National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology to be launched by Shri Arjun Singh at Tirupati tomorrow
	14:10 IST

Shri Arjun Singh, Minister of Human Resource Development, will launch the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology tomorrow in  Tirupati at the auditorium of Sri Venkateswara University. Smt. D. Purandeswari, Minister of State for Higher Education will also grace the occasion. Union Government had approved the Mission in the first week of last month. The highlights of the components of the Mission will be exhibited during the launch ceremony. The proposed Mission broadly has the objective of ensuring connectivity of the learners to the ‘World of Knowledge’ in cyberspace and to make them ‘Netizens’ in order to enhance their self-learning skills and develop their capabilities for on-line problem solving and to work for : creation of knowledge modules with right contents to address to the personalized needs of learners; certification of competencies of the learners, acquired through formal or non-formal means; and to develop and maintain the database having profile of human resources. The Mission aims for: (a)                 building connectivity and knowledge network among and within institutions of higher learning in the country with a view to achieving critical mass of researchers in any given field; (b)                 spreading digital literacy for teacher empowerment; (c)                 development of knowledge modules having the right content to take care of the aspirations of academic community and to address  the personalized needs of the learners; (d)                 standardization and quality assurance of e-contents to make them world class; (e)                 research in the field of pedagogy for development of efficient learning modules for disparate groups of learners; (f)                   making available e-knowledge contents, free of cost to Indians; (g)                 experimentation and field trial in the area of performance optimization of low cost access devices for use of ICT in education; (h)                 providing support for the creation of a Virtual Technological University; (i)                   identification and nurturing of talents; (j)                   certification of competencies of the human resources acquired either through formal or non-formal means and the evolution of a legal framework for it; and (k)                 developing and maintaining the database with the profiles of our human resources Broadly speaking, the Mission has the following components : (1)        Connecting Academic Community to the World of Knowledge in Cyberspace             In order to meet the objectives of the Mission, it is imperative to provide connectivity to the teaching and learning community to the World of Knowledge in cyberspace through information super highway.  Therefore, the Mission shall work for providing all the institutions of higher learning, in the country, with access devices and connectivity through high speed broadband and VPN etc. It is estimated that approximately 20,000 institutions of higher learning shall reap this benefit.   It shall be the endeavour of the Mission to ensure that the access devices are available with maximum number of learners in the country to enable them to become the ‘Netizens’.  To achieve this objective it shall support development of low cost and low power consuming devices through their field trials. The Mission, shall provide platform for exchange of e-content, development of which will be fully funded by Central Government.  The Central Government would also bear 75% of the cost of the connectivity having bandwidth up to 10-25 Mbps per college or per department of a University if remaining cost is borne by State Government or college/institution concerned. (2)        Digital Empowerment of the Academic Community             The Mission believes that the academic community needs to be computer friendly and comfortable with the use of computing and access devices in order to take maximum benefit of ICT tools in teaching and learning process.  Therefore, it has a plan to educate and train the academic community in using the computing devices, browse the internet and make use of ICT tools on priority.  It proposes to seek the cooperation of all organizations including the software and computer hardware companies in this effort. (3)           Content Generation and its Management One of the major activities of the Mission shall be to promote the generation of e-contents in all disciplines and subjects to facilitate the understanding of the course work and hard topics contained therein by the students of various levels.  The Mission shall encourage the teaching faculty to make use of their knowledge to generate contents in their respective subjects by using the ICT tools.  Mission realizes that a large quantity of e-contents in all disciplines is already available in different forms like Compact Disks (CDs) and over the internet.  Mission proposes to undertake the validation of the available material in free domain, for the purpose of quality assurance, classification and thereafter putting appropriate advisories for the benefit of learners through attached metadata. (4)        National Programme of Technology Enhanced Learning The National Programme of Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) was started by the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.  A good number of quality material on various courses has been created by these premier institutions of the country.  e-Contents are being continuously generated by the reputed faculty members of the premier institutions under NPTEL programme.  This programme has been subsumed with the Mission to give it a new dimension.  Mission hopes that the e-contents generated under this programme shall be of great use for the engineering students enrolled in the engineering colleges across the country.  It shall also address,  to some extent, the challenge of availability of faculty to teach specialized high profile courses in the engineering colleges. (5)        Research for development of new ICT Tools             Given consideration to the fact of rapid advancement in the arena of ICT, the Mission has an inbuilt component for promotion of research for development of new tools that may be used for facilitating the teaching and learning processes.  The Mission proposes to support the development of technology for creation of virtual laboratories so that the students enrolled in such colleges where appropriate facility for practical training is not available, can have the benefit through virtual laboratories.  Once this technology is fully developed, it may also be possible to impart technical education through distance mode.  Mission shall also support research for creation of virtual technological universities.  Support shall also be extended to the projects for development of hepatic devices and all other proposals of merit for the development of different ICT tools to make teaching and learning easy, cost effective and to provide equal opportunity of learning to all irrespective of geographical and economical constraints. (6)                 Human Resources Database The Mission proposes to create a database of all human resources in the country with their skills and competencies in order to make best use of their skills for enhancing the productivity. (7)         Certification of Skills The nation has a  large pool of skilled human resources, who have developed the skills through various non-formal means.  The talent of such human resources is not fully utilized for increasing the productivity of the nation for the want of appropriate certification. To address this issue, the Mission proposes to develop an ICT based system to assess and certify the skills of the human resources in due course of time.                           -------------------------- KKP/ska