using such modern facilities. Regular workshops can be conducted on the use of technology required in these setups.

A thorough check of the equipment should also be done on a regular basis which will ensure smooth functioning of the lab on any given point of time.

Taking feedback from students can also contribute towards enhancement of the overall teaching learning process through these labs.

‘CALL’ for cooperative learning Teacher-centric instruction is out and student-centred approaches are definitely in. Learner autonomy is being recognised more and it is time for cooperative learning where individualised instruction is becoming the norm. Student participation in their own learning is on the rise and will continue to be so. Along with CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), MALL (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) would also gain much buzz. The challenge would be to allow them to do that and find the relevant technology and technology related projects to facilitate that.

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case study

labs

Triggering Students’ Creativity, Curiosity Labs at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Mumbai Principal In-charge: Prof Seema Shah Types of labs deployed: Language Lab, Electronics and Embedded Systems Labs, Telecommunications Lab, Virtual Lab

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he implementation of labs is leading to an enhanced teaching-learning process. This is because students can visualise abstract concepts and better understand how things work. This essentially creates an encouraging learning environment where the students’ curiosity and creativity are triggered. This builds a stronger foundation and thus, students are able to apply the concepts learnt in final year projects. Thus, the projects are meaningful, relevant in the current context and can be used with little efforts spent on converting them to prototype.

Some of the projects are used within the institute like online knowledge portal, online transcript system, online faculty feedback system etc.

Language Lab The purpose of a language lab is to involve students to actively participate in language learning exercises and get more practice than otherwise possible in a traditional classroom environment.

With a language lab, all students in the class can speak simultaneously without distracting each other regardless of the class size. Without a language lab, in a class of more than 10 students, each student gets less than one minute of speaking practice. In a language lab, the teacher has a computer with appropriate software for conducting language exercises, both teachers and students

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Prof Seema Shah use headsets, while the students have a recorder/player for recording/listening to speech. We have used language lab as a part of the Communication Skills and Presentation and Communication Techniques subject curriculum. While teaching these two subjects, the Humanities faculty identify students weak in communication and they are given extra exercises during the higher semesters.

This helps in preparation of technical and HR interviews during the placement process.

Electronics and Embedded Systems Labs • DSCH2 is used in the Digital Design labs for gate level/transistor level simulation. It simulates digital circuits and helps view timing diagrams • ISE 9.2i is a simulator for program-

ming digital circuits in VHDL and simulating them. These programmes can be downloaded on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) kit and can implement circuits on FPGA • Microwind: It used for VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) subject to make layouts of various CMOS circuits and can also do circuit analysis • Open Source Software like Ngsice, Magic: These are used for circuit simulations • MATLAB: Practical in Electronics and Telecommunication branches are conducted using MATLAB. It is a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualisation, and programming.

MATLAB is used to analyse data, develop algorithms, and create models and applications. The language, tools, and built-in math functions enable us to explore multiple approaches and reach a solution faster than with spreadsheets or traditional programming languages, such as C/C++ or Java. We use MATLAB for a range of applications, including signal processing and communications, image and video processing, control systems and test and measurement.

Telecommunications Lab • OptiSim: OptSim is RSoft’s awardwinning software tool for the design and simulation of optical communi-

labs

cation systems at the signal propagation level. It has state-of-the-art simulation techniques, an easy-touse graphical user interface and lablike measurement instruments.

• Genesys: Genesys is software useful for design and analysis of RF and Microwave circuits. It has an intuitive Windows design environment with integrated schematic capture and board layout along with system, circuit, electromagnetic simulators.

It provides graphical and interactive stage-by-stage diagnosis of impairments such as mismatches and spurious frequency mixing that are ignored by spreadsheets. System frequency planning is made simple through automatic identification of spurious free bands. We use Genesys in academics for analysis of transmission line, Smith Chart analysis, design of the impedance matching networks, design and analysis of microwave and RF circuits, and design and analysis of antenna.

• IE3D: IE3D is the first SCALABLE EM design and verification platform that delivers the modelling accuracy for the combined needs of high-frequency circuit design and signal integrity engineers across multiple design domains. IE3D’s multi-threaded and distributed simulation architecture and high-design capacity is the most cost-effective EM simulation and modelling solution for componentlevel and circuit-level applications.

IE3D offers the highest simulation capacities and fastest turnaround times for the broadest number of applications making it the best choice for improving your design team productivity and meeting design schedules on time.

