Industry speak

december / 2011www.digitallearning.in38 digitalLEARNING

An event like eINdIA2011 will showcase the cutting-edge developments in IcT, and emphasise upon the benefits of such technologies for school and higher education. This event will help researchers, educators, policy makers and teachers across India by providing them with an update on the latest initiatives from the leading IcT infrastructure providers. eINdIA2011 will be a golden opportunity for witnessing latest innovative solutions from within the Indian IcT industry and beyond.

“ICT Enabled Education-Makes Education Valuable in Gujarat” InOpen Technologies offers products and services to private schools, municipal schools and the state board and government schools. Rupesh Kumar Shah, CEO and Co-Founder, InOpen Technologies, SINE, IIT Bombay sheds light on the Gujarat experience…

Astute governmental policies and the ef-ficient mapping of resources have helped in bringing out phenomenal transforma-tions. The policies support the endeavour for rapid expansion and growth of knowl-edge based economy. Gujarat has suc-cessfully attracted investors due to its un-interrupted power supply, low cost of real estate and investor friendly policies, which has also created a plethora of direct and indirect jobs.

With GIL and GESIA backing the IT infrastructure, the goal of effective de-livery of ICTs comes into play. Some of the enabling policies are Promoting KPO based industries, enhancing sup-ply of skilled workforce, simplification of labour Laws and investor facilitation. This is so unlike the complex proce-dures that one faces in other states to set up a company. The digital content for education, ICT literacy and com-petency enhancement, and the ICT based teaching methods that are run-ning across the state are enhancing

the scope of education. Gujarat is the emerging educational destination.

Gujarat to Leapfrog The focus of the government of Gujarat has now turned towards investing in quality ed-ucation. The state can do the following to leapfrog and lead adoption of ICT in education:• Optimise the investment by using

the same infrastructure for multiple purposes. For example, the com-puter lab of school can be used as training centre for parents so that education continues beyond school.

• Use FOSS applications. Even if itmay be a bigger challenge to alter the operating system, we can focus on using free applications. This in-cludes educational games such as GComrpis, Tux Maths, productivity tools such as office tools, and pro-gramming language like Scratch.

• Provide content for school andhigher education in local language.

Reaching the Last Mile To reach out to all students and mini-mise dropouts three factors have to be taken into account:

Keep the cost of sustained ac-cess low - Software licenses have to be renewed and there has to be adequate hardware support. By using free and open source applications actively the total cost of implementation can be lowered.

Do not reinvent the wheel-We need to focus on sustaining the initiatives al-ready in place.

Understand the user needs- Edu-cational needs of society have to be studied so that the technology useful for everyone can be developed. Value add-ed services provided along with regular education will ensure sustained interest.

Make positive use of the social pressure- It is important to create a positive social awareness to maximise the reach of such initiatives. Local role models can be roped in. They can be used to take care of the kiosks/mobile labs as well.

On eINDIA 2011