National Policy on ICT in School Education

Role of ICT in School Education in India

a study by Pandav Nayak

Indira Gandhi National Open University

Role of ICT in School Education in India

Commenting on its pioneering initiative of placing free of charge 2000 elite Courses on its websites,Prof. Steren Lerman of MIT had famously observed(2001): “The syllabus and notes are not an education. Education is what you do with the materials.”

ICT’s role in any developing country, more focally in India’s schools, has got to be more than mere transmission of information. It has to be borne in mind as a guideline for any national policy that data (thus transmitted) divorced from a process of questioning, reflection, teaching and learning in a given social context, will only banalize education. Unless understood in the light of this central ethos, ICT’s role for all its ‘enhancing’ and ‘enabling’ capabilities may amount to a historic waste because (a) it is possible to improve accessibility, quality and reach of education, (b) generate society-wide demand for ‘education anywhere anytime for every one’ and (c) intervene substantially in the networked global economy with educational solutions. Few can outmatch ICT’s role in contributions to effective ‘inclusive growth’ especially in the context of educating the society at the school stage.

Two exclusive features of ICT consist in its capability to overcome (i) the ‘historical lag’ which underpins the backwardness of the traditional societies like India and (ii) the complexity of ‘explosive numbers’ and exclusionary social and spatial divides which have stood as major stumbling blocks in post-independence India’s nation building experiment . In its varied applications, India has already harvested grand results in almost all sectors of social development. A point of caution running through all these ‘good things’ however, is: it is the technology availability which has dictated India’s applications in the various fields, and not the other way round. This at the same time exposes an absence of national regulatory framework for synergy and integration between educational agenda and other socio-economic goals. More than anything, a strong political will and requisite budgetary allocations are unavoidably necessary if the country is not to go the way of ‘vocational education’, an important school education agenda , neglected since the Kothari Commission days.

Major challenges before the school education which ICT can be made to responsibly confront and resolve are :

accessing the hitherto unaccessed learners
addressing drop-out students, and
vocationalization of the secondary education.

While ‘distance learning’ should be encouraged to promote all the above three objectives, specific ICT solutions may be needed for differential focus. For instance, customized web-based education can meet the challenges arising from 2 & 3 but that would entail further differentiation and enrichment of ICT tools available so far on a broad scale. The associated problems relate to the environment in which ICT would operate. Against a P.C. penetration of 2.3 per 100, revolutionary efforts to bring about convergence will entail a substantial investment in telecom infrastructure. ISRO has already demonstrated its leadership in the area as have some educational organizations like IGNOU, NIOS and some private organizations like NIIT, WIPRO, INFOSYS etc. They need to be brought over an integrative platform through national policy initiatives for implementation of diverse measures. Scope for documenting best practices should be provided for. Reinvigorating efforts for implementation of the skill development mission which occupies a major chunk of the school education space are to be encouraged.

Teacher preparation to meet all the above goals is as important as innovations in the technology however effective. The question of context, media-mix and above all, handling of socially sensitive issues are too vital to be left to a so-called efficient set of delivery mechanisms. Suitable measures to overcome adverse teacher-pupil ratio, periodic in-service training for professional development of the teachers etc can be better given effect to with the help of ICT innovations responsibly introduced in the school education sector.

Print