Virtual Labs We are in the process of implementing virtual labs with IIT, which provides remote-access to labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering. These virtual labs would cater to students at the undergraduate level, post-graduate level as well as to research scholars. The objec-

case study

Aiding teaching-learning process • • • •

Faculty find it easy to teach concepts with these digital labs Concepts and abstract entities are visualised and retained for a longer period of time Higher level learning is possible Helps in applying concepts learnt in projects and technical co-curricular activities

tive is to encourage students to conduct experiments by arousing their curiosity.

This would help them in learning basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation.

Objectives • For explaining difficult theoretical concepts in the classroom, for conducting practicals where students can imagine and understand the concepts learnt, for UG and PG projects in relevant fields • Providing an opportunity to faculty and students to design and simulate their own work • Work done by the students has direct relevance to the industry and increases employability • Design software speeds up time needed if done manually • Use of simulation software in labs mimics the real-world scenarios/experiments

Modes of evaluation • During student’s final viva voce every semester, our external faculty gives feedback on student’s performance. This gives us an idea of the level of learning, which has been encouraging • Department level: At the start of every semester, we invite an industry experts from every department for an in-depth meeting with all faculty members to discuss what is happening in the industry, how we have implemented teaching of theory and practical in the last semester, and how we are going to teach now.

• Subject level: We ask industry experts to give their suggestions which

will make teaching worthwhile and relevant in the current context • Project level: Every project guide gets comments and suggestions for the project he/she is guiding from an industry expert

Teacher’s training and experience with labs • Vendor demos are organised for all new purchases: equipment and software for faculty and technical staff • Regular faculty trainings are conducted before faculty start practical • Teachers’ feedback has been positive, they found it easy to teach concepts, observed that students have developed confidence in their subjects and are able to retain these in higher semesters • Teachers are able to instill curiosity among students in their subjects

Students’ feedback • Students are engaged in the labs, since they find it interesting. They want to use the lab beyond timetable hours for fiddling with their ideas • Students find labs interesting and are understanding concepts better • They have found relevance to current technology trends and work happening in industries .

Future trends • More software are going to come up for design, simulations and testing in various branches of engineering • Collaborations among institutes for sharing labs virtually • Students and faculty are going to become savvier with e-usage and over the Internet.

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Perspective industry-academia gap xx industry-academia gap

Linking Industry-Academia There is a need to expand the vocational education and training programmes in the country to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend, says Prof (Dr) Louis Vernal

Secondary Education Education is the key to the task of nation-building. It is also a well-accepted fact that providing the right knowledge and skills to the youth can ensure the overall progress and economic growth of a country. The Report of the Education Commission (Kothari, 1964-66), titled ‘Education and National Development’, set a number of goals to be pursued. One of them was to vocationalise secondary education.

The National Vocational Education Mission includes the establishment of 1,600 new industrial training institutes (ITIs) and polytechnics, 10,000 new vocational schools and 50,000 new skill development centres to ensure that annu-

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ally, over 100 lakh students get vocational training. There is thus, a need to expand the Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes to reap the advantage of the demographic dividend of the country and to fulfil the aspirations and right of the youth to gainful employment and contribute to national productivity.

The total annual training capacity of VET programmes thus offered is estimated to be about 25 lakh. There also centrally-sponsored schemes of vocationalisation of secondary education which includes establishment of 1,000 polytechnics in the country under the government, PPP and private models.

Jan Shikshan Sansthan and Craftsmen training are other schemes.

About 90 percent of employment opportunities require vocational skills, which is not being imparted on a large scale to students. The major reforms proposed for bringing about necessary ‘flexibility’ in the offering of vocational courses and development of ‘modular competency-based curricula’ in collaboration with industry to suit the needs of both target groups and the employers (industry), will be useful in reducing the shortage of skilled manpower. The corner stone of a vocational framework would be the close partnership and collaboration with the industry/potential employers at all stages: identification of courses, content development, training and provision of resource persons, assessment, accreditation, certification and placement.

xxxxx industry-academiaxxxx gap Perspective

Prof (Dr) Louis Vernal • Member – National Council

for Teacher Education (NCTE), Western Region • Education Consultant –

Learning Links Foundation Delhi, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Goa • Former Dean, Faculty of Education & Chairman, Board of Studies in Education, Goa University

Avenues for collaboration There is a need to create avenues for a close academia and industry interaction through all the phases from conceptualisation to commercialisation. Academiaindustry collaboration includes: • Academic intervention in solving specific industry problems • Adopting alternate modes of evaluation • Bridging the gap between theory and application by bringing in live cases to the institute • Building up relationship with industry and career advisors • Collaboration to develop learning models • Core competency development • Curriculum adaptations move as fast as the pace of industry change • Designing faculty empowerment programmes • Developing joint academic-industry degree models • Development of research-based teaching material • Finalising and reviewiing curriculum in consultation with industry experts • In-plant training for professional competencies, and also to improve soft skills, communication skills, etc • Institution-based laboratory utilisation by industry

A National Policy on Skill Development has been formulated by the Ministry of Labour & Employment and which has been approved by the Cabinet in its meeting held on 23rd February, 2009.

