NMEICT

NATIONAL MISSION ON EDUCATION THROUGH

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

(NMEICT)

Deb Kumar Bandyopadhyay

According to India’s Planning Commission “India is expected to become the most populous country by 2030 and its population, age between 18-13 years is expected to reach 142 million”. With this increasing trend, the government on its part, has increased the higher education budget and implemented several technology initiatives to improve the quality of higher education.

NMEICT: According to the report of Knowledge Commission of India (2006) Chaired by Mr. Sam Pitroda,” Higher education has made a significant contribution to economic development, social progress and political democracy in Independent India. But there is serious cause for concern at this juncture. The opportunities for higher education in terms of the number of places in universities are simply not adequate in relation to our needs. Large segments of our population just do not have access to higher education. The quality of higher education in most of our universities leaves much to be desired. Higher education must provide accountability to society and create accountability within. There must be a focusing on upgrading infrastructure, improving the training of teachers and continuous assessment of the syllabi. It is particularly important to enhance the ICT infrastructure. Websites and web based services would improve transparency and accountability. A portal on higher education and research would increase interaction and accessibility. A knowledge network would connect all universities and colleges for online open resources.” To cater the vast population Indian Government has taken various steps to improve the quality and quantity of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). One such step is Government of India through its Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in February 2009 during 11th Five Year Plan had launched a Mission titled National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) with a budgetary allocation of Rs 4612 crores. It is endeavor through which MHRD is synergizing the efforts taken by the educational institutions vis. IITs, UGC, NITs, CEC, IGNOU and other higher education institutions in the country.

The main objectives out of 48 objectives of the Mission are:

•Empowering and enabling students by ensuring equity and access to education through the use of ICT.

•Connecting over 400 Universities and 22,000 Colleges all over India through high-speed data networks.

•Improving faculty quality by using a unique synchronous training methodology.

•Ensuring equity by providing access to expensive equipment to students even in remote corners through innovative use of ICT.

•Making available e-content and educational videos created by the best teachers across all disciplines for UG and PG classes.

MAIN FEATURES AND INITIATIVES OF THE MISSION(COMPONENTS):

1.SAKSHAT Portal:

“One Stop Education Portal” SAKSHAT , with intelligent navigation techniques is to take care of all needs of the entire learning community by extensively utilizing e-learning concepts and ICT based methodology free of cost. INFLIBNET has taken up the initiative to create integrated e-content portal for easy access to all the contents developed under the Mission. There are more than hundred projects ongoing under the NMEICT ranging from e-content development, access to e-resources, development of software tools etc.

2.E-content Development –NPTEL: National Program on Technology Enhance Learning (NPTEL) is a joint initiative of IITs and IISc funded by this Mission provides e – learning through online FREE Web and Video based courses in engineering, science and humanities streams. The main aim is to avoid reinventing the wheel, the already available content to be digitized and indexed in accordance with subjects and the disciplines. Over 329 courses are completed and nearly 990 courses are getting generated in phase II of NPTEL. Nearly 5000 hours of lectures have been recorded by the IITs. Through Doordarshan’s Eklavya channel many video courses have been telecasted. Within two years of its lunch NPTEL website http://nptel.ac.in has been accessed by working professionals, students and instructors from 140 different nations. (S Deepti Pillai and Dr S Kevin). It gives vast opportunities for skill development and enhancing knowledge.

3.Consortium of Educational Communication (CEC): The main objective of CEC is to use effective modern media television and ICT for Under Graduate and Post Graduate courses. It is one of the Inter University Centres set up by UGC. E –content for nearly 87 subjects for UG and 71 subjects for PG are being generated by CEC along with its 21 media centers. The Digital Media Library houses at CEC has a total collection of about 20000 Educational video Programmes on various formats like Cassettes, CD’s, DVD’s, PD’s/OD’s. Every year it adds more than 2000 video programmes and E-Content in Hindi and English on various subjects.

High quality, curriculum-based, interactive content in different subjects across all disciplines is being developed under this initiative e-PG Pathshala. A gateway to all PG courses http://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/about.php

4.Teacher’s Training: The “Train 1000 Teachers’ programme was initiated by IIT Bombay in 2009. This project envisions empowerment of teachers, through workshops conducted for thousands of teachers at one go, using a unique blend of technology and an innovative pedagogy. The main objective is to work with Engineering Colleges to enhance the teaching skills of faculties. With 42 such workshops more than 36000 teachers have been trained so far. http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/nmeict/About_T10kT.html

5.Spoken Tutorial: A spoken Tutorial is a ten minute audio video tutorial on open software developed by IIT Bombay to train students on important IT topics. The spoken part of the tutorials is also dubbed in many Indian languages. Using a series of such tutorials, one can learn even a complicated IT topic easily. The main aim of this project is to improve the employment potential of students. At present there are about 500 spoken tutorials in English and 2000 dubbed tutorials in Indian languages.

The spoken Tutorial team also conducts workshops using spoken tutorials. Any student or a faculty from any college can conduct SELF workshops free of cost with help as mentioned in http://process.spoken-tutorial.org/index.php/Software-Training#About_SELF_Workshops

Nearly four lakh students have been trained through SELF workshops by the Spoken Tutorial team. These workshops have been conducted in LaTeX, Scilab, PHP, Python, ORCA, Linux, LibreOffice, Blender, Java, C, C++, GIMP, GeoGebra, OpenFOAM and Oscad. It also conducts online tests and gives certificates to those who pass the test free of cost. Not only this project promotes skill development but it also generates remunerations which are shown in figure below.

Few other initiatives by the Mission:

6.Free and Open Source Software for Education – FOSSE: this project provides free support on FOSS to eliminate the use of commercial software in education. Students and teachers from many colleges across India are participating in, and benefiting from these activities. http://fossee.in

7.E-Yanta Robotics in Higher Education: the goal of e- Yanta is to enable effective embedded systems and Robotics education across engineering colleges in India.

8. Virtual Lab: To complement the NPTEL, this project is to design and develop Virtual Lab in various areas of Science and Engineering in order to benefit maximum students. Around 50,000 students have used this and have provided feedback.

http://vlab.co.in

Questions:

1. Write a short note on NMEICT?
2. Write down main objectives and components of NMEICT?
3. Write a short note on Gyan Darshan, Gyanvani, Hepatic technology?