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BRIDGING THE INCOMPATIBILITIES BETWEEN EDUCATION & TECHNOLOGY here is now a massive rise in the popularity of online solutions that allow learners to be creative, solve problems that are of interest to them and learn independently. But India has been late in waking up to the online learning trend, mainly due to the lack of broadband penetration in the country—this issue is now being gradually resolved through programmes like Digital India. However, just creating broadband infrastructure and distributing laptops among students is not the answer. It is also necessary to have high-quality online courses, and efficient systems for promoting, accessing, adapting and redistributing them. Today we have hundreds of startups creating countless learning platforms, which can ensure that learning becomes more ubiquitous, affordable and there is less and less reliance on institutions, but due to lack of infrastructure, they are often unable to reach the learners. The learners too don’t have the tools to analyse the quality of the educational material that is being offered. The crisis in India’s education sector can only be tackled when there is a strong relationship between all the participants in the education ecosystem: the drivers of government programmes like Digital India, school and college administrators, teachers, educational technology solution providers, students, parents, as well as the potential employers. It is necessary that the education leaders should focus not only on the technologies and the courseware, but also on building connections. The government can transform its role in the value chain from a solution provider to a solution partner, whose goal is to help create and foster an integrated education ecosystem by entering into partnership with education technology providers. Such an integrated ecosystem is critical for providing the learner with a continuous learning experience, from the school to the workplace. The Digital India programme can be a collaborative effort where government frames the policies and sets the standards, while the private sector provides the technology solutions. The central challenge in India’s efforts for reforming education through digital solutions is bridging the incompatibilities that exist between our education sector and technology companies. The programmes like Digital India must take full advantage of the power of technology-driven learning, which is being developed mainly by the private sector. Learners are looking for flexible, mobile-enabled learning experiences that are as compelling as what is generally taught in the universities, but the development and dissemination of such tools is only possible when there is deeper integration between the government programmes and the technology providers.

PROGRAMMES LIKE DIGITAL INDIA MUSTTAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGYDRIVEN LEARNING, THE SOLUTIONS FOR WHICH ARE BEING DEVELOPED MAINLY BYTHE PRIVATE SECTOR

anoop.verma@expressindia.com

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NOVEMBER, 2015

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THE PLAN FOR SKILL DEVELOPMENTIN INDIA’S YOUTH Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Union Minister of State, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (Independent Charge) & Parliamentary Affairs, Government of India

interview

feature 14

CLOUD COMPUTING LENDS WINGS TO EDUCATION 20

USING TECHNOLOGY FOR OPEN & DISTANCE EDUCATION Prof. Nageshwar Rao, Vice Chancellor (In-Charge) Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)

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ANALYTICS IN EDUCATION MEASURING & SHAPING STUDENTPROGRESS NOVEMBER, 2015

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feature 24

interviews PIYUSH SOMANI

46 Securing India’s Data Center Industry

BRINGING ERPTO SCHOOLS 28

EDUCATION GOES DIGITAL 52

eLEARNING CHANGING THE WAYWE LEARN

KAPIL MEHROTRA

DESTINATION ANALYTICS NEWPARADIGM FOR TRAVEL INDUSTRY

48 Staying Ahead in Evolving IT Landscape

MANIPALGLOBAL'S SUCCESSFULTRYSTWITH AWS CLOUD

in the news

case study 36

WizIQ TAKES AAKASH TO THE CLOUD

event 56

» Haryana to launch learning enhancement programme in 3,222 schools » India to bring foreign Indian experts for empowering education

DIGITALINDIADIALOGUE

» Snapdeal and Credila unveils online education loan on an e-com platform » Rajasthan tops in IIT admissions

» Dell buying EMC in transformational $67 bn deal » Twitter planning 4,200 employees layoffs

FOSTERING INDIA’S DIGITALECONOMY Attended by a galaxy of select flag-bearers and thought-leaders representing the bureaucracy, academia, corporate institutions and the media, the Digital India Dialogue had the theme of ‘Fostering India’s Digital Economy’ EXPRESS COMPUTER

» ICICI launches in-store m-payments with ‘mVisa’ » Amazon launches platform for ‘IoT’ app » Bye bye Google, hello Alphabet NOVEMBER, 2015

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NOVEMBER, 2015

INTERVIEW RAJIV PRATAP RUDY

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NOVEMBER, 2015

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THE PLAN FOR SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA’S YOUTH “ICT is the key enabler of the Labour Market Information System (LMIS), which is the national database on all the major areas of skill development. It is being created in partnership with all other Ministries in the Government of India and the State Governments,” says Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Union Minister of State, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (Independent Charge) & Parliamentary Affairs, Government of India. In conversation with Ankush Kumar

The Government of India has been giving lot of importance to skill development of the youth in the country. In what ways is the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship contributing in the achievement of this vision? The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship came into existence on 9th November, 2014, along with my induction in the Union Cabinet. Before that there was no separate ministry for this sector. The creation of this ministry signifies the importance that this government is prepared to give to skill development in the country’s youth. Under the new Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, the government is making an attempt to coordinate all the skill development efforts in the country. The ministry aims to make the broad policies for skill development and market requirements, match the demand and supply of the skilled workforce. We intend to build an institutional framework in the sector for more formalised ways of imparting skill training, and also establish private partnerships to create linkages between industry and institutes. As far as entrepreneurship is concerned, the ministry aims to foster entrepreneurship education among EXPRESS COMPUTER

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rajiv Pratap Rudy at the launch of Skill India Mission

youth through formal partnerships with educational institutions, business communities, mentorship networks, incubation centers and successful entrepreneurs. The Ministry will also focus on promoting entrepreneurship in the field of science and technology. Ultimately all the above mentioned objectives converge to make India the skill capital of the world.

Tell us about the key achievements of your ministry since its inception in November 2015? We have taken major initiatives to ensure that the systems for skill development and entrepreneurship are easily available to the youth in all parts of our country. We have launched the National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015. We have NOVEMBER, 2015

INTERVIEW

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RAJIV PRATAP RUDY

initiated the National Skill Development Mission, which is being chaired by the Prime Minister. We have initiated the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, which has the target of training 24 Lakh youth within the next year. Recently on the World Youth Skills Day, we started the Skill Loan Scheme. We are working with a target of providing skill training to 40.2 crore people by 2022.

Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister has given its approval for India’s first integrated National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015. The policy acknowledges the need for an effective roadmap for the promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to a successful skills strategy. The vision of the policy is “to create an ecosystem of empowerment by skilling on a large-scale at speed with high standards and to promote a culture of innovation based entrepreneurship which can generate wealth and employment so as to ensure sustainable livelihoods for all citizens in the country”. Under this policy the government will try to educate and equip potential entrepreneurs, both within and outside the formal education system.

Please share with us the roadmap by which the skill related training can be provided to 40.2 crore people by 2022? We are developing partnerships with several other ministries and departments in the Government of India, and also with the private organisations and international institutions. Our partnerships with various ministries allows us to use their spare infrastructure for conducting skill related training. For instance, in railways we have access to thousands of stations, where lot of infrastructure is already there. We can use this infrastructure for giving handson training to the youth. Also, the cabinet has approved the common norms for skill development schemes. Now more than 70 central programmes will have uniform norms, ranging from course duration to cost and eligibility. The Ministry’s flagship scheme, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), has been launched. We believe that initiatives that we are taking now will enable the youth of the country to develop skills that are needed by our industry. According to the report from National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), the employment opportunities in India will increase from 461.1 million in 2013 to 581.9 million in 2022. This means that in order to achieve the vision of Make in India programme, we have to first ensure that the objectives of Skill India are achieved. Large number of jobless youth from smaller towns and rural areas are now migrating to the larger cities in search for jobs. How are you planning to boost entrepreneurship among the country's youths? We are focussed on developing a culture for entrepreneurship in the country. The 10

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We are working with a target of providing skill training to 40.2 crore people by 2022

Information Technology,and basically the websites on Internet,including the social media,are now full of resources for developing skills.In what ways is the ministry planning to use online mediums for the benefit of the youth? We are giving lot of importance to the Internet and social media space for reaching out to the youth and generating awareness about skill development. We are also using the Information Technology solutions within the ministry. ICT is the key enabler of the Labour Market Information System (LMIS), which is the national database on all major aspects of skill development, and is being created in partnership with all other ministries of the Government of India and the State Governments. The LMIS will be a one-stop shop in which all the relevant information will be freely available to the citizens. The government has created a National Steering Committee for setting up the Labour Market Information System (LMIS). The LMIS will bring in operational efficiencies, it will be transparent and available to all, and will help reduce considerably the situation of one individual being benefited under different schemes. We have also set up the Skill Development Management System (SDMS), which has 1400 training partners, 28179 training centres, 16479 trainers, 20 job portals, 77 assessment agencies and 4983 empanelled assessors. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

INTERVIEW PROF. NAGESHWAR RAO IGNOU

USING TECHNOLOGY FOR OPEN & DISTANCE EDUCATION “The key achievement of IGNOU’s online admission system is that it has made it much easier for the students in all parts of the country to apply for enrolment in the university,” says Prof. Nageshwar Rao, Vice Chancellor (In-Charge), Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). In conversation with Mohd Ujaley

For the academic session 2015-16, IGNOU received three lakh new applications, out of which about 45,000 came through the recently launched online admission system.What is your view of this online initiative for facilitating admissions? We are encouraged by the positive outcome of the online admission system. This year, we were a little late in announcing the date for online admission— our admission process started in April 2015 and we made the announcement for online admission in May 2015. We had been under the impression that the online applications will not be more than 10,000, but students have responded positively and close to 45,000 students enrolled online. We have received positive feedback on the online system from students, parents and from officials at our regional centres. They have also pointed out some discrepancies in the system, which we are now addressing. In January 2016 academic session, the system will be much better. We will announce the dates much earlier, so that more students can apply online. We are now also looking to discontinue the publishing of the prospectus, because it is a costly affair for the university to publish and distribute this literature. Once an online system is fully in place, there won’t be any need for the prospectus to be published. In your view what is the key achievement of the online admission system? The greatest achievement of IGNOU’s online admission system is that it has 12

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significant number of applications. My view is that from next year, when we will be actively promoting the online admission system, the enrolments from the rural areas will be higher. As there is greater penetration of broadband in the country, it will be possible for people in all parts of the country to apply online.

made it much easier for the students in all parts of the country to apply for enrolment in the university. The students don’t need to come to our regional centres, they don’t need to get the demand draft issued, they don’t have to stand in long lines, they can apply online from the comfort of their home. Is the online admission system helping IGNOU to reach out to the students living in the smaller towns and rural areas? According to our analysis, at present it is mostly the urban students who are applying online. Out of 45,000 online applications that we have received about 10,000 are from Delhi. The other major metros have also contributed a

What is your view on using new technologies for improving the scope of the education being provided at IGNOU? I am in favour of using technology for education. In fact, at IGNOU we used to have the Gyan Vani and Gyan Darshan satellite channels. Recently these channels were discontinued, but now we are trying to reactivate them. With these satellite channels, we can disseminate information in much more efficient and cheaper ways. Earlier we had put all our course material online under the eGyan Kosh programme, but due to IPR policy, we had to end this initiative. About 90% of our courseware is in the digital format. We are also open to using devices like tablets for providing education. But our criteria is that the devices have to be reasonably priced at around Rs. 4000 to 5000. Does IGNOU have a plan to use predictive analytics for understanding the educational needs of the students and accordingly plan the courseware? We are already using predictive analytics. In our planning division, we NOVEMBER, 2015

