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Move Over Chalk and Duster, it's Time to Go Digital

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Enough has been written about the importance of having a sound education

system in country and all the social benefits that accrue once we have one. We

also understand why the government is charging a cess on taxes to fuel

education. But do you know that Education which is currently a $40 billion worth

sector, is all set to grow three-folds to $120 billion in ten years time? And

it's not just the managements of the private institutes that are going to

benefit from this opportunity; there's a share to be grabbed by everyone, more

prominently the ICT industry. Roughly 20% of a middle-class family's money is

spent on educating kids, with parents jostling with each other to get their ward

admitted to a top-notch private school than risking their child's future in

950,000 odd government run schools. The widening rich and poor divide in the

society is clearly reflected in the stark contrast between our educational

facilities in cities and villages. A lot of private funding at both school and

college level has ensured world-class institutions mushrooming across urban

India; on the contrary the state of elementary education in villages is

reflected in the satire doing rounds in electronic media these days (the Idea

commercial for the uninitiated!). No buildings for students, no electricity,

forget even potable drinking water or proper sanitation facilities.

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Clearly, the potential for investments in this sector is immense. Most of the

schools and colleges still use primitive means for teaching: blackboards, desks,

chalks and dusters, slates and registers. While, the government's focus is on

educating masses in rural areas, urban schools and colleges are witnessing

private funding in a big way. The more reputed institutions have the luxury of

state-of-the-art facilities within their premises and the comfort of money

should they need to invest more; however, it's the primary and high schools in

rural areas that are really short of funds even for the basic infrastructure,

forget investing in the latest technologies. We see customized solutions

available for all institutions. The institutions that need to develop students

to compete globally and the ones that charge the heftiest of fees, are the ones

most amenable to adopting the latest and the costliest technologies. Let's look

at the levels of IT penetration, the new technologies available and their

benefits.

World-class education in your neighborhood



A trip to some of the world-class educational institutes across India shows how
teaching and admin facilities have changed over the years. And it's not a mere

coincidence that this change has occurred simultaneously with the progress of

ICT. Actually you see a complete facelift in the way institutes function these

days. Right from the start of the admission process, to daily classes, admin

chores, to conducting exams and declaring results; you see a lot of technology

being used.

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Most of the schools and colleges have websites in place that act as a single

source of interaction for the students. Admission processes are notified online

and students have the flexibility to fill and submit forms there itself. These

forms are stored on a central server where customized software let you do all

sorts of administrative fiddling with the data. You can evaluate candidates,

declare admission results and roll out list of successful and wait-listed

candidates online. The fees deposited by successful candidates is directly

credited to the accounts department, saving time on moving files and folders.

Likewise the transportation needs of students is also taken care of. The maps

for different routes can be prepared and stored in the system and be accessed

easily when deciding upon a suitable bus route. In fact, the entire

transportation system can be automated, right from storing info on students,

drivers, bus details, etc to even tracking their movement using GPS navigation

devices. The authorities can keep a tab on the speed at which a driver is moving

and also locate a bus whenever required. Regular instructions can be handed over

to the driver and his route diverted in case there's some blockade or disruption

in traffic on the way.



IT@UPES
:

Stoking the Flames of Knowledge

The first Indian Energy University

approved by UGC, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies has chosen the

fast-track approach to deploy IT solutions across its three campuses.

Set up by eminent petroleum professionals in 2003, UPES offers over 33

graduate, post graduate and doctoral programs in petroleum to more than 2400

students across its campuses in Dehradun, Gurgaon and Rajahmundry (AP).

Being a young and domain specific university, it needs policies that promote

sustained educational excellence and resource optimization. Other challenges

include working within tight budgets, employee retention, managing

complexity, security, and compliance.

The IT facilities at UPES encourage students to explore

and help in self development. The knowledge base available through the

Internet is massive and we at UPES, provide support not only to the

faculty but also to the students to use it to their best advantage.



Dr S J Chopra, Chancellor

To standardize processes across various departments and to ensure timely

and effective information flow, the university was quick to embrace the SAP

solution for Higher Education & Research called SLCM (Student Life-cycle

Management). This automates all processes related to the student life-cycle

viz. student application & admission, academic calendar, academic structure,

student accounting, grading and student progression through the program of

study till graduation. One of the immediate benefits of the implementation

was that employees who use the system actually bonded with the end-to-end

process. For example, the enrolments officer realized the importance of

creating a student record on time and the consequent impact on Finance,

Academics and Student Records and Evaluation and the other departments of

the University. Accountability also increased as the entire system became

more transparent. This was coupled with the expected benefits of

consolidating all data on a single location and a single system — in terms

of reporting accuracy and speed. Management of user authorizations and

security eased (contrasted with access rights assignment in multiple systems

earlier) as well as streamlined backup and recovery capabilities.