The objective is to create a workforce empowered with improved skills, knowledge and internationally-recognised qualifications to gain access to decent employment and ensure India’s competitiveness in the dynamic global labour market. It aims at increasing the productivity of workforce both in the organised and the unorganised sectors, seeking increased participation of youth, women, disabled and other disadvantaged sections and to synergise efforts of various sectors and reform the present system.

• Paying attention towards pure sciences and IT-enabled services in a post-industrial economy • Remedying the lack of industry experience of the teachers themselves • Research: creation and growth of technological knowledge with industry support; tilt the focus of basic research towards application as well • Setting up of technology incubation centres in close proximity with academic institutions • Tailor-made education for the unemployed in shortage areas, for small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) • Training programmes for students on core competency development and action research programmes

Higher Education Workforce in India With elementary becoming universal in India, secondary education is targeted in the next phase. Higher education will take time to be transformed into a mass education initiative. At present, India has more than 15,000 colleges with about 10 million students. More than two-thirds of these colleges are Arts, Science, Commerce and Management (18 percent) and oriental learning colleges.

The recent growth is much greater in professional colleges especially engineering, management and medicine as well as in private vocational courses, catering especially to the IT sector. There are over 1,250 medical colleges.

A major concern echoed by both the industry and the academic community is that India has stock of some 22 million graduates, including six million science graduates, 1.2 million with engineering degrees and 600,000 doctors, according to the data compiled by the Economic Times Intelligence Group, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) and other industry sources. This population is growing rapidly, with over 2.5 million graduates added every year, including 25,000 doctors, 350,000 engineers and over 600,000 science graduates and post-graduates. Yet, at any given time, about five million graduates remain unemployed.

As per a McKinsey report, 73 million workers are needed by 2015: 50 percent more than today in the automobile and electronic sectors.

Collaboration between educational institutions and industry is vital for producing capable and employable workforce. The courses and their transaction should be tuned to the real-world requirements to increase the employability quotient for the students. The influx of a variety of global organisations have their own set of benchmarks and additional requirements are needed such as analytical ability, communication and people skills, technical proficiency, creative thinking and leadership competency, social media.

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Corporate Diary

The Digital Teacher Rajeev Pathak, CEO, eDreamEdusoft is an alumni of IIM Bangalore and BITS Pilani. He has started the company after having 19 years of working experience in technology industry. Prior to eDreams, Rajeev worked with Wipro as GM – Software Products Group. In conversation with digitalLEARNING, he highlighted how the company is helping schools in giving individual attention to students What is eDream Edusoft? eDreams Edusoft is a Bangalore-based company constituting a team of highly experienced individuals. The core team has a combined experience of over 100+ years in software product development, education and business innovation. eDreams has partnered with many educational and research organisations and is involved in basic and applied research to develop globally firstproducts.

Please share the genesis of the company.

We are two-and-a-half-year-old organisation working in the K-12 education technology space. The founders came into the education technology space after having successful careers in education and technology companies to give back to the society.To figure out the fundamental issues that exist in the education system, we went to several educational institutions across India, especially schools. It took us 3-4 months of research to realise that the fundamental issue is the homogenous nature of teaching/learning that exists in classrooms.Every child is uniquein terms of his or herability to learn, intelligence, attention span, concentration, interest, etc. And despite these differences, we teach them all together thesame thing at the same time and with the same methods, examples and questions. It is because of this that the child is unable to unable to understand many concepts and is unable to realise his/her potential. That is the fundamental problem.

Humans have been learning for over thousands of years without classrooms.

The concept of classroomscame into existence only in the late seventeenth& eighteenth centuriesbecause of the industrial revolution, which also created

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the need to impart the same homogeneous skills toall workers. Earlier, the human brain evolved from self-learning by interacting with the society.

Schools and classrooms have a lot of challenges. You cannot address every individual in a school due to limited time and large number of students. The solution is to provide one teacher per child to make the child realise his/her full potential.

