National Policy on ICT in School Education

Three Broad Themes Converge to Deliver the ICT Promise ICT is an initiative designed to deliver educational content to school children throughout the social strata and especially in remote rural areas, using various technology based devices.

This initiative necessitates the conversion of an existing curriculum / content into an electronic format for technology-based delivery. The question we should consider is whether it is just content that we want to convert? Not really. We are converting, or rather transforming the teaching process from a human-based delivery to a technologybased delivery. The essence of ICT, therefore, is much deeper than just content conversion. It’s about translating the natural process of learning, keeping in mind all the relevant components —mainly the child, the teacher and the textbooks.

If we are to trace the evolution path of how IT implementation first impacted and changed businesses, we have some very important lessons for us:

The domain to be computerized needs to be streamlined. A chaotic regime of processes will not yield the benefits of computerization.
Computerization needs the systematic and rigorous application of the processes and principles of Software Engineering.
The human capital required for the creation and implementation of software solutions needs to have a set of standardized competencies.

I would like to extend these learnings to the ICT initiative and propose three themes that I feel are relevant vis-à-vis education through ICT Indian schools.

Theme # 1: Streamlining Current Educational Processes
Theme # 2: Applying Instructional Design Principles
Theme # 3: Capacity Building of Professionals

This paper presents the three themes and their related action points that will serve as a source for more specific policy level guidelines.

Theme # 1: Streamlining Current Educational Processes:

What does it mean to learn? And what does it mean to teach? What is effective learning and teaching? Is a high score the only indicator of great teaching? These are pointed questions that need to be addressed before we dream of an ICT future in education. Today, one can say with some assertion that teaching involves nothing but the download of academic content found in textbooks on to students. We all know that ‘telling’ is not ‘teaching’. Very little attention is paid to map teaching to the process of learning. At the very basic level, students go through a process of:

UNDERSTAND-PRACTICE-TEST
in whatever they learn.

Action item # 1: ICT content needs to map any or each of the above components within the basic learning process very clearly. A CD-ROM or a web-based module or a video needs to be designed with a prior knowledge on whether it will enhance understanding of a particular concept (what is multiplication), whether it will provide opportunities for practice (like multiplying big two digit numbers) or whether it will prepare the child to do well for a test (multiplying one or two digit numbers in a given amount of time).

Action item # 2: Use specific teaching methods suited to different topics. For example, concepts in any subject can be taught using the Concept Attainment method whereas Inquiry-based teaching methods can be used for teaching science. This makes lesson planning an essential process to be followed.

Action item # 3: Develop and enforce lesson planning as a practice. Novice teachers can adapt and use lesson plans made by experienced teachers.

Action item # 4: Evolve a common and direct set of measures to evaluate the effectiveness of learning beyond scores. Number of dropouts, number of teachers retained, number of projects done in the school etc., could become some real world measures that a school may start using to showcase its effectiveness. It is important that none of these measures are child-dependent (like scores) because we don’t want a situation where the cart drives the horse.]

Action item # 5: Streamline processes to recruit, induct and retain teachers.

Action item # 6: Streamline recordkeeping and leverage ICT to collect useful data on teachers’ performance, students’ performance, budgets, etc., to predict and alter key processes.

Theme # 2: Applying Instructional Design Principles One of the most significant contributions of Instructional Design is that it steers the design and development effort of any learning content (irrespective of media) toward being:

a. Learner-centric
b. Goal-oriented
c. Content-centric

This means that the creation of any learning material should, at the very least, actively consider the following:

A. About the learners:
a. Who are they and what are they like?
b. What do they really lack in the current scheme of things? Is it understanding of abstract concepts, is it language, the pace, the complexity of procedures?
c. What is it that they really want from this media?
d. What are their current, most pertinent learning and non-learning (social) needs? B. About the learning goals:
a. Does the learning content focus on awareness, understanding or application of the subject matter (already covered in the first theme—even if the basic learning process is not streamlined we may rectify it at this level)
b. How best can the learning goals be formulated in a manner that makes the process both measurable and contextualized in the real-world setting?
c. How can the students be encouraged to demonstrate the achievement of the learning goal?
d. How well do the learning goals align to the needs of the learners?
C. About the content:
a. Which parts of the syllabus are most suited to ICT delivery?
b. Can teachers identify those topics they find most challenging to teach?
c. Can we collate these points into a National ICT Curriculum so that we ensure that only those concepts that can be best conveyed through this medium are treated through ICT?

The action items that emerge from the above are:

Action item # 7: Define and institutionalize an ID-led process for the content design and creation.
Action item # 8: By deploying a needs analysis process, create a list of topics / concepts that students find hard to study and teachers find hard to teach. Prioritize these topics for further development.

Action item # 9: Align metrics for content design effectiveness with metrics defined to measure school effectiveness.
Action item # 10: Build data capture points within the process.
Theme # 3: Capacity Building of Professionals
The best defined processes cannot make up for inadequacies in human talent. ICT or not, an issue that needs to be addressed urgently is teacher training. This training needs to include pre-service, induction and in-service training. Given the size and nature of the teaching workforce, this is a daunting task and needs to be taken up in a phased manner with a project timeline spanning 2 to 3 years.

The action items that emerge from this theme are:
Action item # 11: Create a competency framework and dictionary for teachers at all levels. The competencies need to be based on the role they are expected to perform given their existing backgrounds.

Action item # 12: Create a set of assessment tools to evaluate the present lot of teachers on the defined competencies.

Action item # 13: Create a Teacher’s Curriculum based on the competencies and the gaps revealed through the assessments. Engage with government and non-government agencies to create the content for teachers based on this curriculum.

Action item # 14: Provide for ongoing learning and evaluation of the teaching workforce. The enhanced competencies of an individual teacher need to reflect in the metrics defined for measuring school effectiveness.

Action item # 15: Use technology-based learning for the teachers in good measure to help them understand the nuances of learning through this medium.

Conclusion:
ICT comes bundled with its advantages of scalability, interactivity, measurement and tracking and many others. Using these advantages along with strong, well-defined processes will help ICT serve the needs of education in full measure.