The Learning Management System (LMS) based on Moodle centralizes content

(across campuses) as well as engages the faculty and students into a more

collaborative way of studying-both in terms of student-teacher interaction

as well as peer interaction. The faculty can include Blogs and Wikis on

their pages, thus effectively making this a primary source of contact with

students. This also includes popular modes of communication such as chat and

discussion forums. The faculty can provide assignments to students; and

create online quizzes that are evaluated instantly; and individually grade

them.

The mail system is supported by a SpamAssassin based anti-spam filtering

system and Kaspersky anti-virus. It has a web client and also supports

mobile client access. All of the University's officials access their e-mail

from their smartphones. An LDAP standards based global address book has also

been deployed to provide online address lookups across all locations. An

Instant Messaging (IM) system that uses this address book for users has been

deployed across locations to reduce traditional channel communication costs.

The University has implemented a student portal that gives a student

access to his records during the semester. Currently available records are

for examination results (where it is possible to generate a facsimile of the

grade card), fee paid/due, online attendance (including color coded status

of attendance per subject as well as overall), placement information

(including eligibility, details on companies coming to campus, and a

historical record of the number of times a student has appeared for a

placement interview). The University library is fully automated using Libsys

4.0 with the WebOpac component for web-based catalog searches. This is also

integrated into the student portal enabling students to search through the

library catalogue online.

Dr Ashish Bharadwaj



Associate Director - IT
Being a young University,

the most important challenges are to implement initiatives that help in

scalable and sustainable academic development, establishing well defined

processes for all stakeholders, and resource



optimization.

The University was the first in Uttarakhand to implement Wi-Fi across

campus. This standard has been maintained across all its campuses. Multiple

802.11g devices-both indoor and outdoor from a mix of vendors are being used

with seamless client roaming, client load balancing and AES based security.

The University has also adopted server virtualization to rationalize

space and contribute to a greener environment in terms of reduced power and

cooling requirements; and improving the utilization of servers that were

often utilized only during peak workloads. Dynamic allocation of resources

made it possible to create up to 6 virtual servers on each physical server

thereby reducing the number of physical servers to 20% of their original

number.

For each campus there's an L3 based LAN with fibre connectivity amongst

buildings. The network is divided into zones that cater to different

sections of the campus — eg. students, labs, finance, examinations etc.

VLANs have been created for all of these entities to ensure logical

separation and separate access control. Inter-campus connectivity is

provided through a 1MBps MPLS VPN that has class of service policies defined

for different traffic types. All devices on the network are manageable and

are monitored 24x7 through network management tools.

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Most of the institutes are fast moving toward having parts of their

examinations online. The benefits are enormous and software developers are fast

pushing solutions for the same. It speeds up the evaluation of answer sheets and

also eliminates leakage of question papers besides connecting various exam

centers and students simultaneously. Students even have the flexibility of

choosing their day and time and appear from a center nearest to their place. A

potent benefit of having exams online is for rural areas where we don't have

much of infrastructure either. A lot of ERP solutions are available that provide

all the above functionality and even more.

Why e-Learning?



A lot of e-learning courses are being used these days for all kinds of subjects
and for students of all age groups. These facilitate ease of learning,

especially when you have branches at multiple locations and want to standardize

the education material that is taught across each branch. The medium of

instruction could vary from a CBT (PC based courses on CDs), a WBT (where

students read information in the form of PDFs, HTML files and fill responses

online) to interactive audio/video sessions. The possibilities are endless and

nearly as good as the quality and scale of your network. The concept of high-def

video conferencing used by corporates has taken the shape of virtual classrooms

in institutes where a professor sitting in one of the cities can deliver a

lecture to dozen other locations at the same time. The success of these courses

depends on the strength of the campus networks and the number of students that

can be connected. As it is not possible to provide wired connections at each and

every location, wireless connectivity through the use of WiFi and WiMAX

technologies is fast becoming popular.

Classrooms go hi-tech



The IT revolution is not just restricted to the admin and infrastructure,
there's lot of action happening inside classrooms as well. If an institute has

the money and the desire to provide best-of-class facilities inside its

premises, then sky is the limit. Everything, right from blackboards to student's

books and registers and slates have been e-enabled. A teacher can simply walk

into the classroom with his notebook (or stay away from the classroom and still

be able to deliver lectures!) and connect it to an electronic whiteboard. The

board itself consumes very less power and could even be powered through the USB.

Short throw projectors are mounted on top of such boards to ensure that the

teacher can move around freely without his shadow being projected on the board.

