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The Universities have a major responsibility in nation building, through imparting education to all those who aspire to learn more, by providing education opportunity to students in remote areas in multiple disciplines. In addition, there are many students who interrupt their studies for various reasons. They have a desire to improve themselves and also there are other knowledge seekers. Distance education system provides them good opportunity. Thus the dual mode system of education has a large socio-economic relevance.
Employment Component
There has been substantial growth in our higher educational system and we are generating over 3 million graduates every year. Also after 10th class and 10 + 2 nearly 7 million youth seek employment. However, our employment generation system is not in a position to absorb all the eligible candidates. This situation will lead to instability in the social structure. There is a large mismatch between the skills required for the modern economy and the education imparted to most of these students. Higher education has to focus on and orient towards productive employment opportunities. A three pronged strategy is needed to make education more useful, skill imparting and simultaneously create employment potential.
Firstly, the educational system should emphasize the importance of entrepreneurship and prepare the students right from the college education to get oriented towards setting up of the enterprises which will provide them creativity, freedom and ability to generate wealth. Diversity of skills and perseverance in work makes an entrepreneur. It should be taught to all the students. In addition, college syllabi even for arts, science, and commerce courses should include topics and practical required for entrepreneurship. The university education has to give the confidence to take up small enterprises. Secondly, banks have to be proactive to support young entrepreneurs so that they can acquire earning capacity through the production of innovative products. This may involve taking certain calculated risks, which can be eliminated by making an analysis of successful venture capital enterprises. Thirdly, there has to be an economic pull for human resources; for example generation of marketable products and enhancement of purchasing power among the people. This can come through the implementation of mega programmes such as PURA, Regional linking of Rivers, Infrastructural missions, Power missions and Tourism.
The educational institutions, Government and the private enterprises should become facilitators for creating this entrepreneurship scheme through the support of the banking system and the marketing system. This is one way of reducing the employment gap leading to upliftment of the 260 million people living below the poverty line. This will also enable to raise the living standards of those who are just above the poverty line.
Growth Of Knowledge Society
During the last century, the world has undergone a change from agriculture society, where manual labour was the critical factor, to industrial society where the management of technology, capital and labour provided the competitive advantage. Then the information era was born in the last decade, where connectivity and software products are driving the economy of a few nations. In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. The Knowledge society is powered by innovative capacity. Efficient utilisation of this existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth of the nation and also improve the quality of life - in the form of better health, education, infrastructure and other social indicators. Ability to create and maintain the knowledge infrastructure, develop knowledge workers and enhance their productivity through creation, growth and exploitation of new knowledge. These will be key factors in deciding the prosperity of Knowledge Society. Whether a nation is progressing towards the knowledge society can be judged by the way the country effectively deals with knowledge creation and knowledge deployment in all sectors like IT, Industries, Agriculture, Healthcare etc.
Universal Tele-Education System
Normally, a proper education system has to aim at: a good mathematics teacher teaching mathematics in a remote village in Bheemavaram in AP should be able to teach a number of schools located in different parts of Andhra Pradesh and other places and interact with the students in sequence and be able to clarify the doubts. Also the teacher must be able to draw knowledge from various sources on the fly, such as internet, digital library, generated creative content and the lectures given by various experts in the same field and deliver to all the students as if they are in the same simulated class room in a cost effective manner. This will enable large number of students to benefit from the lectures delivered by an expert teacher. .
It provides virtual classrooms in a multi class and studio environment with seamless two-way interaction between the teachers and students in a collaborative framework. It provides seamless, one-to-one, one-to-many connectivity, through the broadcasting network in a multicasting mode of delivery. It seamlessly enables a remote teacher to become a teacher to all the students in a session. Unlike the other video conferencing systems and multimedia tools currently in use for tele-education purposes, this Interactive Universal Tele-education delivery system creates a virtual classroom. It enables the teacher to take the student to a live virtual tour of the subject. This provides a cost effective solution for interactive content delivery. In a comparative basis we can create 250 nodes tele-education system for interactive delivery at a cost of establishing 4 multi-station video conferencing systems.
Recently, The President Dr. Abdul Kalam gave a lecture for five colleges in different parts of Punjab as a part of Distance Education Programme. He searched a page relevant to the subject from the digital library and pushed the page to all the participants and also located his talk from his website and broadcasted that page to all the participants through the tele-education system. he could see all the class students from various locations. They could also see and interact with him. Such an interactive tele-education delivery system is fully functional at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Quality Content Generation
There are three components for education: lectures, practical or laboratory and library. The content includes all the above. Content can be generated in many ways. The first one is the assimilation of the subject by an expert teacher through research study of many books and articles leading to the generation of quality and creative content in a presentable format. The teacher presents in a unique and innovative way to make the content appealing and easily understandable to the students. The second form of content could be on a self-learning method by breaking down the content into a series of question answer models. Third may be from various books, which can be extracted through a digital library and presented just-in time to all the remote students.
Fourth may be from Internet, where wealth of information is available; however careful assessment should be done for authenticity. Teacher may search the information in the Internet and push the content live through the tele-education system.
The content should have supportive animations, which may even bring virtual laboratories and virtual immersion effects to the remote students. When the content is generated, it should be a sharable learning object across the nation and across all platforms.
*DPIO, PIB, New Delhi
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