The same concept can also be taught to a child according to their area of interest (say cricket, Barbie dolls), and each child has a different learning style and progression curve. Schoolstoo, agree that one human teacher is needed for every child for at least one-two hours in a day, if not for the whole day. But, providing a human teacher for every child is not possible. This issue challenged us to build an intelligent and adaptive technology that will provide personalized learning to each child. That is what our product, Funtoot, is all about: an attempt to provide individual attention to every child.It is anintelligent and adaptive learning solution like a digital teacher.

Please tell us more about Funtoot.

How does it work as a digital teacher?

Funtoot is an intelligent and adaptive personal tutor that teaches children in a fun and interactive manner. It observes, assesses, diagnoses, interacts, encourages and tutors each student based on his/her individual characteristics.

Funtoot has been developed after extensive research and is personalised to the precise requirement of the student.

Students can look forward to fun-filled learning. It helps cultivate innovative thinking in them. While enabling students to perform better in studies, Funtoot also assists teachers to monitor their

Rajeev Pathak students regularly and help parents be aware of the progress of their children.

As Funtoot is built for a cloud computing environment, it does not require installation of additional software or hardware.

A computer and an internet connection is all that is required to get started.

You have received angel investment upto Rs 5 crore last year. Please share with us your expansion plans.

We have strong presence in the schools in South India including cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Pondicherry, Coimbatore, Hubli, and Belgaum, etc. We have priced our solution in a manner that it is affordableto all.We also give special discounts to rural areas.

In the next one year, we plan to enhance our reach to the Northern and Western parts of India. In fact, we have started the deployments in some schools in North India already.

We are also raising further capital to grow in India and abroadand make our interactive and adaptive technology more apt. We have plans to provide personalized learning to 1 Million kids over next 4-5 years.

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Bringing Industry-Academia Closer We can have quality institutions only if we have deregulation and giving the institutions better autonomy and more flexibility, says Prashant Bhalla, Chairman, Manav Rachna Educational Institutions Please tell is about the concept behing Manav Rachna. What is your vision?

Manav Rachna was set up to provide quality education, especially to the students in Northern India. We started 15 years back in 1997 when privatisation in the higher education sector was negligent. At that time, certain policies of the AICTE and several initiatives of the central and state governments came in which wanted to push the private sector in coming into the higher education space.

Our commitment is to provide quality education and we try to bring in the best practices from across the world through our cross linkages, from various international institutions and partners, as well as very strong connectivity with industries like Tata Consultancy Services, Maruti Suzuki, Jai Bharat Maruti and other management, banking, finance and engineering companies.

We are trying to create a bridge between the industry and academia: the need of the hour. Our

curriculum is relevant to what the industry needs and aims at driving the whole system towards contributing to it.

How do the foreign collaborations contribute to Manav Rachna?

When you are associated with a good academic institution, the drive comes from the faculty and departments. There are articulations, academic exchanges, student exchanges, international placements, and joint research. We are trying to develop something that is truly indigenous with support mechanism from the best practices from across the world. Manav Rachna Institutions have a strong base of foreign collaborations with Carneige University, Curtin University (Australia) and with universities in Finland, UK, New Zealand, and other countries across the world. Our new venture, the Kunskapsskolan Schools is a new methodology of teaching prevalent in the West: a true personalised coaching, and goal-based learning that we are trying to bring in into our schools.

We will follow the CBSE curriculum and break it into a student-centric learning methodology rather than a student- or teaching-centric methodology.

What made you get into this field and what are your future plans?

The drive was to bring in something in the North. Today, we are trying to drive the environment in such a way that we make continuous innovations to provide new courses. We have to focus on the courses

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that are relevant to the current timeframe and the current generation and try to bring in ways to use the best available technology. Technology and digital learning should be implemented in the right way and the whole community should benefit out of it.

In the future, we will try to move into health sciences. We are creating the first flagship of Kunskapsskolan Schools in Gurgaon and we plan to take it to across the country.

What are your expansion plans?

We are trying to develop this programme as a methodology and as a concept. We will look at like-minded people who would be interested in working with us, or those who are running their own schools and would want to adapt to this methodology. It is driven by a learning portal and any school can adapt to it. The challenge is the implementation thought process and trying to work upon the existing system because there is a great resistance of change whenever you try to do something new.

Please tell us about your industryacademia linkages.

We are moving to a practical way of doing things. Our students get the advantage of picking their career from the day they join us. The industry also benefits from this because they do not have to work on training the students and on getting them involved in their system from day one.