He can control his slides on the whiteboard through a stylus or a digital pen

and even draw objects on it. There are interactive presentation panels available

that let you achieve the same functionality standing on the podium facing the

audience. Whatever is marked on these touch screen panels gets automatically

reflected on the board. Needless to add, the entire set of changes gets

incorporated on the notebook app. The teacher can even move around the classroom

interacting with students for which he has another gizmo available-a digital

slate-that is connected with the whiteboard through WiFi and works in the same

manner as the interactive panel, but provides mobility in addition.

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For their part, students would only be too happy to have notebooks that are

connected to the whiteboard or the teacher's notebook so that they can save the

day's proceedings. The concentration levels would only increase with the added

benefit of revisiting a lecture again and again at one's own pace. There are

also interactive response systems available for students to poll their responses

to questions posed by teachers during a lecture. These are similar to the

popular 'polling devices' used by various television game shows, where audiences

poll responses to queries put forth by the host. The small, portable devices

work on either IR or ultrasonic waves. The responses can be compiled to generate

reports.

Another trend that's catching up is the use of low-cost ultraportable mobile

PCs for young kids. What can at best be described as bare-bones machines by

today's standards, these UMPCs bundle together cost savings with simplicity.

Using Intel's Celeron and the latest Atom processors, coupled with the now

cheaper Windows XP, these UMPCs come for as low as Rs 15k. They only require

additional e-learning software and you have a kind of client-server mechanism

established amongst the teacher and students.

Toys for the Next-gen Classroom



While the list is pretty huge and the possibilities endless, we present some of
the most intuitive gadgets that are being adopted by the 'high-on-budget'

institutes

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It's the electronic version of the old classroom boards, we've all grown up

being taught in classrooms, that has redefined the way students are taught in

classes. Alongwith the ultra short throw projector, this whiteboard can be used

by the teacher to transform a lecture into an audio-visual presentation with

informative slides, right there on the whiteboard. There's a software installed

on the teacher's notebook that controls the interaction of the teacher's

notebook with the whiteboard and is also used to save changes that he makes on

the board. The teacher can fiddle around with images, text, calculations on the

screen using a stylus, an electronic pen or even a finger, depending on the

model being used. These whiteboards can also be used to remotely conference

across different locations, thus adding a new dimension to video conferencing.

 
i

There are several short throw projectors such as this CP —A100, available for

use with interactive whiteboards in classrooms. The benefit of deploying such

devices over the traditional projectors is that they reduce or nearly eliminate

the presenter's shadow on the board, while in motion from one end to the other.

They are quick and easier to install and can be mounted on the wall above the

board. However, you need to be very precise about placement, to produce the

right sized image to fill the board and one that is completely focused on the

surface of the board.



If you hate showing your back to the audience while presenting, then this
dual touch-screen device from SMART Technologies is the perfect solution. This

device takes the input from your notebook via a USB 2.0 port and delivers the

output to a projector. You can control and modify your presentations in Word,

PowerPoint and Excel by writing notes, drawing figures, etc. You can work on the

screen using a tethered, battery-free pen and navigate through menus using the

pen or the finger. The 17” SXGA screen has the right resolution to view the most

intricate detail on screen and the best part is that you can even save the

changes made on screen to several software applications such as the Microsoft

apps mentioned above and even AutoCAD.

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The digital cousin of the good old slate, this device offers the freedom to

deliver lessons from anywhere in the classroom. You can interact wirelessly with

your whiteboard from up to 16 m by controlling software applications, writing

notes and highlighting information using the battery-free tethered pen. It is

designed to add mobility to the whiteboard experience in a classroom. Students

can also use them to explore topics on their own and deliver presentations to

the rest of the class directly from their desks.

If you remember Kaun Banega Crorepati, you'll probably also remember the

'fastest finger first.' You guessed it right, this Interactive Response system

is similar in concept and only builds on to the teacher-student interaction in

classroom. The system includes a remote for each student (shown in the image), a

central receiver and a software to quiz, survey and prepare reports. The remote

interacts with the receiver using radio frequency technology with a range of up

to 30 m. The central receiver hooks up through USB and is compatible with both

Windows and Mac.

The AVerVision300AF+ is used to scan hard copies and provides a direct output

to the projector. It has a 3.2 mega pixel sensor and the auto focus can adjust

to produce sharp images whether at standard zoom and pan, or the full 16x

magnification. It can store upto 80 images which can be viewed by connecting the

camera to a PC or MAC. It can be integrated with most classroom whiteboards and

the 360 degree access full function remote control allows presenters to control

the device from anywhere in the room.