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hold the data on all our learners since 1987. Now we are making comparative study of the data: course-wise, age-wise and sex-wise. So far it has not been published, but I am encouraging them to publish it so that people from outside IGNOU can also benefit from it. Our regional centres are also holding the information on the popularity of different courses—we are analysing this information to understand the level of popularity of the various courses that we offer. The software for running these programmes is partially being created by our own IT staff—IGNOU has a computer division in which about 50 people are working. We also have a technology enablement group consisting of close to 20 professionals. Due to the growing popularity of cloud computing, virtualisation, data analytics and other areas of IT, some universities have started offering advanced courses in these subjects. Is IGNOU planning to offer advanced courses in IT? We must accept that every course that we teach in the universities will have a lifecycle. Five years ago some courses such as MBA used to be very popular, but today such courses are finding it difficult to attract large numbers of students. At IGNOU, we are constrained by the lack of human resource in technology and that is why it is difficult for us to offer courses in higher technology. In the past we have tried to get into collaboration with private parties to provide higher education in Information Technology. There is a feeling that people who get educated through the open and distance learning programmes are less employable. What steps are you taking to help IGNOU students find suitable jobs? We have placement cells at the headquarter and at the regional centres. Recently, our Noida centre organised a placement opportunity meet in which 11 companies and 500 students participated. Out of 500 students, about 150 were shortlisted and finally about 50 students were selected for various jobs. This indicates that the IGNOU students are comparable to the students of EXPRESS COMPUTER

Prof. Nageshwar Rao, VC (In-Charge), IGNOU interacting with academic staff at IGNOU

ABOUT IGNOU

stablished by an Act of Parliament in 1985, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) serves the educational aspirations of over 3 million students in India and other countries through 21 Schools of Studies and a network of 67 regional centres, around 2,667 learner support centres and 29 overseas partner institutions.The University offers about 228 certificate, diploma, degree and doctoral programmes, with a strength of nearly 810 faculty members and 574 academic staff at the headquarters and regional centres and about 33,212 academic counsellors from conventional institutions of higher learning, professional organisations, and industry among others.

conventional universities. IndiGo airlines has recently hired about 50 students from our institute; they plan to hire more from various regional centres across the country. I would also like to tell you that IGNOU has started a programme in collaboration with Hero Motors. In this

The mandate of the University is to: Provide access to higher education to all segments of the society; ● Offer high-quality, innovative and need-based programmes at different levels, to all those who require them; ● Reach out to the disadvantaged by offering programmes in all parts of the country at affordable costs; and ● Promote, coordinate and regulate the standards of education offered through open and distance learning in the country. ● To achieve the twin objectives of widening access for all sections of society and providing continual professional development and training to all sectors of the economy ●

programme we are providing theoretical training, while Hero Motors takes care of practical training. We also have a triparty collaboration with the Tihar Jail, in which Hero Motors is the third party. mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

CLOUD COMPUTING

LENDS WINGS TO EDUCATION The true significance of the role that cloud is playing in education space becomes evident when viewed from the perspective of the user—students, teachers, parents and others can access a variety of education services using whatever devices they have access to BY JASMINE DESAI

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he future of education is all about access, anywhere learning and collaboration. The proliferation of affordable devices, broadband connectivity and digitised educational content is enabling the institutions to use the online mediums for knowledge transfer. The growing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) shows that students have already started preferring a college experience without the traditional brick-and-mortar college. Cloud is central to the success of MOOCs and other initiatives for online learning and collaboration. According to Gartner, globally 37% of the CIOs in the education space are exploring new ideas for investing in the cloud. “By 2017, at least 75% of the new and replacement student information systems in higher education globally will be SaaS- or cloud-based,” says Gartner in one of its Strategic Planning Assumptions (SPA). In another SPA, Gartner makes an interesting point about the usage of cloud in India’s NOVEMBER, 2015

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education sector: “Through 2018, more than 10% of education institutions will adopt cloud-based ERP offerings from India at less than one-third of the price of traditional on-premises solutions.” It is clear that educational institutions, and technology companies, now strongly believe that the future of education is the cloud.

The Allure of Cloud The distance learning programme has been one of the key motivators for cloud computing implementations at the Welingkar Institute of Management. Dr. Pradeep Pendse, Dean IT/eBusiness/Business Design, WeSchool, says, "In case of the distance learning EXPRESS COMPUTER

programme, the key incentive was flexibility in scaling up or down depending on demand. Since several thousand students connect to the distance learning website for various purposes from enquiry to registration, to reading and downloading content etc., the usage is never predictable." According to Dr. Pradeep Pendse, the extensive use of videos is also a key reason why cloud is a compelling proposition. He informs that cloud is usually offered by vendors who have strong data centres and strong internet bandwidth, so better infrastructure management is the natural payoff of any movement to the cloud. However, the main purpose is to improve the services

that are being provided to the students. “Last year we moved our entire distance learning programme to the cloud,” he informs. The institute utilises a cloudbased email service. They also have a SaaS based payroll system. The key benefits of the email service and payroll system include the reduced application management effort and costs, and the much lower infrastructure costs. Krishna Kant , Head, EMC Academic Alliance - South Asia & Russia, says, “I have seen many universities move towards cloud deployment both for educational and infrastructural purposes. From an infrastructure standpoint, cloud leads to agility, scalability, elasticity, ubiquitous computing, automation and on-demand access to a range of resources. This leads to far greater utilisation, sharing of information and a much richer learning experience. Some universities have even started offering MOOCs by using their cloud infrastructure.” He points out that the usage of cutting edge technology by educational institutions is enabling the students to develop a holistic view of how modern technology works. “Such a view of technology at work,” he says, “will help the students in their future career.” As per an EMC Zinnov study, the private cloud industry in India is expected to create 100,000 jobs by 2015, which represents a 10 times growth from 10,000 in 2011. Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President of ManageEngine says, "SaaS technologies and cloud computing are being deployed by most universities and colleges. The gap between technology adoption at educational institutions and corporations is fast narrowing." Some universities are experimenting with flipped learning, in which the direct instruction moves from group learning space to the individual learning space. The instructional content, which is stored in the cloud, is mostly delivered to the learners through the online medium, outside the classroom.

Reaching Out to Students With the massive student interest in online courses, the universities that are NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

CLOUD COMPUTING

The solution should enable easy linkages to social platforms,which enable seamless collaboration between students, parents, researchers and professors Biswajeet Mahapatra Research Director,Gartner Inc

The gap between technology adoption at educational institutions and corporations is fast narrowing Sridhar Iyengar Vice President of ManageEngine 16

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using cloud are in a better position to attract more students and are expected to do better. Arun Shetty, Director of Collaboration Solutions - India, Avaya, says, “Cloud adoption makes sense for the education sector, because the technology allows the institutions to reach out to large numbers of students and faculty without having to invest, manage, monitor, upgrade and scale the systems/applications/software. The proliferation of online learning/ online assessment solutions is enabling the institutions to provide quality course material to their students at very low cost.” The needs of every educational institution is different and in order to make a judicious investment in the cloud technologies, the institutions have to look at their priority areas. They must also make adequate investments in network infrastructure. Sajan Paul, Director Systems Engineering - India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, says, "The key areas that can provide clear benefits include technologies like messaging and collaboration tools, multi-media conferencing, and centralised storage capability. In India, National Knowledge networks (NKN) is enabling many premium educational institutions in research and collaboration.” Sajan Paul gives the example of Xavier University in Bhubaneshwar (XUB). He informs that this university has started Juniper Networks powered campus this year. With this infrastructure, XUB is a completely digital institution, capable of offering services such as Xavier Videobook, which allows its students to source relevant and contextual video content to make learning more immersive, and Xavier My Room, a platform for hosting virtual classrooms and peer-to-peer interaction using highquality video and audio conferencing. The institution is also using several cloud tools and software solutions that make it easier for the students to access course material. Cloud based Office Suites, financials on cloud and content on cloud are the most utilised services for education sector. Cloud is increasingly being used by educational institutions for backing up

data and running educational applications. “Universities have to innovate to provide better value to the students. With the adoption of cloud, costs may go up in the short term, but it leads to a great learning environment, and students will do much better. Close to 75% of students prefer classes with at least a moderate level of technology. An analysis of the performance of students shows that technology increases a student's selfesteem and this in turn motivates him to learn,” says Iyengar of ManageEngine. Jitendra Panchal. Jt. Director – IT Infrastructure, SVKM, Central Office, Mumbai, speaking, on Narsi Monji Institute of Management's cloud projects, says, "We are using cloud actively. Our mailing solution is on cloud. Our website hosting service is with Aware India, which is again on cloud. Our Blackboard Learn is on US-Blackboard cloud and the NMAT exam online application is also on the cloud." He also speaks about the security issues that are there in cloud deployment and usage. He informs that many checks have been performed before finalising their cloud solution. “NMIMS has been using cloud solutions for more than a year and till now we have not faced any problem,” says Panchal. “The Institute is planning to go for virtualization in its in-house data centre located in Mumbai and for its DR again planing to go for cloud.”

Innovation is an Ongoing Process Pendse of Welingkar Institute points out the challenges that his institute has faced in its cloud journey. He says that the transition to cloud was difficult, because after the application had to be re-tested on the new cloud infrastructure, the data had to be migrated and the existing students had to be informed. However, the changeover went off smoothly. He informs that the institute is planning to increase its presence in the cloud, because it is a big challenge to manage the infrastructure. “Cloud can help us release precious data centre space in our campus. This space can be used for other academic purposes,” says Pendse. Digitisation and cloud computing can be helpful for managing almost every NOVEMBER, 2015

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aspect of the institution. Just to give an example, the documents and the transcripts belonging to the students can be scanned and efficient digital workflows can be developed. With such systems, the students will have better opportunities for interacting with their teachers and other students. They can use chats, with Facebook like interfaces, they can share documents with ease like in Dropbox. However, this will also lead to the generation of lot of unstructured data, which is usually storage hungry. “To take care of the emerging storage needs, the technology must be scalable,” says Pendse. Kant of EMC is of the view that with the IT industry being redefined, it is necessary that the skills of our emerging IT students keep pace with the IT innovation and help bridge the demandsupply gap. “EMC runs an initiative called EMC Academic Alliance to accomplish this. Through the Academic Alliance program, EMC provides colleges and university faculties with curriculum options designed to fit a variety of ITrelated programs. For example, EMC has partnered with Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) to offer the world’s first suite of Masters and Undergraduate Degree programmes in Cloud Computing. CIT is currently offering MSc and BSc degrees in Cloud computing,” he says.

The Road Ahead The ongoing innovation in the cloud space will have a discernible impact on the education sector. Many educational institutions are moving towards the hybrid cloud model, which allows them to take advantage of both, the public and private cloud. As virtualization continues to tie servers and networking closer together and silos within enterprise IT begin to dissolve, there will be a higher adoption of converged infrastructure. MOOCs, the new trend in education, could not have been possible without the deployment of cloud on a massive scale. “MOOCs has the potential of taking information to a new audience, irrespective of geographical distance. The technology is best suited for conducting virtual classes,” says Iyengar EXPRESS COMPUTER

of ManageEngine. According to Iyengar, it is also important to look at the trend of collaborative learning, which is now enabling students to work together from anywhere and at any time. “It is cloud that makes all this possible,” he says. According to Shetty of Avaya, educational institutions should adapt technologies, which enable them to enhance the experience of their students. He says that cloud is helping the institutions develop systems for online learning and assessment, for improving collaboration between students and faculty. “Today important educational content is easily available online in different languages,” he says. “This is benefiting large numbers of students who had been left out by the traditional structure of education.” Large-scale digitisation is a growing trend in education sector. Paul of Juniper Networks is of the view that as more institutions recognise the possibilities of digitisation, the significance of this vertical is going to rise. “E-learning is now being offered by most institutions, and given the maturity of cloud technology, the scope of e-learning is bound to improve in the times to come,” he says. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director,Gartner Inc points out the areas in education where cloud computing vendors should focus. He says, "They should direct their attention more towards local hosting of applications. They must have cheaper applications (with very low margins but very high volumes). It is important that the solutions should be easy to customise or to migrate and upgrade. Optimum security and data protection is a must. The solution should enable easy linkages to social platforms to enable collaboration amongst students, parents, researchers and professors.” It is clear that now it is time for all institutions of education to embrace the cloud. Many institutions in India have already deployed the cloud, but there is still a long way to go to ensure that all the institutions are ready for the future of technology. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

Cloud is increasingly being used by educational institutions for backing up data and running educational applications Sajan Paul Director Systems Engineering India & SAARC,Juniper Networks

Some universities are now offering MOOCs by using their cloud infrastructure Krishna Kant Head,EMC Academic Alliance South Asia & Russia NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ANALYTICS IN EDUCATION

MEASURING & SHAPING STUDENT PROGRESS Educational institutions are now looking at analytics for generating information on how they can adapt their teachings to help the students BY MOHD UJALEY

EXPRESS COMPUTER

ecently when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the facilities of German automotive major Bosch in Bangalore, they were shown a presentation on how data analysis and data mining can help in the real time prediction of road accidents. The predictive abilities of data analysis and data mining can also be useful for the education sector. A humongous amount of data is being held by the schools, colleges, universities and education bodies across the country. This data can be analysed to uncover insights that will boost the student achievement and improve operational effectiveness across educational

institutions. It is important for educational institutes to track and record the data related to demographics, performance, attendance, co-curricular activities and placement records. They need to closely monitor the financial planning and budgeting process, faculty data and other operational data. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Analytics can provide interesting insights in several areas such as faculty attrition, popular courses and student preferences. Insights into educational performance can act as a strong guide for institutes to help students opt for courses in higher studies, and thereby aid them in selecting the ideal career path,â&#x20AC;? says Noshin Kagalwalla, NOVEMBER, 2015

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Managing Director, SAS, India. Mitesh Agarwal, Vice President & CTO, Oracle India, has similar views. He says, “Education sector can leverage the power of analytics to increase student, faculty and staff productivity, to better manage finances, streamline operations, and ensure the success of the students. They can also track the metrics around segments like student admissions, student records and financial management.”

