e-Education: The Emphatic Gateway to an Enlightened India

If education is the foundation of any modern society, then e-Education is the next evolutionary step. As India ushers in its stellar odyssey for the digital glory and various economic parameters are geared up to inject flexibility to the elephantine economy, e-Education has captured the attention of policy- makers, IT magnates, the academics and the unprivileged side of the digital-divide. Because of its sheer promise, it has inspired a rare glimpse of hope for an equitably-educated ebullient India. While the path to it is strewn with unprecedented challenges, it also throws in its way unforeseen opportunities at the same time for the parties involved – the vendors, the traders, the peripheral actors and the government, apart from the end-users (the teeming millions of India’s uneducated and undereducated). VARIndia attempts to throw a glance at it. 

 

As we continue to swoon in our new-found status as an unquestionable software superpower and the balance of power slowly swings from the Silicon Valley to Bangalore, and after a series of success stories in the satellite launches, the countdown for the country to go lunar has begun, we are yet to leverage the technical edge to solve other problems. e-Education is an offshoot of the marriage between these twin technologies. 

 

 

e-Education is the delivery of education by electronic means using formal teaching methodologies and styles. e-Learning is a generic term which encompasses the learning channels and systems such as remote delivery of multimedia content, email, video conferencing, online interactive classes and learning management systems. 

 

e-Learning is increasingly being used in commercial organizations to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This ranges from simple video and animation clips, which provide on-the-job training, to fully interactive training courses that lead to professional qualifications. e-Learning is now being adopted and integrated into the mainstream education. Governments that embrace innovative technologies can significantly improve educational standards and computer literacy, enabling their respective countries to compete effectively and take a lead in the global marketplace. e-Learning caters to all types of educational environments and individual learning needs, affecting educational establishments, teachers, pupils, students in higher education, and adult learners. e-Learning will also have a pronounced impact on teaching methods and instructional delivery. e-Education can be effectively operationalized through EduSats, optical fibres or IP. 

 

 

e-Learning offers a number of key advantages such as e-Learning allows learning to be undertaken from anywhere at any time. This may remove the need to physically attend a course, eliminating travel time and the expense. It also allows community e-Learning education centres to be set up in remote locations where conventional classes would be prohibitively expensive. Rich creative content can be developed that provides opportunities to explain learning points in interesting, absorbing and imaginative ways. The pace of the material can be adjusted by the learner. 

 

 

A connected infrastructure is a requirement for remote e-Learning. However, for online e-Learning, where the rich content is downloaded, a high-speed link is important and in some cases essential. 

 

Overall, the important challenge to increase the availability of inexpensive high-speed connections will have to be addressed by government initiatives. Where land-based connections are not available, the government will have to go for satellite links, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi to overcome this barrier in the short term. 

 

Some higher education institutions and universities have already installed campus wireless LANs (Wi-Fi). Line-of-sight aerials have been used to cost- effectively extend the wireless LAN to remote buildings up to a mile away. 

 

Students living in off-campus accommodation are provided with a wireless LAN connection link to the campus through the Internet. All of this means that students, no matter where they are in the virtual campus, will have seamless access to resources and services.

 

 

With the widespread use of national e-Learning curriculum in schools, the ratio of PCs to students will need to rise dramatically. However, in order to realize the full potential of e-Learning, students need their own portable PCs that they could use both at school and home – just like higher education students. Schools will install wireless LANs allowing students to easily connect to school community resources, including e-Learning material, digital libraries and other school communities and campuses. 

 

The added advantage of allowing students to become acquainted with the digital environment they will ultimately meet in the workplace. There are many advantages to this blended learning approach. For example, if students are ill or unable to attend an instructor-led lesson, then they would have an e-Learning option that they could use to continue their studies. It allows students to learn at their own pace; material can be covered a second or third time to consolidate the learning points – an advantage for slower learners. The e-Learning version would contain additional material and references to enable students to delve deeper into a topic, if they wished. Students could have the option to read ahead or even look at lessons and topics that are not part of their core curriculum. Multiple-choice tests would be incorporated continually to assess the student’s learning progress. Since students can undertake much of the learning without the direct involvement of the teacher, this allows the teacher to focus on the best way for students to learn and to reinforce key or difficult topics as a group. It also means the teacher can spend more time on the weaker students. 

 

 

The technologies and processes for developing e-Learning systems are already widely used in the private sector. It is, therefore, advantageous for the government to tap into this expertise and work with commercial companies, or collaborate through public–private partnerships with organizations that can provide both the required expertise and share the risk and rewards.