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This is a complete classroom teaching solution that comprises a low-cost,

ultraportable mobile PC (UMPC) with the simplest of hardware, and e-learning and

management software for connected notebooks. The solution works as a typical

client-server mechanism with the teacher acting as the administrator in the

classroom. Each student is handed over the UMPC shown in the picture, connected

to the teacher's notebook, which acts as the master PC. A big LCD in front acts

as the blackboard for the class and outputs the notes from the teacher's

notebook. The teacher can send notes and messages and broadcast courseware to

all students, who can save those for revision.

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Grooming the Rural Kids



Quality education in India remains the preserve of a select few. There's no
Harry Potter wand that could help rectify the situation overnight but sustained

efforts from everyone: government, corporates and technologists, can help infuse

some momentum to the sector that has a direct impact on India's future. We can't

ignore the need to educate 70% of our children who stay in villages and can't

afford to pay for their education. This is where we need innovation from

technologists to make use of the best that technology has to offer to ensure we

can spread education amongst masses. What this doesn't mean is that we only

invest in fancy electronic gadgets; the solution could be as simple as a

discarded PC from a large enterprise with minimal hardware. Such a system can be

loaded with a simple e-learning software and put to maximum use amongst

children. This would not only reduce the burden of transporting men and material

(teachers, books, stationery, etc) but also allow schools to make the best

courses available. So, the challenge in rural areas is not about teaching

professional courses or motivating children to study. It's about providing the

most effective teaching solutions at the least cost. Let's look at the different

ways in which IT is coming to the rescue:

1. As a substitute to teachers: Finding qualified teachers for all

subjects in rural areas has always been a challenge as most of the educated

people move away from villages to towns upon completion of their education. IT

helps fill in this void to a great extent. There are a lot of e-learning

software available that help design customized courses. These are generally very

simple to use and invoke the thought process in students' minds through a vivid

range of tutorials and assignments. The hardware requirements for running these

courses are pretty simple and they can be loaded on top of any barebones

machine. And if the IT infrastructure in the area is good enough then the same

courseware could even be hosted on the Web. The students receive inputs from

teachers in real time and can submit assignments and post queries. As part of

Corporate-Social Responsibility (CSR) most corporates are actively engaged in

setting up IT infrastructure in community schools and even provide training in

using it.

2. Online Exams: This is perhaps one of the most potent e-learning

application. Conducting exams online not only reduces man & material costs but

also saves on logistics. Most of the professional institutes have started

conducting exams online but the real potential of such a system can be realized

in rural areas, where reaching out to students is the most difficult challenge.

You don't need to purchase any complex software, there are many free Linux based

distros available that are par for the course. Read our story 'Empowering

India's Future Through IT' at pcquest.com to find out how Kerala's high schools

are benefiting from it. Each student needs to log on to the exam portal at a

specified time and place. The exam papers are available as a set of Web pages

where students can fill their responses. Once the student is through with his

test, the information gets stored on a central server. The beauty of conducting

exams online is that there's no scope for question paper leaks nor is there any

chance for students or the exam center as a whole to indulge in malpractices.

3. Playing on students' curiosity: There is always a craze around

learning computers amongst people across all age groups. To satiate this

curiosity the use of computers needs to be blended with the regular course

material for students. This acts as a strong catalyst for students to learn

their subjects and also makes them familiar with computers. Not only subjects

there could be whole lot of games and exercises that students could play around

in-between classes. They could be exposed to a lot of useful information around

their surroundings, that would only transform them into more informed citizens.

4. Promoting Adult Literacy: One-thirds of India's population still

remains illiterate and removing illiteracy remains one of the biggest challenges

for the society, primarily because convincing adults to learn is far more

difficult than young kids! A lot of initiatives are already in action from

various state governments with each state having a Literacy Mission in place.

However, the vast expanse of the country coupled with a lack of trainers and

infrastructure hinders their work. The rise of India's ICT industry has brought

about a complete turnaround in the way adult literacy is tackled. Most

corporates have donated their older PCs to such missions and with software

companies developing adult literacy software, there has been a complete makeover

on how courses are delivered. Apart from playing up the curiosity and interest,

the use of computers also ensures standardization of courseware. Moreover, the

same teaching center can be used to teach separate batches of people throughout

the day.

5. Promoting literacy through kiosks: We have seen choupals in villages

and also seen how the same places have been converted to e-choupals through the

use of interactive kiosks. These have been widely used to facilitate

e-governance schemes related to agriculture, banking, insurance, laws and

legislation, etc. The same kiosks can also host educational software and be used

for teaching children and adults. They provide the same functionality as a

standard PC in schools in addition to delivering e-governance schemes.

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