IT in education

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At present ICT adoption is largely limited to computer labs in government schools. However, there is a move towards delivering education through the use of tablets and some talk of Cloud computing. By Jasmine Desai

2012’s Union Budget boosted allocation for the education sector by 21.7% year-on-year. Manish Bahl, Director, India and Research Operations and Senior Analyst serving Vendor Strategy Professionals, Forrester Inc, commented on his blog, “The proposals to set up 6,000 schools through public/private partnerships, and implement a service tax exemption for school education infrastructure, will generate substantial opportunities around PCs (desktops, laptops, and tablets), classroom technologies like interactive engagement and back-office technologies like CRM, ERP, BI, and Smart Campus. Low-cost tablets will be in much greater demand when backed by government initiatives.” Clearly, a shift is on the horizon for education and IT is the catalyst here.

Use of ICT in government schools & colleges
The education sector has witnessed a lot of progressive changes in recent times. The most prominent has been the shift to instructor-led delivery aided by technology-enabled solutions. Technology has become an integral part of the classroom and an increasing number of teachers are using technology-led tools as teaching aids to enhance the delivery of their lessons According to Srikanth B Iyer, COO, Pearson Education Services, “Computer science is being taught in several government schools and this trend has, in turn, led to an acceleration in the growth of computer science labs across this category of schools.”

Education is a segregated sector and, accordingly, the traction of different technologies also varies. According to Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Senior VP & MD, Talisma, Asia Pacific & Europe, “Competition, innovative education models, the need to align with global counterparts, and growing awareness on the need to scale up IT infrastructure to meet the emerging needs of an increasingly tech-savvy student base, will all prove to be major drivers for increased IT adoption in this sector.”

The popularity of digital classrooms is on the rise. Basically, a digital classroom has a massive repository of multimedia objects including 2D/3D images, simulations, rhymes, games, games, activities, worksheets, animations and more, which are updated regularly in order to keep the content current. Teachers can import their own material and customize their teaching sessions.

Pearson Education Services has worked on building labs for around a thousand government schools in Rajasthan. In Bihar, it has provided labs to 168 schools. It will shortly provide labs to 400 government colleges in Andhra Pradesh and start working on tablet-based solutions, which will have preloaded content for the student alongside teaching and administrative tools for the teacher. The student will be allowed to carry the tablet home.

HP has Lab-in-Box, a solution that is designed to address specific obstacles to enabling school education in India. It sets up IT-enabled classrooms that can be transported to remote locations and are self-contained and fully operational from day one. Although ICT is now considered to be a critical part of school education, most schools were not originally constructed with computer labs.

Then there’s the Cloud. According to Tarun Malik, Director, Product Marketing, Microsoft India, “Cloud computing holds great promise for the development and delivery of computer resources to education in India, especially in schools where digital divide is apparent.”

Supporters of the Cloud argue that it can help maximize efficiencies and optimize costs, including uploading content to the Cloud. This evolution gives educational institutions the opportunity to balance the need to deliver cost-effective services to students, teachers, faculty and staff with important institutional demands, including important considerations such as data security, authentication and system management.

SaaS is, perhaps, the most relevant Cloud option when it comes to education. Microsoft India recently announced that All India Council for Technical Education was deploying Office 365 for Education at over 10,000 colleges and institutes in India.

Another instance is that of Delhi Public School, which has adopted Microsoft Cloud services for Education It wanted to offer its students online access to notes and assignments, but the prohibitive cost of maintaining thousands of mailboxes, and the cost of expanding the same, year-on-year, had prevented it from doing so. Consequently, it moved to Live@edu.

Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya, Director – Government Affairs, HP India, commented, “In order to leverage technology in education, it is vital to introduce cost-effective, Cloud-based applications and promote Internet-based learning to effectively engage students and align technology to meet the social and educational challenges in India.”

The sheer difference in demand for quality education and the lack of supply of the same is what will drive technology adoption. In schools that lack access to experienced teachers or high quality books, ICT can clearly make a huge difference. Cloud-based applications makes knowledge transfer a more cost-effective process, especially for students in rural areas, encouraging them to opt for newer ways of learning.

Addressing issues
There are manifold challenges looming around the government educational sector that needs to be addressed and overcome. Some of them can be hailed as social issues. According to Bhattacharya, HP India, “In the current education scenario where only half of the areas of habitation in India have a primary school, and only about 12.4% of children attend college, the government faces challenges in encouraging more children to enroll themselves in schools and facilitate their schooling with cost-effective, sustainable and inclusive models of education.”

Limitations in the current teaching methods, lack of quality teachers and inadequate infrastructure are all major barriers to IT adoption in the Indian education sector.

In both government and private schools, the biggest setback faced is the lack of expertise among teachers in using technology. In government schools, the challenges are two-fold. Firstly, there is the lack of proper infrastructure and electricity is scarce. The capability of teachers to adapt to new technology is another major challenge.

According to Mruthyunjayappa of Talisma, “The adoption of new technology definitely presents a challenge for technology planners in campuses. They need to have good knowledge of existing technologies and emerging business requirements in order to frame an agile roadmap for technology adoption.”

Other areas to be considered include studying the existing IT infrastructure, setting aside budgets, availability of trained staff to run operations, preparing a business continuity plan and setting aside resources for running pilot projects. Since most technology projects deliver a tangible return on investment only in the long run, planners have to work to get an approval from senior university board/senate members. This is particularly apparent in projects that involve a multiphase and multi campus implementation. The other key area where adoption challenges come from is that of people. Administrative staff need to be enlightened about the benefits of automation and transparency within the system.

Are we there yet?
There are many reasons as to why the scenario varies in developed countries as opposed to a developing nation like India. In India, there is the added challenge of addressing the diversity of the nation. The process of developing a product is far more complex here, since you need to cater to a broader spectrum of people who speak multiple languages. The absence of skilled manpower is another reason why we lag behind developed countries globally. Our school system faces a severe shortage of trained and qualified teaching and support staff in both the private as well as the government sector.

According to Iyer of Pearson Education Services, “The level of penetration of technology in both private and government schools is minimal (around 15% in Indian private schools) and there is a long way to go before we can achieve digitization of schools.”

Classroom solutions will evolve in terms of the quality of content and hardware. Attempts are being made to boost the usage of tablets in the education space.

Smart classrooms, smoother admissions and on-boarding as well as automated student relationship management will all be the norm for Indian higher educational institutions in the future. While course content is being constantly changed, so will the delivery channels. Analytics could be the next area of IT adoption for this sector wherein faculty will be able obtain real time and actionable feedback on methods of teaching, content or any other parameter.

Iyer of Pearson Education Services said, “IT adoption in the higher education sector is in its infancy and there is going to be accelerated technology adoption in administration, academics and process management.”

Given the challenges of limited resources, connectivity and infrastructure, inventive ways to circumvent these challenges are required.

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