Companies like Jai Bharat Maruti and Tata Consultancy Services are moving on to this thought process. During the selection process of the students, the industry representatives jointly do the selections and contribute towards what is being driven to them. We are also planning to start an MBA in healthcare with Fortis Hospitals.

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corporate diary

Casper Grathwohl, Senior Vice President – Group Strategy, Oxford University Press, in his conversation with Ruhi Ahuja Dhingra, talks about Oxford Educate and how it will teach the educators a better way of imparting learning in the classroom

Aiding Teachers

Digitally

Please tell us about Oxford Educate.

Digital materials have been around in the classroom for quite some time in India. There are quite a few technology companies in the market fighting to provide these services, but the content is not good or is not relevant. I read a study that said that only 20-30 percent of the digital material that is purchased by the

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schools is actually used. Oxford Educate has been our response to that – digital materials that can make a difference in the classroom, something that teachers want to use to enhance children’s learning.

What is special about Oxford Educate is that it is much more than just a course book in digital form: you can

page through it and click on different elements with animation and readings. In the English Language Teaching courses, you can read poems and hear them in the original language. You can also see videos and print documents.

Oxford Educate gives all the tools to teachers that they need to teach a course more effectively. In the past, digital prod-

corporate diary

ucts were offered as supplements, but they did not offer help in teaching the course. The material that publishers have been offering since the last couple of years when the entered the space, has better content but is not a part of the course. That is what makes Oxford Educate special. Also, it is free and other publishers either charge extra if you purchase the CD with the digital materials along with the book. But we are offering the material for free not only because we are committed to education and want to see students perform better and help teachers, but also because we think our products will do better and more people will use them because the digital material we are providing is effective.

by technology in ways that some of us who are older are not. But because Oxford Educate is very simple to use: you can turn pages just the way you do on an e-Reader or when you are on the web, there will hopefully be no gap between a teacher’s and a student’s understanding about the programme.

The challenge outside of Oxford Educate is Indian teachers need better technology training and this training will soon be the key to a long-term successful Indian education system that is growing so rapidly. Technology evolves so quickly and young people are always going to be on the edge of where we are going. So teachers have to learn to adapt to this.

What is your view of the adoption of the digital medium in India?

There is a huge difference between the range of schools in the market. The private high-end schools in tier-1 cities are very different from those in tier-3 cities that do not have a lot of money. The challenge with digital in a place like India is that it is not happening uniformly across schools. The digital revolution is at different points on a scale at the same time.

Therefore, you cannot come up with a solution for your ideal classroom and expect the educators to be able to implement it.

My view is that the gap is closing partly because technology is becoming less expensive. Tablets used to be so expensive but they will get lower to a point where if not everyone, but at least the next layer down of students will have access to these materials. That is going to make a huge difference. As of now, everything is print-based while technology sits as a supplement. But when real change happens, technology, digital and print will be blended together in a way that one does not drive the other. Right now, print drives digital.

The cost of tablets will soon come down to a point where if not everyone, but at least the next layer down of students will have access to digital materials.

That is going to make a huge difference

Students are more tech savvy as compared to teachers. How do you think that gap can be bridged?

To be fair, Oxford Educate will not bridge that gap fully. Young people are excited

Will Oxford Educate serve as an aid to the teachers?

Today’s students are as sophisticated with digital at the age of seven or eight years as teachers are and that is very intimidating. This makes the teachers think that digital makes their job harder and that they cannot do anything that is more difficult or that they are not comfortable with.

When we developed Oxford Educate, we talked not to just digitally-savvy teachers, but also those who do not use digital to find out what they need to

get more comfortable and make things more interactive for students. Even the teachers who are less comfortable with digital will find that it works just like how they use their Facebook or shop online. Oxford Educate’s CDs are very intuitive and easy to use. That is why they will work.

Oxford Educate has been designed to help teachers use the course material. A teacher can read out a poem to the class.

He can also have that poem on the screen with an audio sounding like Shakespeare. This way, students will learn as they pay attention to the story that is being told. What a better way to learn! Oxford Educate will help teachers because it is too much of a task for teachers to do it without any support right now.

In how many countries have you launched Oxford Educate?

India is the first. We developed this specifically for the Indian market and did the research here. Digital education is taking off in India and we thought this is time when we could make a difference.

What are your plans for the Indian market?

Right now, Oxford Educate accompanies 13 courses across all subject areas.

Courses like English Language Learning, Computer Science, Mathematics and Science will be launched now and teachers will receive CD-ROMs. Our website also has tips on how to use the CDs, contact information and best practices.