Capturing the Basic Data Presently the educational institutions are mostly capturing the data related to students and teachers age, qualifications, demography, attendance, test score, socioeconomic status and placement. “Schools capture the scores of students in various tests, attendance and in some cases performance of students in extracurricular activities. The attendance data and test-scores are analysed to find out the levels of interest in schooling for a specific student. If the student is losing interest, it will be manifested in the attendance and in grades,” says Sameer Dixit, Head-Big Data and Analytics, Persistent Systems. Analytics can be helpful for correlating attendance with scores to identify the target scores and the minimum numbers of classes required. However, some experts are of the view that as most of the institutions are capturing only the basic data, they tend to lack the ability for extracting meaningful insights. According to Krishna Kant, Head, EMC Academic Alliance, South Asia & Russia, data generated by students, faculty and administration, can be analysed to discover useful, but for that a good analytics tool is needed. “At present most institutions don’t have access to better analytics tools,” he says. Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, Managing Director-Health & Public Service, Government Relations and Corporate Affairs, Accenture, says that currently the schools are having a system for tracking the data on the performance of students and teachers, but as they lack dedicated and structured process, the data is not stored for a substantial duration. The short period for which the data is stored is not enough to generate meaningful EXPRESS COMPUTER

insights. He suggests that ideally, an education institute should store data for at least 5-6 years.

Capturing more with Analytics tools Today the data flows into the higher education institutions from all directions such as online applications; online classroom exercises; assessments, both online and offline; social media; blogs; and student surveys. The role that cuttingedge analytics software can play in deriving insights from a wide variety of data is well established. “Analytics has made it possible to track the student’s entire learning curve. This gives rise to possibilities where tweaks can be made according to the pace and skill levels of the students. Tracking digital content also takes data tracking into a new space by providing student engagement metrics and identifying successful and unsuccessful learning content and initiatives,” says Saugata Das, Offering Leader, Cloud Business Solutions, Personalised Learning Solutions, IBM. “Given the technology advancement, every bit of data can be captured and stored. The cost of capturing, processing and analysing data has come down significantly. For instance, now there are schools that store the classes conducted by experts,” says Gupta of Accenture. Social media analytics is another area of importance. The groups that the educational institute may have on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc., can be used to deliver meaningful insights on the learning styles, behaviour and preferences. Video channels like edX, Coursera and even YouTube can be an important resources for generating students related data. “When a student watches a video, the data on which videos he watched, for how long, how many times the video was paused, after how much time did the student dropped off, can be captured. Even the data on the order in which different videos were watched can be captured. The comments and questions posted by students can also be captured and analysed. The e-learning tests can also be captured to develop insights on what questions the students skipped and on what questions the student spent lot of

An education institute should store data for at least 5-6 years to generate meaningful insights Sanjeev Kumar Gupta Managing Director-Health & Public Service,Government Relations and Corporate Affairs,Accenture

Insights into educational performance can act as a strong guide for institutes to help students opt for courses in higher studies Noshin Kagalwalla Managing Director,SAS,India NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ANALYTICS IN EDUCATION

time,” says Dixit of Persistent Systems.

Trends in Analytics for Eduction

Education sector can leverage analytics to increase productivity, manage finances, streamline operations,and ensure success of the students Mitesh Agarwal Vice President & CTO,Oracle India

Analytics has made it possible to track the student’s entire learning curve Saugata Das Offering Leader,Cloud Business Solutions,Personalised Learning Solutions,IBM. 22

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The interest in analytics is fuelled partially by the constant innovation that is happening in this area. Today there exist tools that allow the institutions to build ever-stronger links between data, teaching and learning and to maintain a focus on developing the skills and knowledge that we value as a society. The technological tools for e-learning, real time data capture, storage and analysis has been maturing. The adoption of technologies such as text analytics, sentiment analytics and statistical analysis for pattern mining is also on the rise. “Learning analytics is in many ways applying Big Data to education. It can be used in isolation or in combination with web analytics, artificial intelligence, data mining, social network analysis or traditional statistical techniques,” says Gupta of Accenture. Organisations have been using recommender systems, instant skill assessment tools, social network analysis, personalisation, adaptive content and data visualisation for advanced data analytics. “Educational data mining combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP), statistical analysis and modelling techniques such as predictive, prescriptive or text can help predict patterns. Machine learning and social network analysis is also an integral part of the analytics being performed,” says Das of IBM. There is a proliferation of digital content pushing learning beyond classrooms. This is giving rise to a large amount of structured and unstructured data which can be positively harnessed to improve learning. IBM offers an education programme called ‘Career Education for Business Transformation (CEBT)’. “CEBT is aimed at developing skilled professionals who can engineer better outcome in different industries so as to transform business for the modern era,” says Das. The platform developed by Persistent Systems is called ‘ShareInsights.org’. This platform is free for use by educational institutions provided that they follow certain terms of usage.“Going beyond just creating awareness on data analytics, we have taken a step ahead to address this

issue by setting up Persistent Computing Institute to provide new thinking in Computer Science education in India,” claims Dixit. SAS India conducts regular monthly webinars for academic institutes. Partners, consultants are often invited to deliver guest lectures, host discussion sessions and meetings with schools at several levels ensuring the spread and reach of analytics across the nation. The company offers joint programmes on analytics with leading schools in India such as Indian School of Business (IBS), Hyderabad; Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore; Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow. Accenture India practitioners have been guest faculty at a number of educational institutes. While EMC has been running a successful initiative called EMC Academic Alliance to engage and educate the management of educational institutions, train the faculty and help them skill the students. The students are also able to have free assessment and credentials, which they can populate on their resume.

Awareness, Privacy, Funding Several challenges have to be overcome for enabling the institutions to take advantage of analytics. The challenges include: the lack of awareness about the benefits that can be accrued from analytics; the absence of a culture that can enable data-driven decision making; and the absence of a promoter or leader who is motivated to get analytics implemented within the institution. Issues like lack of clarity on privacy related issues, and the paucity of funding, is also a cause for concern. “Privacy is a major issue, organisations need to have the necessary measures in place to ensure that privacy is preserved,” says Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager, Tableau, India. Similar views are being expressed by Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, Talisma Corporation. He says “Privacy is an important area of concern. The onus is on campuses to inform students and other stakeholders on the nature of data being collected and where the data would be used and seek their consent before collecting data.” Other key challenge is low awareness about data analytics use in education. NOVEMBER, 2015

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IN NUMBERS SCHOOLING SEGMENT GROWTH FORECAST

$95.8 Billion

A GREAT OPPORTUNITY

29%

$144 Billion

2015

of India’s population being between the age group of 0-14 years

■ According to research firm IDC, the big data and analytics market is expected to be $125 billion worldwide in 2015.And, it is growing at Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.5%.

Sameer Dixit Head-Big Data and Analytics, Persistent Systems

LARGEST IN THE WORLD

29.63 48,116 MILLION STUDENTS

■ Overall, the global smart

INDIA’S HIGHER EDUCATION SEGMENT EXPECTED TO INCREASE TO

$37.8 B i l l i o n by 2020.

COLLEGES

Experts say that one of the foremost ways of addressing this is to increase the collaborative effort between educational institutions and data analytics companies. Creating a curriculum through this methodology will be more effective. On the challenge of ensuring the availability of limited funding for educational institutes, Kagalwalla says, “Gone are the days when analytics was a tool in the hands of a select few. Innovations such as the cloud and affordable technologies such as Hadoop have helped in democratising analytics and making it available to more consumers at lower cost. EXPRESS COMPUTER

If a student is losing interest, it will be manifested in attendance and grades

education and learning market is set to grow from $105.23 billion in 2015 to $446.85 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 24.4%. ■ In India, according to

Nasscom, analytics market is expected to be more than double to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18

So educational institutions that may find the infrastructure for analytics expensive, can definitely explore these options.” The industry players are optimistic that in due course of time all these challenges will be overcome and institutions will be able to take maximum benefit from analytics. “We are very optimistic that analytics will see a high growth. While specific numbers for analytics in education sector are not available, there is definitely a large opportunity that lies ahead,” says Kagalwalla of SAS India.

Organisations need to have necessary measures in place to ensure that privacy is preserved while using data analytics tools Deepak Ghodke

mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com

Country Manager,Tableau,India. NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ERP @ SCHOOLS

BRINGING

ERP TO SCHOOLS To integrate different sections of their diversified operations into a single, cohesive and easy-to-use system many schools are now turning to ERP BY RASHI VARSHNEY

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ith the objective of streamlining the management processes and reducing operational costs many educational institutions are now deploying ERP. It is well known that ERP systems make it easier to track the workflow across various departments, so that there is better visibility into the important processes, across various departments of the organisation. However, the cost of ERP software, planning, customisation, configuration, testing, implementation is quite high, and if the institution does not plan well it may fail to achieve the expected outcomes. Recently IIT Roorkee (IITR) conducted a meeting for implementing SAP ERP project, which will cover the end-to-end lifecycle management of all the processes and functions in the institution’s three campuses located at Roorkee, Saharanpur and Greater Noida. The ERP project, aptly named “Advaita", which means “the one for all”, is going to be implemented in multiple phases.

Along with taking care of all the management related tasks, the Advaita will help the institution in keeping track of the student from the point where he gets enrolled.

Trend for Digitisation “Technology has pervaded into every aspect of school management—from delivering high quality audiovisuals in digital classrooms to tracking the location of the school buses through GPS devices. The requirement of every institute varies in accordance to the size and scale of their operations. However, schools are increasingly realising the importance of adopting technology to increase efficiency and decrease overhead costs,” says Darpan Vasudev, Vice President, Next Education India. Founded in 2007, Next Education provides cloud-based ERP solution to close to 6500 schools in India. Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan and Delhi Public School are using NOVEMBER, 2015

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The problem with schools is that here the staff are totally used to the traditional way of doing things and it is very hard for them to move into a different system Darpan Vasudev Vice President,Next Education India

ERP solutions developed by Next Education. With ERP the functions across the enterprise get integrated into a single system that supports the institution’s financial, human resources, and student service transactions and processes. The ERP solutions offer the advantage of being integrated with each other and being capable of tracking many things at the same time. For instance, when data is changed in one area, information automatically changes in all the related areas and functions. When ERP is being implemented, it can also lead to the redesigning of the standard systems according to the global best practices. “Globally there is a mega trend for ‘Digitise or Die’. There is no way for organisations to survive 2020 without digitisation. This is creating a huge requirement in the market for quality ERP products for all kinds of organisations,” says Unni Koroth, co-founder and CEO, EXPRESS COMPUTER

Foradian. The Bangalore-based ERP solutions start-up Foradian Technologies, provides a cloud-based education solution Fedena, which acts as an information system of educational institutes by collecting and organising data of the dayto-day operations of the institutions and generating insightful reports for helping in decision making and collaboration. Fedena has various modules for managing timetable, attendance, examinations, grade-books, campus news, hostel, library, transportation, school calendar, events and much else. It also has a Human Resource module for managing payroll and employee pay slips.