 

The Portuguese Government‘s e-U (Electronic University) initiative to drive the use of technology in edu cation is an excellent success story. To encourage the deployment and the use of wireless LANs throughout campuses, it has partnered with a bank and hardware provider to give all students the ability to purchase top brand portable PCs with wireless LAN capability at preferential prices and arranged through a loan, if required. The design of a consistent and complete e-Learning solution – infrastructure, content and delivery – that is commercially viable for a country’s core educational curriculum is, no doubt, a major undertaking. 

 

This is something essential for our government and educational establishments to maximize the effectiveness of their investment in education by focussing on e-education while joining hands with the private sector. 

 

 

Once the e-Education programme comes to be implemented on a large scale, it would unleash huge business opportunities for the entire gamut of business sectors in the country. Given the colossal need for the large number of IT and telecom equipments, the programme is all set to open up opportunities for all the IT and telecom vendors. So, the players like Cisco, Lucent, Oracle, IBM, HP, LG, Intel, or Samsung, or even domestic vendors like HCL, Zenith or our friendly neighbourhood assembler will be presented with a rare chance to make the most of it. Long-distance optical fibre laying which will cover most of the areas under the programme will obviously quench its thirst with a staggering volume of optical fibres. It is surely a shot in the arm for the telecom sector, which has been attracting lots of foreign investors’ attention as video conferencing and affiliated services would increasingly rely on tele calls. Besides, for the first time, the country’s space programme will be at the service of the layman at the grassroots level at such a large scale, covering all the remote interior areas and amazingly connecting each thread to the national fabric.

 

The initiative is going to accelerate the domestic market for IT, which is likely to gain tremendous momentum against 23–25-per cent growth year on year. 2007, which has been declared the Year of Broadband and the Fab policy declared by the Central Government will also get the required impetus. 

 

If this is not enough, the government has come out with an ambitious programme of e-governance and digitalizing the country‘s PDS (Public Distribution System) in this year’s budget. 

 

The hardware sector received the government’s move with a rare aplomb. Vinnie Mehta, Executive Director, MAIT, responded to the move thus, “We welcome the government’s decision to maintain the current excise and custom duty levels on IT products. Further, the focus given on education is, indeed, very welcome as developing suitably skilled human resource is critical to sustain the competitiveness of the IT sector as a whole. We also welcome the increase in the budgetary allocation for e-governance at the centre by 82 per cent to Rs.719 crore, and to State Governments by 66 per cent to Rs.500 crore, in addition to the decision to computerise the Public Distribution System (PDS) and the Food Corporation of India (FCI). These steps will provide further impetus to the industry.” 

 

 

The strongest factor that can be a potential roadblock to the implementation will be the mammoth costs involved in the project. Optical fibre laying, establishing infrastructure for the operation, integrating remote centres through satellites, cyber-administration, training and customizing teachers with the nitty-gritties of the programme will pose the greatest challenge. Except this, knitting the programme into the curricula of state educational boards will be urgent to add relevance to the educational programme. A common curriculum for all the students in the country will go a long way in improving national educational standards. A well-planned content to make lessons interesting for the students will be required. Otherwise, it may spoil the party for the people who bet on it.

 

 

Apart from a spurt in hardware consumption, the programme would generate millions of jobs addressing the country’s biting problem of unemployment. Lakhs of trainers, computer operators and branch controlling zonal officers will have to be recruited to man it successfully.

 

 

e-Education, to put in a nut-shell, would be the most potent tool in our hands for unleashing the colossal potential of a sleeping India. The dream of an India Shining can be translated into a roaring reality when a schoolgirl from the backwaters of Bihar will be able to lock horns academically with a Delhi Public School boy in Delhi; a farmer is digitally forewarned regarding the whims of the weather god; or a village potter connects to his potential customer or market at the click of a mouse, buys and sells goods online.

 

If e-Education comes to be implemented in all the states then the domestic demand of computer hardware is, imagine there are lakhs of schools, crores of students and academics in the country! 

 

Once e-Education is put in place, it will have tremendous spill-over effects. Our agro- business, pisci-culture, tourism, wildlife and environment protection, in course of time, will also come to be redefined by the dot–com magic. Thus, e-Education is evidently, apart from the fabulous business opportunity it holds, the swiftest and most cogent way to an enlightened India. We have missed the industrial revolution but can ill-afford to miss the information revolution.