Our plan is to have teachers use this.

We have trained all of our 130 teacher trainers to help teachers if they need any assistance. We will gather all the feedback and update Oxford Educate every year so that it has new features and more content. It is very important to stay close to the classroom and learn and keep updating it. We probably will not be perfect at it at first but we will try to remain nimble so that we can constantly keep up with what teachers need. And we think that if we publish a new course and make it available every year, we will be improving the programme.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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Event Report

Shri Sikandar Singh Maluka, Education Minister, Government of Punjab (Left) and Kahan Singh Pannu, IAS, Secretary-cum-Director General, School Education, Government of Punjab inaugurating the exhibition at the State Education Summit

L to R- Kahan Singh Pannu, IAS, Secretary-cum-Director General, School Education, Government of Punjab; Parampal Kaur, Additional State Project; Dr R S Khandpur, Director General Pushpa Gujral Science City, Punjab lighting the lamp.

Punjab State Education Summit Inspires Teachers to Use Technology Department of School Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Government of Punjab, and Elets Technomedia hosted the State Education Summit in Chandigarh on 7th and 8th February, 2013

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Event Report

I

n the words of the programme Chair of the event, Kahan Singh Pannu, IAS, Secretary-cum-Director General, School Education, Government of Punjab, “The summit was convened with the objective of discussing and witnessing the huge dimensions in education which are taking place in the country.” Pannu added,“Technology plays a sole leader in our daily lives and a key role in how we teach, learn, and interact on the administrative platform in schools. Technology is the only answer to make students learn better. One of the most important components of education is to create curiosity and creativity among children.

So, how can technology can be put to use in the best manner in this respect, especially in the government schools, was the objective of this conference.”

Esteemed dignitaries graced the conference Sikandar Singh Maluka, Education Minister, Government of Punjab, was the Chief Guest at the conference. Among eminent Guests of Honour at the summit were: Dharam Vir, IAS (Retd), State Election Commissioner, Haryana; Vivek Atray, HCS Director & Special Secretary to Government, Haryana, Electronics & Information Technology Department and Managing Director, Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd. (HARTRON); Parampal Kaur, Additional State Project Director, Government of Punjab; Dr R S Khandpur, Director General Pushpa Gujral Science City, Punjab.

Reaching to those who matter the most More than 1500 delegates including representatives from the government, education regulatory bodies and corporate organisations from across the country, district coordinators and school principals from different districts of Punjab attended the two-day summit. The summit facilitated one-to-one interaction among the key dignitaries and the attendees.

The summit agenda The two-day summit included seven sessions along the school and higher Education track. The sessions included: Towards Transformative Innovation in Education, STEM (Science Technology English & Mathematics) Education, Role of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in School Management, Innovative Technologies in Education, Career Counseling: Choosing the Right Path, Revamping School Education through Skills & Vocational Education, Emerging Trends in Higher Education and Higher Education: Challenges, Opportunities and Insights.

Confederation of private sector and academicians Corporates from across the country demonstrated their innovations towards propagation of interactive learning in classrooms. While teachers got acquainted with the advancements in other parts of the country with help of such innovations, the presentations from these corporate helped administrators to understand the role of ICT in bringing in transparency in administration.

The summit also witnessed presence of top level officials and senior academicians from different education regulatory bod-

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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Event Report

ies, universities, technical institutes and schools. To name a few: Prof Krishnamachar Sreenivasan, Sr Faculty Member, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Ropar; Dr A K Dwivedi, Director, NIELIT, Chandigarh, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology; Dr RS Bawa, VC, Chandigarh University; Dr M B Dholakia, Joint CEO, Gujarat Knowledge Society; Dr Jessy Abraham, Associate Professor, Department of Teachers & Non-Formal Education (IASE) Jamia Millia Islamia; DNV Kumara Guru, Director, External Relations, Indian School of Business, Mohali; Dr Neelam Gulati Sharma, Additional Director, Punjab State Council for Science and Technology; Earnest Charles J Samuel, Founder and Principal, Mount Carmel School, Chandigarh; Komal Singh, Principal, Millennium School, Mohali; Dr Madhu Chitkara, Vice Chancellor, Chitkara University, Punjab; Dr Amrit Lal, Principal, DAVIET, Jalandhar; Dr Lovi Raj Gupta, Vice Chancellor, Baddi University of Emerging Sciences and Technology, Himachal Pradesh; HS Bawa, Industrial coordinator, Centre of Industrial Liaison and Placement Thapar University; Dr Rohit Dhand, Additional Dean, Lovely Professional University; Gurmeet Singh Dhaliwal, MD, Baba Farid Group of Institutions; Dr Maninder Singh, Head Computer Science Engineering Department, Thapar University; SPS Bedi, Executive Director, Chandigarh Group of Institutions; J S Dhillon, Professor in Electrical and Instrumentation, Sant Longowal Institute of Engineering and Technology; Satish C Sharma, CMD, Maharaja Group Of Colleges, Udaipur; Virender Rawat, Director - Academic, B窶適anae School, Gujarat; Prof (Dr) Devendra Pathak, Vice Chancellor, APG Shimla University; Dr Aneet Bedi, Professor, Dean Academics, Gian Jyoti Institute of Management and Technology; Jeet Singh, Doaba Institute of Engineering and Technology; Dr Jasvinder Pal Kour Shergill, Principal, Government Medical College, Sangrur Road, Patiala.