Start-ups Riding on the Wave The major ERP providers in the education sector are the global IT giants like Oracle, SAP, Wipro, etc. However, the rising demand for ERP solutions for the management of unique requirements is leading to the rise of large number of start-

One thing that I want every education institute to do before implementing an ERP or even a technology tool is to have a couple of real use cases Abhiraj Malhotra CEO,SchoolPad NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ERP @ SCHOOLS

» www.expresscomputeronline.com

There is a mega trend for ‘Digitise or Die’. There is no way for organisations to survive 2020 without digitisation Unni Koroth co-founder and CEO,Foradian

Government’s initiatives like Digital India and Make in India are encouraging the organisations to look at ITsolutions for cutting cost and increasing efficiency Yogesh Agarwal CEO,Applane Solutions 26

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ups. Institutions like Army Public School, Federal Public School, Bluebells Model School, Universal Education Group are using Applane ERP software. “The ERP market is a highly unorganised with lot of players in all price ranges and product variations,” Unni Koroth from Foradian Technologies. Applane provides cloud ERP through which the educational institutions can automate their back-office systems, academics, classrooms, transport, library, hostel, HR, sales, deliveries, accounts and finances from a single window with reports and analytics. “The educational institutions are now showing more interest in digitalisation. Government’s initiatives like Digital India and Make in India are encouraging the organisations to look at IT solutions for cutting cost and increasing efficiency. In case of cloud related solutions there are some security related concerns, but overall we have a huge opportunity for growth,” says Yogesh Agarwal, CEO, Applane Solutions. SchoolPad, a start-up, is providing solutions to schools like Chitkara International in Punjab. Essentially SchoolPad is a cloud based software, which aims to simplify the school operations. It improves communications between the parents and teachers and leads to better avenues for collaboration in the educational effort. Abhiraj Malhotra, CEO, SchoolPad, informs that many of the K-12 institutions are aware of the ERP software with which they can bring more efficiency to the management of their institution. “The bad news is that the evaluation of these technology tools or so-called ERPs is something that a lot of these institutes are yet to conduct. As there is very little actual research done, there is scope for failed implementations,” he adds.

Challenges & Opportunities The challenges that the institutions face in implementing ERP are often related to technical and the budget related issues. At times the staff in the institution is not fully trained in the use of ERP systems. Also, the decision makers at the institutions want to have a clear view of how the ERP can help in reducing the cost of managing the institution. But the process of

installing ERP is never quick and easy, and the experience of installation is likely to differ from institution to institution. According to Abhiraj Malhotra of SchoolPad, many institutions face problems in implementing ERP, because they did not conduct a thorough research before deciding to buy ERP. “Clarity on the important requirements and on how those requirements fit or are taken care of by the system are the important things that the institute must understand upfront before investing into such a system. Another big challenge that I have come across while talking to schools and colleges is related to the post implementation training and support because of which the teachers struggle to use these tools leading to a much reduced usage ratio,” he adds. Vasudev of Next Education points out that when it comes to technology implementation, no two verticals are alike. Each sector has its own challenges. “Implementing an ERP solution in schools is very different from implementing it in other sectors. The problem with schools is that here the staff is totally used to the traditional way of doing things and it is very hard for them to move into a different system, which is based on Information Technology. Also some schools have the aspiration, but they lack the infrastructure for effective ERP implementation,” he says. Agarwal of Applane has similar views. He says that as the school administration staff is engaged with traditional ways of managing the institution, they continue to prefer the manual systems even when the ERP has been implemented. Malhotra of SchoolPad says that it is important that the schools have a trail before going for the final implementation of ERP. “One thing that I want every education institute to do before implementing an ERP or even a technology tool is to have a couple of real use cases. Let’s say you want to use technology for the management of the process of collecting fees of your students—the system should be such that it can generate a list of defaulters and send them a quick SMS reminder. You must first of all have a trial run.” rashi.varshney@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

NEWS EDUCATION

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Haryana to launch learning enhancement programme A PROGRAMME DEVELOPED to enhance quality of education in state-run schools will be made operational in 3,222 primary schools in Haryana. Under the Learning Enhancement Programme (LEP), an initiative of Haryana government prepared in collaboration with Boston Consultancy Group, 18,000 primary school teachers have been trained over the last one month as part of the state’s quality improvement programme. The 3,222 LEP schools are spread across the state and more than six lakh students are enrolled there. The first hour of the school day will be

observed as ‘LEP hour’ in these schools, where teachers will use books that have been specially prepared by State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT).

India to bring foreign Indian experts INDIAN EXPERTS TEACHING in international institutions overseas will be brought home to to raise the level of education system in the country, a senior educationist has said. “We are working on an initiative to bring Indian educators overseas to teach in local institutions for at least one semester,” S S Mantha, former chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education told PTI.

Online education model is being made for end-to-end courses, which will be available through videos streaming, said Mantha, who delivered a keynote address at the Second BERG Education Awards for excelling Indian institutions and individuals. A series of follow on plans and programmes are coming up to the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Skill India’ initiatives, Mantha said.

Online education loan on an e-com platform THIS EDUCATION LOAN is the latest addition to Snapdeal’s expanding portfolio of financial services which includes personal loans, home loans and co-branded Snapdeal HDFC credit card. Snapdeal, in partnership with educational loans specialists Credila, an HDFC group company, has launched customized education loans offering on an e-commerce platform. Customers will have the opportunity to avail benefits, like up to 100% finance of EXPRESS COMPUTER

their education with no upper cap on loan and easy EMI repayments, company claims in a statement. “Our aim is to create a digital commerce platform that caters to diverse consumption needs of our consumers. With rising costs of education, student fees has become one of the highest spends that a household incurs,” said Tony Navin, Senior Vice President, Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives, Snapdeal.

Rajasthan tops in IIT admissions RAJASTHAN TOPPED THE list of states in cracking entrance exam of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology this year, with nearly 20% students gaining admission to the 18 IITs. According to a recent report of JEE Advance 2015 by IIT Mumbai, 19.7% of those students who secured seats in the prestigious institute belong to Rajasthan. 1965 students from Rajasthan secured IIT seats out of a total of 9974 seats. Uttar Pradesh has secured the second position with 1259 qualifying students, while Andhra Pradesh which topped the list last time, had 776 students. 770 students from Telangana secured seats this year. In another interesting trend, 25 per cent of the seats, this year, were secured by students from rural areas who have completed their upper primary schooling in Hindi medium as compared to 90 per cent seats grabbed by students from urban areas last year. Girls, this year, secured 900 seats in IITs, a share of 9.03 per cent as compared to 8 per cent of the seats secured in 2014. The detailed report also said the fathers of 888 qualifying students practiced agriculture whereas fathers of 232 students were doctors and of 466 students were engineers. The fathers of 1548 qualifying students were involved in business while mothers of 6690 selected students were housewives with a modest level of education. The fathers of 479 students were teachers while of 2989 qualifying students were government employees. The report also mentions that every fifth of the qualifying students had prepared for the exam in Kota. NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

eLEARNING

CHANGING THE WAY WE LEARN

The growing reach of broadband and the easy availability of smart devices has created a vibrant environment in which numerous start-ups can flourish by creating innovative platforms for e-learning ANKUSH KUMAR

he education infrastructure in India is one of the largest in the world—it comprises of 1.4 million schools, 35,500 colleges and 600 universities. Yet this infrastructure is not sufficient to meet the education related needs of our geographically diverse and populous country. e-learning is now being looked at as one of the thrust areas for enabling learners to access high quality educational material even if they lack access to traditional classroom based teaching. “The total e-learning industry size in India is $700 million. It has witnessed a growth

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of 25% in the last five years,” says Gaurav Kumar, Associate Director, KPMG India. Many e-learning players have been catering to the overseas market, leveraging on cost arbitrage/ lesser development cost. “The domestic share in e-learning industry is around 20% and the rest is led by the overseas market. With higher internet penetration, we believe the industry has the potential to grow at more than 40-50% over the next five years,” Kumar adds. R K Prasad, CEO and Co-founder, CommLab India, believes that the nature of e-learning being pursued by the

corporate sector is markedly different from what the institutions of education are using. “In USA, the latter leads the former. In India it is the former that will lead, because the educational institutions are too staid and monolithic to take advantage of e-learning,” says Prasad. He was of the view that today, in India, there is much greater awareness about e-learning in the student community. “The fact that out of the 2.8 million learners who have registered for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on the USA-based education platform Coursera, 8.8% of learners are from India, is a NOVEMBER, 2015

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With higher internet penetration,we believe industry has the potential to grow at more than 40-50% over next 5 years Gaurav Kumar Associate Director,KPMG India

testimony to the growing popularity of e-learning. Many of those who have registered are professionals who are looking for an opportunity to upgrade their knowledge,â&#x20AC;? adds Prasad. CommLab India is offering a Learning Management System (LCMS), a software technology platform on which e-learning courseware is hosted and served to the learners. The company designs and develops custom (bespoke) e-learning courseware for different devices.

Corporate Training Through e-learning Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) is in the EXPRESS COMPUTER

business of providing technology-enabled learning solutions to corporations, universities, schools, publishers, and government institutions. The company has created immersive learning formats such as virtual 3D worlds, multiplayer simulations, gamification, learning nuggets and story-based learning. Ishrat Shums, Executive Vice President - Global Marketing & Proposal Design, Tata Interactive Systems, is of the view that the Indian e-learning market is full of promise. He says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Corporates in India are driving the usage of e-learning through various learning and development programmes.

In India the demand for e-learning from corporates will lead, as the educational institutions are too staid and monolithic to take advantage of such solutions for learning R K Prasad CEO and Co-founder, CommLab India NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

eLEARNING

Once the entire country becomes connected through broadband, the providers of e-learning will find it much easier to connect with learners Professor Sarika Lidoria Director,ITM University Online

OpenSAP is an effective system for enabling learners to receive feedback on their hands-on work from both peers and SAP experts Ravi Kiran Director - Knowledge Management (SAPTechnology),SAP Labs 30

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High attrition coupled with expensive recruiting is leading to e-learning becoming the de facto standard in the industry.” According to Ishrat Shums, many corporations are inclined to have engagements, which span across the entire learning value chain. This has led to a hike in the demand for offerings such as Training Needs Assessment, Performance Support Solutions, Learning Effectiveness Measurement, and few others. She is of the view that the rapid adoption of personal learning devices represents significant growth opportunities. In partnership with the Hasso Plattner Institute, SAP has developed its own elearning solution called openSAP, which is free and is regarded as a thought leader for Enterprise MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The courses offered under this platform range from application development on the SAP HANA platform to cloud to other user experience (UX) topics. According to SAP, the platform has garnered 730,000 course enrolments and 225,000 unique learners, out of which about 30% are from India. “All you need to sign up is a valid email address. The courses are free of charge (except for optional system access) and are offered in English,” informs Ravi Kiran, Director – Knowledge Management, SAP Labs India. The platform consists of videos, self-tests, discussion forum, weekly assignments, gamification, and final exam. Recently openSAP started offering the facility for peer assessment to some of its courses. This is an effective system for enabling learners to receive feedback on their hands-on work from both peers and SAP experts. Ravi Kiran believes that technology enabled learning is important for improving skill development in the country. He says, "eLearning has a crucial role to play in providing the required skillsets to future job market entrants in a country like India which is expected to face a potential shortage of 250 million skilled workers across sectors by 2022. Technological advances are also affecting the way we learn and work and this is disrupting the education sector globally.”

The Digital Highway to Learning Under the Digital India programme, the Government of India is planning to connect 600,000 villages through highspeed broadband. "Today many universities, corporates and government bodies are trying to make a mark in the online education space. Due to lack of proper connectivity they are currently facing problems, but once the entire country becomes connected through broadband, the providers of e-learning will find it much easier to connect with learners,” says Professor Sarika Lidoria, Director, ITM University Online. The ITM University Online, which is a part of the ITM Group of Institutions, has taken many initiatives in e-learning. e-learning is now being deployed by the institutions at all levels. Splash Math, a start-up, has over ten million users. Targeted at children in the age range of 4 to 10 years, Splash Math has been downloaded 400,000 times on devices like iPad, laptops, desktops, etc. Arpit Jain, Co-founder & CEO, Splash Math, says, “Currently we are offering this in the US market, where over 12 million children have already benefited from it. Our solution supports sync across multiple platforms and we have added five million users in last one year, largely driven by elementary school adoption. In the domain we operate, the US Market is pretty mature and in North America elearning market is going to be $27 billion by 2016. Canada, UK, Australia are also catching up. Latin America, India are our next big bets.” Vamsi Krishna, CEO, Vedantu, believes that a normal classroom teaching in which we tend to take up a 'One Size Fits All' approach is not so effective and should be changed. A live online tutoring platform, Vedantu currently caters to the students between 6th to 12th grades in CBSE and ICSE curriculum. It is possible for any student to opt for live online session/course with the teacher of their choice. Each teacher is listed with an hourly rate and the payment by the student is on a pro-rata basis. Vamsi Krishna informs that Vedantu has an adaptive and intelligent in-house WAVE technology (Whiteboard, Audio and Video Environment) that has completely NOVEMBER, 2015

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THE SCOPE OF e-LEARNING LARGEST MARKET FOR E-LEARNING AFTER USA According to a report from the UK-India Business Council, India is now the largest market for e-learning after USA.

250 MILLION SHORTAGE India is expected to face a potential shortage of 250 million skilled workers across sectors by 2022

INDIA: one of the largest educational infrastructure

1.4 MILLION

SCHOOLS

35,500

The inbuilt facility of video conversation in mobile phones and availability of 4G is taking e-learning to new levels of effectiveness Lovleen Bhatia Co-Founder & CEO,Edureka

COLLEGES

600

UNIVERSITIES A new report from IDC says that by 2017, India will overtake USA as the world’s second largest smartphone market. Total wireless or mobile subscriber base is 98.08 crore out of 100.93 crore telecom subscribers India’s app usage is growing at a rate of 13% year-on-year outpacing global growth

The domestic share in total e-learning industry is around 20% and rest is led by overseas market.

$ 700 MILLION Size of total e-learning industry - 25% growth last 5 years

By making learning ‘motion-based’, physical skills can be taught in a virtual environment Manish Gupta Co-Founder & CEO,G-Cube

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FEATURE

eLEARNING

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We use data analytics and algorithms to connect the most relevant teachers to the students as per their requirements Vamsi Krishna CEO & Co-Founder,Vedantu

revamped 1-to-1 teaching and learning experience. “WAVE makes learning online a pleasure—it enables very low-bandwidth teaching sessions. We use data analytics and algorithms to connect the most relevant teachers to the students as per their requirements. We also have a clickto-call feature integrated to our system that facilitates quick and seamless connection between tutors and students. Our technology additionally allows session monitoring and calculates the studentteacher engagement level of each session. It allows students to also take objectivetype tests online and submit subjectivetype assignments that can be later evaluated by the teachers,” says Krishna. Extramarks is a well-known provider of digital education solution for K-12 schools in India, South Africa, and Middle Eastern Countries. More than 5000 schools and about a million students use Extramarks products. "The new concept of ‘Bagless Environment’ in schools is being enthusiastically received by various stakeholders in the education system,” says Atul Kulshrestha, Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, Extramarks Education Pvt. Ltd. He gives the example of Muslim Education Society, which has now adopted the system of bagless classroom. Close to 700 students of the society are getting their education through electronic means.

The Mobile Classroom

The new concept of ‘Bagless Environment’in schools is being enthusiastically received by various stakeholders in the education system Atul Kulshrestha Founder,Chairman and Managing Director,Extramarks Education 32

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According to the latest telecom subscriber data released by TRAI, the country’s telephone subscriber base is now 100.93 crore. Out of this the total wireless or mobile subscriber base is 98.08 crore. Many mobile subscribers in the country, even those in the smaller towns, are now using smartphones. A new report from IDC says that India continues to maintain a double digit growth in the uptake of smartphones and by 2017, India will overtake USA as the world’s second largest smartphone market. Mobcast, a mobile app for employee engagement and training, enables a company to broadcast its content like product presentations, management videos, event invites, news and announcements to employees at the click

of a button. Its platform is being used to impart training to over 500,000 users across 30+ organisations. Ashwin Roy Choudhary, Founder and CEO, Mobcast Innovations says, "Large organisations like retail, FMCG, BFSI, Pharma have more than 60% of their people on the move. Given the frequency of new product releases, imparting on premise training is an expensive and logistically difficult task. Even e-learning requires them to be present in office and take modules at a stretch leading to lower retention and a day of lost productivity. We see a major trend shift in companies wanting to go mobile to promote; byte sized training or capsule training." Edureka is offering more than 75 courses on technologies like Big Data, Analytics, Mobile Programming. “With growing mobile penetration we can reach many more Indians than ever before. India's app usage is growing at a rate of 13% year-on-year outpacing global growth. We have already launched apps, which have given us immense boost in terms of connecting with a larger mass and in increasing user engagement. The inbuilt facility of video conversation in mobile phones and availability of 2G/ 3G /4G, has increased interactivity and accessibility, which is taking e-learning to newer levels of effectiveness,” says Lovleen Bhatia, CEO & Co-Founder, Edureka. For a long time, hand-held devices had been provided to sales personnel to carry documents or literature needed to make a successful sale. Now mobile-enabled solutions are becoming very useful for employees on the move – such as sales personnel. "The trend now is to utilise the mobile device to provide on-the-job training as well – through short videos or audio bits, which can be consumed quickly and applied instantly. To deliver a more lifelike experience, motion-sensing technology of Kinect in Xbox 360, Leap Motion, Tobii etc., can be harnessed. By making learning ‘motion-based’ physical skills can be taught in a virtual environment with ample room for mistakes, re-tries and practice,” says Manish Gupta, CEO & Co- Founder, G-Cube. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

CASE STUDY

AAKASH-WizIQ

WizIQ TAKES AAKASH TO THE CLOUD With the successful deployment of WizIQ’s comprehensive teaching solution, Aakash has launched its live online teaching programme BY MOHD UJALEY

or the past 26 years, Aakash Educational Services has been providing training to students, who are preparing for medical, engineering and other competitive examinations. The institution has a country-wide network of more than 110 study centres, and over 150 exam centres—it has a collective annual base of over 100,000 students. Over the years, the institute has seen a steady rise in the demand for its educational services. Recently, Aakash started the initiative called “Aakash Live” to cater to the needs of the growing number of students.

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Initially the company was of the view that it must develop its own solution for “Aakash Live”; it was felt that a simple plug-and-play kind of solution could suffice. The institute’s management also thought of using a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. But after a thorough research on all the technology related issues was conducted, the management decided that it is in the best interests of the organisation if they focussed on their core strength, which is teaching. The task of creation of IT solutions, they decided, could be handed over to IT companies. The company was in need for a Learning Management System (LMS), but

they wanted to ensure that the solution that they ultimately opted for should be cost-effective, accessible to all, and built specifically for imparting education. “We were looking for an education platform solution, which could enable us to leverage the real-time online learning technology that mimics the traditional, face-to-face classroom environment. It was important that the solution should result in the maximisation of student engagement— it should deliver complete learning experiences on all the devices with full mobile functionality, give insights into student behaviour, performance, and progress using analytics tools and expert NOVEMBER, 2015

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assistance,” says Aakash Chaudhry, Director, Aakash Educational Services.

Tryst with WizIQ After considering diverse options available in the market, Aakash zeroed in on to the cloud based learning platform developed by WizIQ. The Virtual Classroom solution from WizIQ mirrors the physical energy of the traditional classrooms; it is most suitable for creation of online academy. It enables the instructors to deliver engaging, intensive online instructions to students. “The Aakash Live launch marks an important milestone in our mission for providing expert coaching to students anywhere in the country. The live online sessions completely mirror the energy you find in an Aakash classroom, and our students can choose to use any device— desktop, laptop, tab, or mobile—for seamless learning experience,” says Chaudhry. WizIQ claims that it has helped over 400,000 instructors and 4.3 million learners from 200 countries across the globe succeed. And, its 'Virtual Classroom' software, 'Online Academy Builder' and 'mobile learning applications' offer solution that gives teachers and trainers absolute control and ownership of their brand and enterprise with a range of benefits. With the installation of Virtual Classroom solution, the Aakash instructors are able to conduct polls during online sessions in real time. They can receive instant feedback and responses from students. This system enables them to keep track of the progress that the students are making. By constantly analysing the performance of the students, the teachers can refine their pedagogy and get better results.

Benefits of Online Teaching The solution comes with interactive whiteboards, which allow the instructor to keep the students engaged while the course material is being presented. The students and the teachers can use the whiteboard as a writing tool—to write notes and highlight important points during the course of the class. The virtual classroom uses multiple whiteboards, so one whiteboard can be EXPRESS COMPUTER

used for writing notes, while the other may be used for opening PowerPoint presentations or YouTube videos. There is facility for switching effortlessly between different whiteboards. The text chat tools that WizIQ has developed are a key feature of this online solution. These chat tools can be used by the instructor to not only assess the understanding of the students, but also to encourage their participation in the live class sessions. It is possible for the students to quickly type out their answers in the comments box. This facility ensures that the online environment is not too different from the interactive atmosphere that is generally there in traditional classrooms. Along with text chat, WizIQ also offers audio and video chat facilities. With WizIQ students have access to activity feed, with which they can participate in asynchronous discussions outside the classroom. This facility can be especially valuable for students who are unable to express themselves clearly within the classroom. Also, the students can download the session on their computers for later viewing. Perhaps the most useful feature of WizIQ is the recording facility. This ensures that no student ever misses a class. “Aakash instructors and administrators love the fact that WizIQ is device-agnostic. Learners can attend classes from any device—desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile. They can use iOS, as well as the Android devices,” says Harman Singh, Founder and CEO, WizIQ. The cloud based library in the solution allows Aakash instructors to store the courseware online, so that the same can be easily accessed by the students and the teachers. “Our 'Online Academy Builder' empowers education service providers like Aakash to set up their own customised academy within minutes. This evolutionary leap in education technology is designed to increase learner engagement with its cuttingedge features like mobile learning, video streaming, live online classroom, discussion boards, assessments, and insights and analytics tools,” says Singh.

The Aakash Live launch marks an important milestone in our mission for providing expert coaching to students in the country Aakash Chaudhry Director,Aakash Educational Services

Our 'Online Academy Builder' empowers education service providers like Aakash to set up their own customised academy within minutes Harman Singh

mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

Founder and CEO,WizIQ. NOVEMBER, 2015

CASE STUDY

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MANIPAL GLOBAL

NOVEMBER, 2015

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MANIPAL GLOBAL'S SUCCESSFUL TRYST WITH AWS CLOUD

Manipal Global is using Amazon Web Services cloud to resolve problems related to unpredictable server demand and other complex issues that the organisation has been facing BY JASMINE DESAI

oday in the education sector, technology is being used as a catalyst for improving the overall educational environment at the campus. Many organisations, like the Manipal Global Education Services Pvt Ltd., are now on the forefront of riding the cloud computing express train. Headquartered in Bangalore, Manipal Global is the leading international provider of high-quality educational services. The services of the institution are supporting over 400,000 students—many of these students are on the organisation’s awardwinning technology platform, EduNxt.

The Easy Cloud Approach Balakrishna Rao, CIO, Manipal Global Education Services Pvt. Ltd., says, "We had a classic case of unpredictable server demand wherein the need for high volume computing horsepower rose at specific EXPRESS COMPUTER

times within a time period." He informs that during seasonal peaks, the systems at the institution witnessed a sharp increase in traffic and load—100,000 internal assessment uploads in a day on EduNxt, which is the LMS (Learning Management System) platform; 450,000 hits per day for results on student portal for distance learning programmes; 3 million hits a month for websites and around 10 TB of data transfer a month. Eventually the IT team at Manipal Global realised that setting up of traditional infrastructure on-premise to manage such unpredictable peaks was neither feasible nor cost-effective and the only way of addressing this issue was the deployment of cloud, which offers agility and elasticity. The organisation was utilising traditional on-premise data centre approach prior to moving to Amazon Web Services cloud. "Typically

we used to have situations where the systems would come under extreme stress and invariably fail to respond to peak workloads. It was a major challenge for us to address these seasonal loads and concurrency. Performance was another key concern during these short periods of service delivery,” explains Rao.