The summit also had a special session on the essence of Career Counseling that was conducted by Pervin Malhotra, Executive Director, CareerGuidanceIndia.

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Recognising the best practices in Punjab The summit was not only an insightful ride through ICT innovations in the education sector for the people of Punjab, but it also recognised and felicited some of the best practices in the sector in Punjab itself.

Useful ICT innovations in Punjab 1. Mobile Car Science Lab: A car that moves from school to school which does not have lab facility. The car is fitted with necessary instruments and material for conducting practical classes on science subject.

2. Project ePunjabSchool: The online portal has connected all middle, high and senior secondary school with centralised database and provides updated information of students, teachers & school infrastructure.

3. Udaan: The project is aimed at spreading awareness of general knowledge among students and teachers. Ten questions and answers are mailed to all the schools and put up on the notice boards so that students can note them and revision tests based on these are conducted during free period. This gives students a free access to questions on a particular topic.

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Event Report

ICTACT BRIDGE Concludes its Chennai Edition

Industry – Academia Interaction with the focus on Skill Requirement for a Paradigm Shift

I

CT Academy of Tamil Nadu (ICTACT) is organizing a series of conference titled “ICTACT BRIDGE” a platform for all the stake holders in the education eco-system to discuss on improving the Industry-Institute collaboration, thereby creating a vibrant industry relevant education scenario in the country. This event is being supported by Government of Tamil Nadu and conducted in association with NASSCOM. For the 7th time in the row ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu successfully conducted ICTACT BRIDGE conference.

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The conference addressed the pressing factors challenging employability with focus on 21st century skills for Education, employability, and Entrepreneurship on 20th Feb 2013 at Chennai Trade center, Nadambakkam. The event was supported by ELCOT, EDI Chennai, TANSACS TNSDM, STPI, FICCI and TiE. ICTACT BRIDGE 2013 Chennai edition featured powerful sessions and tracks to address specific stakeholder issues with focused themes including Leadership in Building World Class Institutions, The 21st Century Skills for Teachers, Skill De-

velopment and Employability, Conclave on Recruitment Trends 2013 followed

by ICTACT Academic Partner Excellence Awards 2013.

The conference was represented by a multitude of key stakeholders from Academia, Corporate, Government and Media. The Academia participants included academic leaders, the teaching fraternity, research community, placement officers etc. The Corporate participants included corporate executives, senior management members, technical executives, etc.

Event Report

A team of eminent experts from the industry and academia are part of the ICTACT Bridge committee, are leading the conference, provide expert guidance, finalise the theme and framework of the conference and be part of various activities of the conference thereby making the conference a real bridge between the industry and academia. The conference was not only a chance to hear from those leaders and brainstorm for the future, but an opportunity for the academia to network with corporate.

BRIDGE 2013 – Chennai Edition witnessed around 1160 participants from 347 colleges and various corporate.

K Ganesan Global Head, Talent Acquisition, while giving the welcome address stressed on the point that the education ecosystem should fine tune its learning system and the syllabus to get itself updated to the 21st century education. The syllabus should be made student centric with active learning. Education through Internet should be facilitated. He quoted that ‘21st century education is not a Sage on the Stage but a Guide by the Side.”

Thiru Atul Anand, IAS, Managing Director, ELCOT said, “ The government will ensure the access of IT to every nook and corner of the state. He advised that the academia should have an open mindset and accept the new trends

which will help them to adopt for the 21st century education.”