Cloud-First Strategy In order to manage unpredictable server demand across their diverse products and services, Manipal Global decided to adopt a Cloud-First strategy. Giving insight into the vendor selection process, Rao says, "We looked at agility, elasticity and cost effectiveness while evaluating our cloud vendors. We selected AWS as the cloud platform to run our critical consumer-facing services. Today, almost 70 per cent of our workloads, such as digital marketing solution and websites, NOVEMBER, 2015

CASE STUDY

MANIPAL GLOBAL

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learning and assessment platforms, as well as the disaster recovery site for SAP/ERP systems have been migrated from on-site data centres to AWS."

Transition to Cloud The transition to the cloud began in earnest in the year 2010 with one of the smaller cloud players. However, in the year 2013, Manipal Global decided to move to AWS in a big way. Mentions Rao. “Our first priority was to taper off the unpredictable spikes during “results publishing” with the help of cloud and that was a huge success. Since then, “results publishing” became a “solved problem” for us which otherwise used to be extremely vulnerable. By then the institution had significantly moved into virtualization practice across maximum number of applications within its private data centres which is critical for cloud transition. Manipal Global started handpicking cloud ready applications, particularly student and consumer facing workloads, created the migration strategy and moved them without impacting the business at all. "Time was ripe then for us to take a big leap and make Manipal Global a “future-ready” organisation, building “cloud” as part of the business strategy," says Rao. Currently, the organisation deploys over a dozen AWS services, including the Reserved Instances and On Demand Instances of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Simple Email Service, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Identity and Access Management, and AWS Trusted Advisor which is part of the AWS Support service. Manipal Global also has various technology platforms, OS and development environments currently running inside its own Virtual Private Cloud environment and using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud service. Shelling out some tips, Rao says, "It is important from the systems landscape perspective to ensure consolidation of 38

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Time was ripe then for us to take a big leap and make Manipal Global a “future-ready” organisation, building “cloud” as part of the business strategy Balakrishna Rao CIO,Manipal Global Education Services Pvt Ltd

servers and stacking them up as virtual instances. Also, the trick lies in picking the right kind of applications that are strong contenders for cloud migration. It is equally important to align developers to build “cloud-ready” applications." Manipal Global engaged PwC as its cloud transition partner to draft “cloud-first” policy, compile cloud readiness report and also implement systems and processes to make assessment for cloud transition of workloads in future. PwC also helped to build DR (Disaster Recovery) system for Manipal's SAP ERP on AWS cloud.

The Worthwhile Cloud Change management cannot be avoided when it comes to such a transition. Sometimes it can be complex and at other times a straight forward process. According to Rao, the most compelling business reasons emerge from the sheer need for service availability and smooth customer (students) experience. What looked logical and inevitable initially, soon translated into a strategic move for the company.

Rao explains, "We have been doing “first-time-right” as far as our cloud transformation story is concerned. However, we would have liked to establish projects and instances for various businesses on cloud slightly differently, so as to enable us to deliver business-wise dashboards with corresponding usage of cloud services, performance and the charges." In addition, Manipal Global has most of its development and test environments run out of AWS. Needless to say, AWS cloud has been their obvious platform for several proof-of-concepts and experiments which otherwise would have been simply dropped or practically not feasible to realise. According to Rao, there is more courage now to take risk. Most importantly, IT is more agile than ever before and has the ability to run with and even ahead of businesses. “By using AWS, we are able to innovate and launch our services to new businesses and markets within hours, compared to 4 to 5 weeks previously with the traditional data centre approach. AWS helped us eliminate the capital expenditure and keep the operating expenses flexible, allowing us to achieve cost benefits of 25 percent on a like-to-like basis per year. In addition, our operational expenses are further reduced with our capability to manage 6 to 8 times the scale without adding more manpower." Rao also informs that AWS has helped Manipal Global meet and effectively manage most of their frequent demands for test and development environments, preventing the uncontrolled proliferation from within. It has also boosted the innovation culture within the organisation as the teams are able to fearlessly conduct some experiments and proof-of-concepts on cloud which was never easy and straightforward before due to various reasons. The security issue always seem to surface when talking about the cloud. Manipal Global created its own Virtual Private Cloud environment and IP using Amazon VPC so that it forms an extended enterprise network and systems. We have also set up various monitors and replication services to ensure data security. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ICT IN K12 EDUCATION

EDUCATION GOES

DIGITAL The digital tsunami has transformed the traditional classroom into a system of education that is online, self-driven, and is available anywhere, anytime BY ABHISHEK RAVAL

report from ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) reveals that "among class V children enrolled in government schools, the percentage of children able to read class II level text decreased from 50.3% (2009) to 43.8% (2011) to 41.1% (2013).” The report also states that "in 2013, 18.9% of class III students in government schools were able to do basic subtraction or more as compared to 44.6% in private schools.” Despite the small progress that we have made, the state of education in the country continues to be abysmal; majority of the schools in the country are complying with the basic RTE standards for minimum infra in education. It is widely believed that e-learning can be a solution to the massive infrastructure and trained manpower related problems that India is facing in the education sector. The Government of 40

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We see Embibe as a smart practice tool, one that is meant to be used optimallyby the students Aditi Avasthi CEO and Founder,embibe.com

India has identified e-learning as one of the thrust areas for imparting education. Hardware and software development for e-learning tools, technologies and pedagogy is being encouraged by the government. India has become the largest market for e-learning after the USA, and the sector is expected to receive a boost from the government’s Rs.1.13 trillion Digital India initiative. A recent report from IBEF (India Brand Equity Foundation), a Trust established by the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, highlights the strong potential for growth in India’s e-learning market. The report states that India’s online education market size is expected to touch $40 billion by 2017. With the rapid growth in the number of internet users in India, it is expected that many more students could start accessing NOVEMBER, 2015

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become more interactive and easy to access. Aakash Educational Services (AESPL), a popular coaching institute has started the iTutor programme for offering educational content on tablets. In order to access the iTutor programme, the students don't even have to buy the entire package, they can buy the chapters that they need to study. Many of the chapters are available for just Rs. 99. “Aakash has been in the business of creating content for helping students pass important examinations for more than 20 years. We have a large library of content. So in 2010-11 we decided to take the help of technology to reach out to the students who are unable to enrol in our physical classrooms because they can’t afford our fees or any other reason. Since its launch, the iTutor programme is proving to be highly popular—close to 3000 students have already enrolled,” says Aakash Chaudhry, Director, AESPL. According to Chaudhry, the students find the course being delivered through the iTutor programme so interesting and beneficial that they recommend it to their friends. Those students who have purchased few chapters, tend to buy more chapters. “We have created content that is full of video lectures, online test series, question banks and much else. The entire course is packaged in such a way that it is quite entertaining for the students. They enjoy this method of learning,” he says. Along with enhancing the quality of learning, e-learning is also leading to the democratisation of education by

their coursework from outside the traditional classroom. E-learning is clearly the next big thing in India. Several start-ups and established IT companies are taking major initiatives in the sector. The Microsoft Edu-Cloud, running from these data centres, will provide a boost to the education sector in the country—it is expected that about 6 million students and 1 million teachers across 1500 institutions will benefit from the Edu-Cloud initiative. EXPRESS COMPUTER

Traditional Classrooms go Online With the popularity of tablet devices, there has been a massive rise in the number of companies that are offering educational content on tablets. With such content, education has NOVEMBER, 2015

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ICT IN K12 EDUCATION

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Hosted on AWS, Mindsparkderives its uniqueness by its abilityto provide personalised courseware to everychild Pranav Kothari AVP,Mindspark

We have a large libraryof content. So in 2010-11 we decided to take the help of technology to reach out to the students who are unable to enrol in our physical classrooms Aakash Chaudhry Director,AESPL 42

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ensuring that same kind of education content is available to students everywhere. Many schools and universities are now trying to leverage the educational resources that is becoming available on digital formats.

The Rise of Education Start-ups Unlike Aakash, which is catering to the student’s needs through both, the physical and the digital mediums, Embibe is a start-up, which is only using technology to reach out to the students. Aditi Avasthi, CEO & MD, Embibe, says, “If a student is finding it difficult to understand the Pythagorus theorem, we will provide him the information on the theorem through the online medium. Our purpose is to push the best content that is available online to the students. We see Embibe as a smart practice tool, one that is meant to be used optimally by the students.” A brainchild of Educational Initiatives (EI), Mindspark is a programme that uses the power of technology to help a child bolster his skills in mathematics. The programme is beneficial because it allows the student to follow a learning path that is based on their current level and at a pace that they are comfortable with. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, Mindspark derives its uniqueness by its ability to provide personalised courseware to every child. Currently the programme is being used by 60000 kids in 100 private schools, 20 government schools and 5 independent centres. Pranav Kothari, AVP, Mindspark, says, “When a children logs into the Mindspark system, he is given a screening test to determine his approximate level. The questions put to

the child are in the increasing order of difficulty—based on the answers that are received, the programme determines the academic level of the child. It is possible that a child might actually be in class 5th, but the tests may show that his knowledge is equivalent to a child in class 2nd. Once the level of the child has been determined, the programme delivers learning material that is most suited to help the child make progress in life.”

Challenges and Opportunities As learners look for more and more control over the learning process, the digital world comes up with solutions to meet the demand. However, it is also true that the quality digital courseware is costly and time-consuming to produce. Most of the participants in such courses are already well-educated—there are very few students from poor backgrounds. Also, the success of e-learning programme essentially depends on the motivation of the learner, because in this case there is no teacher around to provide sustained guidance and support throughout the learning experience. The makers of digital learning solutions are aware of not only the opportunities that are there in the fast growing area of e-learning, they are also cognisant of various challenges that the sector faces. Effort is being made to develop solutions that are targeted at specific groups of learners. This is because it is difficult for any single learning experience to meet the needs of thousands of participants with varying levels of relevant knowledge. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

BUSINESS AVENUES

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NOVEMBER, 2015

INTERVIEW PIYUSH SOMANI ESDS

SECURING INDIA’S DATA CENTER INDUSTRY “Good cloud computing infrastructure is a must for enabling our start-ups to manage their business economically and efficiently,” says Piyush Somani, MD & CEO, ESDS Software Solution Pvt. Ltd. In conversation with Express Computer

On data privacy related issues, how do the policies in European Union differ from that in India? There is a vast difference between the European privacy policy and the policy in India. The European Union and countries like Japan and Singapore have been consistently revising their policies to match the pace of digital revolution and cloud computing. The European Union has made it mandatory for any organisation with more than 50 employees to host their data within Europe. Such organisations are also required to have full time “data controllers” to communicate with the “data privacy and security” teams in EU. The European Union has also signed agreements with countries like United States of America to enable American companies to host European people in the USA. However, American companies have to follow the rule of employing full time “data controllers” who must share information with the European Union in a prescribed format to track any illegal activity or breach of data security. We keep hearing that if we have massive cloud computing infrastructure, there will be greater computerisation and loss of jobs.What is your view on this issue? If we look at history of industry and employment creation, we find that new technologies have always led to the creation of better employment 46

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opportunities for larger numbers of people. People thought that the coming of computers would mean fewer jobs, but the truth is that computerisation has created more avenues for people to be gainfully employed in areas like data analytics, storage, networking, mobile apps, and much else. Rise of eCommerce has created new opportunities for millions. It is true that computerisation often leads to the change in the nature of jobs, but the change is always for the better. In most advanced countries, where they have good cloud computing infrastructure, the problem of unemployment is mostly under control. Also cloud computing requires massive Data Centers, which need large numbers of professionals to create and manage the infrastructure. A good cloud computing infrastructure in the country is a must for enabling our start-ups to manage their business economically and efficiently. Many of these start-ups may grow into larger enterprises, and start employing many more people. Today the size of India’s cloud computing sector is just $400 million, this is not even 2% of Japan’s cloud industry. So there is huge potential for the growth of this sector in India. This sector can easily add 20 lakh jobs in India in the next 7 to 8 years. What kind of cloud computing model should the government organisations use for improving their efficiency and transparency? The usage of the Data Center and the Disaster Recovery Centre should be made completely transparent. The organisation must only pay for the resources that they are using. In case of many government organisations, the current utilisation of the Data Center is below 5%. This leads to huge loss of revenue, when you take into account the money that has been invested by the government. The Disaster Recovery Centres are rarely used—they are there only to ensure that the business is not affected in case the main Data Center goes offline. It makes more sense to set up the Disaster Recovery Site on a resources sharing model, with multiple PSUs and EXPRESS COMPUTER

The cloud computing sector can easily add 20 lakh jobs in India in the next 7 to 8 years other government organisations sharing the compute resources. What steps can the government take to ensure the growth of the domestic Data Centre enterprises? The Indian Data Centre companies must have level playing field in order to compete with the multinational companies. In the current environment, we face significantly high taxes, which drive up the cost of our services in the country. Also, the cost of hardware in India is almost 50% higher than what it is in countries like USA—this is a cause of concern for us. The government must develop policies to ensure that the Indian Data Centre companies are not burdened with higher taxes and we also have access to low cost hardware.

The high cost of bandwidth in India makes it unviable for companies to host data in the country.What steps can be taken to bring down the cost of bandwidth? Currently we are dependent on submarine optic fibre laid in the seabed, and this is bound to make the cost of bandwidth exorbitant. Much of our data is hosted abroad and this data travels through the submarine optic fibre cables laid on the seafloor. But if we start hosting India’s data within the country, then our dependence on submarine optic fibre will come down, as the cost of optic fibre laid under the ground is much cheaper than the submarine optic fibre. This will lead to the drastic reduction in the overall price of bandwidth. Also, we must also ensure that all the NIXI centers in all our metros are allowed to peer with each other. Currently the NIXI center in Mumbai is not allowed to peer with the NIXI centre in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai or any other city. This makes it difficult for all the cities in India to exchange their bandwidth with each other. We should be following the LINX (London Internet Exchange) model, which allows for easy peering. Once all the cities in the country are able to exchange bandwidth with each other, the price of bandwidth will come down and it will become cheaper to host data within the country. NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

ARTEMIS

STAYING AHEAD IN

EVOLVING IT LANDSCAPE “At Artemis Hospital we have a policy for refresh cycle. Every 4.5 years we do an upgrade and refresh our servers, networks, desktops, laptops and applications to bring our systems at par with the latest technologies,” Kapil Mehrotra, Head - Information Technology, Artemis Hospitals BY EXPRESS COMPUTER TEAM 48

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pread across 9 acres, Artemis Hospital is a 380 bed, stateof-the-art, multi-speciality hospital located in Gurgaon. The Head IT at Artemis, Kapil Mehrotra, says that he is inspired to work here because the hospital offers ample opportunities to research and implement Information Technology for the benefit of thousands of patients. “At Artemis we are constantly endeavouring to use Information Technology innovations to set new standards in healthcare,” says Mehrotra. He informs that the medical practices and procedures that the hospital follows are research oriented and benchmarked against the best in the world. Mehrotra is of the view that as the field of IT is constantly changing, it is important for organisations to keep

upgrading their systems. He emphasises that an organisation’s ability to keep up with the latest technology advances is the key ingredient for long-term success. “At Artemis Hospital we have a policy for refresh cycle,” he informs. “Every 4.5 years we do an upgrade and refresh our servers, network, desktop, laptops and applications to bring our legacy systems at par with the latest technologies.” He emphasis that a successful IT implementation can only happen when we have in place the foundations for meeting today’s standards. “It is important for us to remain flexible, as the needs of the organisation are constantly evolving,” he says.

Meeting the Challenges Kapil Mehrotra holds a MCA, NOVEMBER, 2015

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The implementation of IoTand nano-technology can only happen when we have a clear business case for justifying large investments

an MBA degree in e-Business. Apart from this he has attended leadership programmes organised by leading global institutes including the Indian School of Business. He also has a number of certifications in various areas of management and IT. When asked about his reasons for joining the field of IT, Mehrotra says, “I have chosen IT as a career because it is very challenging field. In IT we have the advantage of being on the forefront of the technology revolution. We are often the first to know about the new innovations that are happening in Information Technology.” Looking back in life, he says that his career in IT has not been a smooth ride, he likes to talk about the many challenges that he has faced. He says, “The toughest challenge that I faced was during the 2001, when we had the post 9/11 job recession.” “At that time I was given the charge of a very complicated project, which I had to finish in a particular timeline and for which I also needed to travel to Switzerland without my family for long periods of time,” says Mehrotra. “For me this was a tough situation, because then I had got married only about a month ago. My problems were aggravated because I could not have any clarity on when I could return to India.” After working at companies like Apollo Munich Health Insurance, iYogi and Aviva Life Insurance, he joined Artemis Hospital in 2014. Today he is highly regarded for his extensive experience in development and EXPRESS COMPUTER

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ARTEMIS

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deployment of IT strategy, systems and integration projects for domestic and international clients.

Implementing New Technologies According to Mehrotra, the culture in Artemis is such that all the technologies and innovations that are patient-centric always get welcomed. “We take pride in the fact that the healthcare systems that are being used in Artemis are as good as what they have in the hospitals in countries like USA, UK and Japan,” he says. “Taking a view of the entire country, I will say we are quick learners. It has always been our goal to adopt new technology as fast as we can.” On the subject of deploying new technologies like Cloud, Big Data Analytics, nano-technology and IoT, Mehrotra says that these innovations are being looked at with interest at many hospitals. According to him, Cloud and Big Data Analytics are already being used by the hospitals, but IoT and nano-technology are yet to take off. “Any worthwhile implementation of IoT and nanotechnology can only happen when we have a clear business case for justifying large investments,” he explains. “Such a business case is yet to develop in most hospitals.” Talking about the specific IT projects that have been implemented in Artemis, Mehrotra says, “At Artemis, we have recently migrated our entire exchange to Office 365. We have digitised the patient medical records, which has not only led to rise in productivity, while also enabling faster retrieval and reduced cost of storage of old records.” To ensure the seamless moving of patients through the continuum of care, the IT team at Artemis has introduced the real time discharge dashboard. This dashboard has led to faster admission and discharge process at the hospital. “We have also upgraded PACS with new rich features like multisite integration, reporting from home, video consultation and mobile app. Now the third party images can be stored directly in the PACS,” informs Mehrotra. Mehrotra has faced a number of complications and challenges while enabling the IT deployments at Artemis. One of his biggest professional challenge that he faced happened in an 50

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Full Name:

Kapil Mehrotra

Current Designation:

Head - Information Technology

Current Organisation:

Artemis Hospitals

Expertise:

BFSI & Healthcare

Work Experience:

19 Years

Favourite Quote:

Use your smile to change the world, but don’t let the world change your smile.

Favourite Book:

ATale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Favourite Food:

North Indian

Favourite Destination:

Switzerland

Favourite Gadget for Work:

iPhone 6S

Favourite Gadget for Personal Use:

Apple Watch

insurance company where the IT team and the internal users were not able to work in unison because of internal politics.

Setting Future Goals Is he bitten by the entrepreneurial bug? Does he dream about running his own business someday? Mehrotra says that at present he has no plans for becoming an entrepreneur. “The work that I am doing presently at Artemis gives me ample opportunities for utilising all my entrepreneurial energy and skills,” he says. “After all, I am using IT for creating new avenues for business growth.” He gives full credit to the management for creating a conducive working

environment at the hospital. He says that in five years time, he wants to see himself in the top management at the hospital. When asked about his wishes that are yet be fulfilled, Mehrotra says that he can remember two such wishes. “My first unfulfilled wish is that I would like to work for government administrations and contribute in drafting of guidelines and white-papers for the end users/corporates/entrepreneurs/product development companies, etc.” He is of the view that in this field there are lot of grey areas, which he can help address. His second unfulfilled wish is that he wants to be the part of the cyber security team in the government. NOVEMBER, 2015

NEWS ENTERPRISE IT

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Dell buying EMC in transformational $67 bn deal

Amazon launches platform for ‘IoT’app

DELL IS BUYING DATA storage company EMC in a deal valued at approximately $67 billion, a move that will transform the PC company into a major player in the data storage market. The acquisition shifts the focus at Dell, once a pioneer in the personal computer business, away from hardware like PCs to the more profitable areas of storage and other business services. And it shows how two mature companies are trying to adapt to the quickly shifting technology landscape. Since going private in 2013, Dell Inc. has been investing in research

AMAZON.COM INC’S CLOUD business, Amazon Web Services, has launched a service to help customers build applications to connect devices through the cloud. The service, called “AWS IoT”, will allow factory floors, vehicles, health care systems, household appliances among other things to connect through cloud services, the company said. Amazon said that there were no minimum fees for AWS IoT and customers using the service will have to only pay for what they use.

and development and expanding its software and services business as those in the technology industry continue to struggle with soft PC sales. EMC meanwhile has been shifting from a provider of data storage hardware such as on-premise data centers to offering a more comprehensive suite of products to businesses, from cloud storage to security offerings. The deal, which was approved by EMC’s board, is targeted to close in the second or third quarter of Dell’s fiscal year ending Feb. 3, 2017.

Twitter planning 4,200 employees layoffs TWITTER WILL LAY off employees as freshly-returned chief Jack Dorsey pushes for a leaner operation focused on winning users. Layoffs will be spread across the entire San Francisco-based company and will likely include engineers, which account for about half of Twitter’s approximately 4,200 employees. The job cuts reportedly come as engineering teams are being reorganised at the one-to-many messaging service.

Twitter is betting that the second coming of co-founder Dorsey as chief executive will bring blockbuster growth.

ICICI launches in-store m-payments with ‘mVisa’ ICICI BANK HAS launched a service, enabling customers to make electronic payments from their smartphones at physical stores, e-commerce & other deliveries at home, radio taxis and utility billers among others. This service is based on ‘mVisa’, a new mobile payment solution from Visa. With this service, users of ‘Pockets’ can make cashless payments from their smartphones using their debit card by EXPRESS COMPUTER

simply scanning a ‘mVisa’ Quick Response (QR) code at a merchant location without swiping the card at an EDC machine. This service provides customers the convenience of speed to complete a transaction along with enhanced security as the card remains in possession of the customer. To use this facility, a customer is simply required to click on the ‘mVisa’ icon on the home screen of the ‘Pockets’ app.

Bye bye Google, hello Alphabet ALPHABET HAS REPLACED Google as the publicly traded company that will house Google’s search and Web advertising businesses, maps, YouTube and its “moonshot” ventures such as driverless cars. The structural overhaul, announced in August, is intended to separate the company’s core businesses from ventures such as the driverless cars, glucose-monitoring contact lenses and Internet-connected high-altitude balloons. The core businesses will be called Google and operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, will head Google. Alphabet will be run by Google co-founder Larry Page and each of its businesses will have its own chief executive. Starting from the company’s fourth quarter in January, Alphabet will have two reporting units – Google and all other Alphabet businesses taken as a whole. NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

DESTINATION ANALYTICS

Âť

D EST I N AT I O N A N A LY T I C S

NEW PARADIGM FOR TRAVEL INDUSTRY Thanks to the magic of analytics, it is possible for an OTA to give exclusive offer to a customer for an airline that he uses most often, for the route that he tends to fly, for the hotel that he generally prefers to stay in BY JASMINE DESAI 52

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he travel industry is now a prolific user of business analytics. While this technology has brought much needed ease to various routine tasks like booking tickets and hotel rooms, it has also increased the complexity of planning a journey because the range of choices that are now available to us have become much more vast. At Stayzilla, analytics is being used to analyse data generated from the activities of millions of users who conduct their searches or transactions on the organisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website. The analysis of this data helps Stayzilla develop insights into what consumers really want. "Analytics in combination with data (internal and external) aids in determining business objectives and track the critical KPIs," says Yogendra Vasupal, CEO and Co-Founder, Stayzilla. The organisation has developed a few inhouse analytics tools, and they also make use of open source platform. According to PhoCusWright, it is NOVEMBER, 2015

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expected that the net revenues from travel market's online bookings in India will reach $12.5 billion in 2015. MakeMyTrip, the popular travel services website, is making heavy use of business analytics. Sanjay Mohan, Chief Technology Officer, MakeMyTrip, says, “We are using analytics to personalise experiences for our users. For the most basic use-case, if a customer has booked an airline ticket through us, we send them notifications to book a cab as part of pre-travel engagement. Post-travel, we recommend that hotels should match user-preference, based on their past actions on our website.” Mohan adds that the industry has just scratched the surface of personalisation at this point, and there is a sea of opportunities in this space going forward. In his view, airlines are the most disruptive users of analytics. Sambarta Ghosh, GIC Industry Leader - Travel & Transportation IBM Global Business Services, says, ”Airlines have started using analytics effectively for disruption management and enhancing fuel efficiency, which can save the airlines millions of dollars on a yearly basis. They also use analytics to do dynamic crew and employee staffing. Travel companies use customer analytics extensively for customer segmentation, personalised customer experience and campaigns. Railways are using analytics to monitor rail infrastructure real time and predict failures to help trains running reliably." Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India, says, "Owing to the burgeoning digital transformation and customer demand, the infrastructure of enterprises is gradually becoming complex. This is resulting in data deluge. To mine the reservoir of raw data for key insights, businesses are increasingly adopting intelligent analytics tools."