Thiru Kumar Jayant, IAS, Secretary – Project Director – Tamil Nadu Aids control Society opened his speech by requesting the college to understand the input of the student. The students though have a routing exam system and score high marks are not competent enough to face the demands of the industry. The students are very poor in application skills, but have great skills in memorising and scoring great marks. College is where more freedom should be given to the students and there should be mechanism to suppress the pressure of students. All colleges should have orientation programs.

Reading books beyond the academic curriculum should be made mandatory in all institutions. This habit will fetch great difference among the students and improve their communication skills in the long run.

David J Gainer, Public Affairs officer, US consulate, Chennai spoke about the values of the Indian education system.

He stated that they will introduce 100 community colleges in India. He mentioned that Indian students are working all over the World in all Top MNC’s in all sectors; it is the educational background which makes this possible. He stated

that more a half a million Indians travel to US every year. There are strategies framed for the collaboration of the Indian and the US educational institutions.

Thiru P Murari, IAS (Retd), Advisor to FICCI President & Former Secretary to President of India Thiru Murari started his speech by stating that he is very much delighted to be in ICTACT Bridge conference.

Not only IT but teaching skills are enhanced by taking such collective initiative. Eighty percent of the people who emerge from various institutions are still not employable. The State skill development is established to upgrade the skills and make them employable.

We have to look into this problem very urgently. What we need to do is to develop and foster the entrepreneurship spirit among the students. Convert the job seekers into job creators. Risk taking ideas should be promoted. Entrepreneurship cell should be created in every college with partnership from corporate and effectively utilized for the growth of the students. Another important issues is the innovative spirit of the students, because of this the patent registration in India is very low.

He finally ended his speech by quoting about the entrepreneurship talent hunt organised by FICCI and US embassy.

The Closing session was given by Crazy Mohan and he explained about how skill development has helped him throughout his career. He shared his experience and how his teachers have been an important inspiration for his success. He finally concluded that everyone should nurture a skill which will help them through their lifetime.

digitalLEARNING / March 2013

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PERSPECTIVE Industry-Academia Gap

“Integrate Skill Labs in the various district level colleges to include the rural and semi-urban youth in the Skills Movement,” Says, Bikram Dasgupta, Founder & Executive Chairman, Globsyn Group

A

ccording to the India Labour Report 2009, 1.4 billion youth is expected to enter the country’s labour force by 2026. Around three million students are added to Indian workforce every year. Despite deceleration in the broader economy, India is set to create more than a million jobs across various sectors. Though this sounds a promising figure, the industry perspective differs.

Only 10-15 percent of them are considered employable by the industry.

With the growth rate expected to hit a record low figure in a decade, India is

in the middle of a crippling economic slowdown. But, it is unlikely to hit the hiring pattern. Companies are on the constant look out for skilled manpower so as to cut down their training costs.

Multi-skilled people are given more preference in all fields.

It is a sorry fact that around 53 percent of the Indian youth faces a serious problem of skill deprivation, thus leading to the industry academic gap. With globalisation providing huge opportunities to the Indian youth, Indian youth need to up their employability quotient to meet the growing demands of the industry. With government allowing FDI in multi-brand retail, we expect that there will be huge demand for workforce for that particular sector. As reflected through the figures, availability of labour will not be a major problem. What is of concern is the absence of skills to meet the global standards. There is a need to groom the students with specific add on training so as to refine their existing skills.

To combat this issue, there is a major debate on how to bridge the industry — academic demand and supply gap. One of the approaches is the shift of the Indian education system from the current teacher-centric system, to the more holistic and robust learner-centere instructional methodology. Further to this, emphasis should be given to vocational educaBikram tion in colleges.

Dasgupta

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Colleges today should pay equal importance to life and work skills along with regular academics.

One of the breakthrough ideas would be to integrate skill labs in the various district level colleges so as to include the rural and semi-urban youth in the skills movement. This will help the industry to address this skill gap by up-skilling and cross-skilling the students. The objective is to complement the existing curriculum followed by the colleges and groom the student to meet all the professional demand at the workplace right from day one of his office life.

The Indian government too, has gauged the potential of skilled manpower. Therefore, the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) was formed as a part of the coordinated approach to skill development to synergise and enhance industry and employer participation in skill development. As a part of this, NSDC has taken up the mandate of skilling 500 million people by 2022.

Considering the present scenario, collaboration of the skill training institutes with the industry is extremely essential. The corporates need to recognize the importance of certified skilled workers. The industry at this hour needs innovative solutions from the academia to meet their business needs of higher productivity and lower costs without compromising on efficiency.

(The author is an alumnus of IIT-KGP and Harvard Business School)

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