Analytics Comes With a Baggage Analytics promises big developments in the travel industry. However, lot more work needs to be done to ensure that the analytics solutions get even better at divining the needs of their customers based on prior booking patterns. Paul EXPRESS COMPUTER

Travel companies should realise that data is an asset and should have dual focus - quick turn-around of the projects while stabilising the standardised parts of the solution Viros Sharma, Vice President & Global Business Head – DWBI & Analytics, ITC Infotech

Online travel is now unfortunately a volume game and customer experience through analytics will decide the winners Bhavish Sood, Research Director,Gartner

Winsor, Director of Industry Solutions for Retail and Services industries, Qlik, says, "One of the major concerns for travel companies is to improve customer service by offering reports and analysis to the top five corporate customers that use their travel services. This is only possible when there is integration of visual analytics into the IT infrastructure of the travel companies." Rohan Gopaldas, Hospitality Vertical Lead, Crayon Data, says, "Many of our customers from the travel industry have one major challenge, which is related to the billions of rows of digital data that they collect daily. This data captures their website visitor traffic and takes lot of time to process. To cite an example, we recently helped an airline develop an application which analyses their web traffic for understanding how many of their visitors were purchasing flight tickets compared to those who were just browsing." The use of Big Data, which combines the internal enterprise data with the publicly available data, in analytics can certainly lead to enhancement of revenue. This combination can help travel companies develop better systems for catering to the needs of their guests. For instance, by using a combination of internal and external data, a hotel can find out if a guest is frequent traveler to the hotel; if he is visiting with his wife who loved art; if he, the traveller, himself liked footfall; and if the couple loved Italian food. Once the hotel is armed with this information, it can upgrade the guests to a suite for a small charge, arrange an airport pick up, a tour of an art gallery and box seats to a football match. This kind of proactive service certainly increases the likelihood of the guests returning in the future. The travel industry usually provides two payment options for the traveller— pay-at-hotel and payment at the website gateway. It has been found that about 67% people opt for the pay-at-hotel model. By using analytics in determining the booking funnel metrics, the pattern in the bookings that have taken place can be determined. According to Mohan of NOVEMBER, 2015

FEATURE

DESTINATION ANALYTICS

» www.expresscomputeronline.com

To mine the reservoir of raw data for key insights, businesses are increasingly adopting intelligent analytics tools Srikanth Karnakota Director Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft

One of the major concerns for travel companies is to improve customer service by offering reports and analysis to the top five corporate customers Paul Winsor Director of Industry Solutions for Retail and Services industries,Qlik 54

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MakeMyTrip.com, "The quality of our people will determine the quality of our products, and the value we can bring to our customers. The biggest challenge, therefore, lies in recruiting and retaining the best talent in the industry. Everything else is manageable." Vasupal of Stayzilla says, "Driving important business insights through analytics and data should be within the boundaries of rationality and should be backed by business logic. In fact, a business pain-point should be the starting point for all data exploration. Analytics solutions should help address the business question of “why” more from the data perspective rather than the “how” component. Case reasoning and question based approach helps drive business more effectively, as it leverages analytics to answer and mine insights and business knowledge patterns.” By making use of analytics, Stayzilla has accumulated lot of useful information. For instance, the company is today making use of the system of georecommendation for identifying the amenities that can be given to the guests from a particular geographical area. In beach destinations the most important amenity that travellers look for is a bar while in Tier 2 cities, the travellers look for safe lockers.

Tracing Trends Another trend that the travel companies are looking at is IoT. Ghosh of IBM Global Business Services, says, "A key trend emerging is the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to have real time data and insights from sensors and machines or assets in rail and aviation

companies. Predictive Analytics solutions would play a key role in establishment and successful implementation of IoT platforms with actionable insights. Some companies are focussing on providing integrated Journeys. To reach out to their customers, these companies use Cognitive Analytics and advanced Customer Analytics." “Data Warehouse and BI as a Service will be a very important trends to look out for,” says Viros Sharma, Vice President & Global Business Head – DWBI & Analytics, ITC Infotech. He is of the view that the smaller and mid-size airlines are moving towards this model for obvious Capex to Opex shifts and delivery risk management. MRO and MIDT Analytics are also picking up. Large Airlines are experimenting with big data both on premise as well as on cloud options. Traditional travel firms are getting squeezed by online travels simply because they have the ability to use technology to bring efficiencies to scale. Bhavish Sood, Research Director, Gartner explains, "Traditional travel firms also have the ability to measure and monetise the customer click-stream data. If they are not able to leverage these two technology capabilities their ability tosurvive is questionable." He very aptly sums up the situation which is plaguing the travel industry right now wherein he says online travel is now unfortunately a volume game and customer experience through analytics will decide the winners. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

NOVEMBER, 2015

NEWS EGOV

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Now, apply for Voter ID card through an app AHEAD OF NEXT year’s state Assembly polls, an Electoral Assistance System tapping mobile and online facility for accessing voter details, was launched, claimed to be the first such in the country. Through the new facility – EASY – a voter can get his or her voter card or make changes through mobile phone, by telephone or by online portal service, State Chief Electoral Officer Sandeep Saxena Saxena said, launching it. Compared to the earlier model of updating details of voters district wise in Tamil Nadu, he said under the new system the details

of voters in all the 32 districts has been “integrated”. “Through this method, we will be able to remove errors in voters data and also remove duplicate entries. It can be done very accurately,” he said. He said the election commission website was undergoing changes and a revamped website will be launched on October 16. To a query whether the existing method of adding voters details manually through special camps would be phased out, he said, “It is not so. The new facility would be available along with the existing model.”

Bookunreserved and platform tickets using app MAKING THE MOST of mobile platform and its increased penetration, Railways has launched facilities for booking of paperless unreserved tickets as well as platform tickets to cut queues at the reservation counters. The initiatives are mostly targetted at the Mumbai suburban sections to begin with where 75 lakh passengers use the local train services to commute between places. The paperless platform ticket programme would cover the major

sections in the Mumbai suburban as well as New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin stations.

Odisha CM launches police-citizen portal ODISHA CHIEF MINISTER Naveen Patnaik has inaugurated a state policecitizen portal, enabling tech-savvy people to send their complaints online to the authorities. “Through the portal, a citizen sitting at home can avail a number of services at a click of the mouse. There is no need to go to any police station,” the chief minister said. All the 531 police stations in the state have been linked through the online portal http://www.citizenportal-op.gov.in. EXPRESS COMPUTER

The services which can be availed through the portal are issue of character certificates, permission for taking out processions and rallies, issue of an FIR copy, permission for holding events and performances, tenant verification, employee verification and registration of missing person’s report, said the chief minister. People can also track the status of the complaints registered by them on the portal, he added.

Kerala CM inaugurates Digital Literacyprogramme THE PILOT PHASE of the Digital Literacy programme aimed at making Kerala a ‘total digital literacy state’ has been inaugurated by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy in Thiruvananthapuram. In the first phase, the project will be implemented in Thiruvananthapuram district, according to an official release. A total of 10 student police cadets selected from 10 schools will be given tablets with internet facility and expert training.

TN CM announces ‘Amma Mobile Phone’for SHG trainers IN LINE WITH her regime’s popular ‘Amma’ brand of welfare initiatives, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has announced an ‘Amma’ mobile phone scheme to help women Self-Help Group (SHG) trainers supervise work. Under the scheme, “computerised mobile phones” loaded with special Tamil software would be provided to 20,000 self-help group (SHG) trainers in the first phase at a cost of Rs 15 crore, she told the state Assembly. This is the latest in the Amma brand schemes. The Jayalalithaa government had previously launched ‘Amma Canteens’ which offer low-cost food, ‘Amma Mineral Water’ which costs Rs 10 a bottle, and ‘Amma Pharmacies’ where medicines are sold at lower rates, among others. NOVEMBER, 2015

p re s e n ts

Fostering Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Digital Economy

Digital India Dialogue brought together the policy makers and industry veterans for an invigorating discussion on the benefits that can flow from robust digital trade

EVENT DIGITAL INDIA DIALOGUE

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FOSTERING INDIA’S DIGITAL ECONOMY Attended by a galaxy of select flag-bearers and thought-leaders representing the bureaucracy, academia, corporate institutions and the media, the Digital India Dialogue had the theme of ‘Fostering India’s Digital Economy’

L to R: Victoria A Espinel, President & CEO of BSA; Ashok Chawla, Chairperson, Competition Commission of India; Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head—New Media, The Indian Express

he digital platform is a platform for democratisation, but it is important for the enterprises to understand the needs of the digital economy, and the government needs to develop the policy framework in terms of electronics and platforms. This was stated by Ashok Chawla, Chairperson, Competition Comission of India, in his address at the Digital India Dialogue. Chawla also spoke about the need to encourage local manufacturing of electronic products. The conclave began with a welcome address by Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head—New Media, The Indian Express Group. Goenka said that with its strong focus on Digital India, the current NDA government is the first one that is both transparent and efficient. "We welcome this government's focus on digital and believe that technology improves the efficiency of governance and the transparency of

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government,” Goenka said. In her address, Victoria A Espinel, President & CEO, BSA Group (The Software Alliance), spoke about how data and software can transform lives. She described the framework that is needed for fostering digital economy. “Digital technologies allow companies to operate seamlessly across borders, but we need to consider national security issues while ensuring that borders are open in the digital world,” said Victoria A Espinel. Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India, pointed out that ICT is the great enabler—life expectancy has gone up because of technology. He was of the view that the biggest challenge that we face today is related to creation of employment opportunities. While expressing the hope that the “Make in India” initiative will result in the creation of large numbers of jobs, he also pointed

out that the the labour laws which had been created during the 1920s, and continue to be implemented today, are a big impediment to job creation. “These archaic labour laws are not taking into account the massive changes that ICT is bringing into our lives,” he said. He informed that the government is working to make labour laws simpler. Aruna Sundararajan , Additional Secretary & Administrator (USOF), Ministry of Communications & IT, expressed the view that the key challenge that we face today is related to how we build a digital economy and what kind of digital society are we going to be? She pointed out that while 200-400 million Indians enjoy digital connectivity, vast majority of the country remains untouched by internet. She said that at some point of time more people will gain access to internet, but we have to keep making efforts to take care of privacy and security related issues. The event witnessed a massive participation of key government functionaries, select flag-bearers of private companies, and thought-leaders from the space of e-Governance. The list of guests and speakers included Dr. Govind, CEO, NIXI; Lt. Gen. Nitin Kumar Kohli, AVSM, VSM, Signal Officer in Chief, Indian Army; Arvind Gupta, Head IT Cell, BJP; Praveer Sinha, CEO & Managing Director, Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited (TPDDL); P. Balaji, Director-Regulatory & External Affairs, Vodafone India; Deepak Maheshwari, Head, Government Affairs, Symantec and many others. NOVEMBER, 2015

REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/49926/90