RESOURCE CENTRES & SERVICES IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

The Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET):

An autonomous organization, formed as a nodal agency under the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for promoting the use of mass media technology for expanding and improving the quality of education at the school level. The Institute is funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India.The Central Institute of Educational Technology(CIET) was established in 1984 by the Ministry of Human Resources Development of Government of India, under the umbrella of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).The Institute is located at NIE Campus, NCERT in New Delhi, the capital of India.

The origin of the Institute was effected by merging two departments of NCERT, Center for Educational Technology and Department of Teaching Aids, with an aim to make the new age technologies in mass media available at the school level. The activities of the Institute are centered on the branches of media such as radio, television, movies, satellite communications and cyber media.

CIET is involved in various activities such as design, development and dissemination of alternative learning systems, promotion of Educational Technology, training of personnel in Educational Technology, coordination of activities of its subsidiaries like the State Institutes of Education Technology (SIET) and consultancy and media support to other constituents of NCERT.

The Institute is housed in a spacious building with open courtyards, amphitheater, two television studios, two sound studios, technical control rooms, workshop, seminar rooms, rehearsal areas and projection facilities, library, canteen, administrative areas and artists' studios.

The Institute also provides courses in education at bachelors, masters and doctoral levels

Satellite  Instructional Television Experiment (SITE):

The Satellite instructional Television Experiment or SITE was an experimental Satellites communications project launched in India in 1975 by National aeronautics and space administration (NASA), USA and ISRO. SITE made available informational Television to rural India by various international agencies such as UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, ITU. It plays a major role in helping develop India’s own Satellite Programe, INSAT. The programmes under the SITE  were classified into 2 categories

a)           Educational Television (ETV)

b)           Instructional Television (ITV)

ETV programs mainly focused on School Children in the age group of 5-12 years. It makes the education more interesting creative purposive and stimulating  and also create awareness in the changing society. ITV is mainly for adult Audience and cover incidents of national importance improved practices in agriculture, health, hygiene, family planning, Nutritions etc and some recreation programme.

The programmes were Telecaste for 4 hours each day in two transmitions. The programmes were produced after categorizing the target audience in to 4 groups. Such as Hindi, Oria, Telugu and Kannada. The SITE was operated for one fall year from August 1975 July 1976 and covered six states.

Objectives of SITE

1. Gain experience in the development, testing and management of Satallite based instructional TV system particularly in rural areas.

2. Demonstrate the potential value of satellite technology in the rapid development of effective communication in the developing countries

3. Democrate the value of Satallite broadcaste TV in the practical instruction of village inhabitants

4. Stimulate national development in India with managerial economics technological Social implication

    SITE was more effective than all other media. It was more attractive to female audience.

Gyan-Darsan Educational Channel:

Gyan-Darsan is launched by ministry of Human resource development, information and broadcasting, Prasar Bharti and Igno in 26^thJanuary 2000 as the exclusive educational daily test transmission channel for students of open and conventional Universities. The time was further increase due to good response up to 19 hours within 1 year it became non-stop daily 24 hours transmission channel for educational programmes. The programme constitute 23 hours indigenous programmes and 1 hour foreign programmes. Curriculam based and enrichment programmes telecasted for 24 hours. And 4 hours for 1 GNO CIET-NCERT , 3 hours for IIT 2 and half hours for CEC-UGC and 1 hour each for TTTI and adult education. It has been used extensively in conventional and distant education format.

EDUSAT (Education Satellite):

Edusat was launched by Indian space research Organization on 20^th September 204. It is a path-breaking effort in the concept of tele education. The main purpose of this is to provide education to all people primarly children from remot areas of the country who can not go to schools or colleges. The claude would be conducted by (varioue stte education board) NCERT, CBSE, Universities etc. in a studio environment using powerpoint presentation as well as the common blackboard. It is having interactive as well as non-interactive sessions offered.

Objectives of EDUSAT

1. Ensure availability of quality content online and through variety of access devices in schools.

2.  Promote a shift from current passive learning to active learning.

3. Inservice and recurrent training of School teachers continues upgradion of their knowledge and skills.

4. Enrich the curriculum and pedagogic by employing all the technologies available including virtual class room, video on demand.

Advantages of EDUSAT

1) Provide access to some of the best teachers and teaching process for a large target group of learners. This will enhance quality of education.

2) The studio environment eliminating the  needs of a large number of competent, qualified teachers.

3) The student can ask questions to the teachers through sms, e-mail or other mode of communication.

4) The CD of classes could be available on the net without the interaction section.

   CEC (Consortium for Educational Communication):

The consortium for educational communication popularly known as CEC is one of the inter University centres setup by the University Grants Commission of India. It has been established with the goal of addressing the needs of Higher education through the use of powerful medium of Television along with the appropriate use of emerging information communication Technology(ICT). Realizing the potential and power of Television to act as means of educational knowledge dissemination UGC started the country wide classroom programmes in the year 1984. For production of such programmes media senders were setup at 6 Universities. Subsequently CEC emerged in 1993 as a nodal agency to co ordinate , guide and facilitate such educational production at the national level. Today 22 media centers are working towards achieving this goal under the umbrella of CEC.

 UGC (University Grants Commission):

The UGC was formed in 1946 to  oversee   the work of 3 central Universities of Aligarh , Banaras and Delhi. In 1947 the committee was entrusted with the responsibility of dealing with all the existing Universities. UGC was formally inaugurated by Abdul Kalam Azad, the minister of Education. The motto of UGC is “Gyan-Vigyan Vimutaye”.

SIET (State Institute of Education Technology):

SIET in Kerala, the state institute of educational technology is responsible for the planning,  research production and evaluation of educational software like video, audio programmes and computer multimedia.  SIET Kerala also aims to implement scheme to generate teaching technology and process in the modern context. SIET Kerala is the latest in the array of 7 SIET’s in the country. Department of Education , ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India sanctioned the state institute of  educational technology for  Kerala in 1998.

INFLIBNET:

Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET)

(Established in a project made in 1991 and incorporated as a Society in 1996)

INFLIBNET
Infocity Gandhinagar
Gujarat - 382 007

An Inter-University Centre of UGC the INFLIBNET serves towards modernization of Libraries, serves as Information Centre for transfer and access of information, supporting scholarships and learning and academic pursuits through a National Network of Libraries in around 264 Universities, Colleges and R&D Institutions across the country.

SIET:

SIET Kerala , the State Institute of Educational Technology is responsible for the planning, research, production and evaluation of educational softwares like video, audio programmes and computer multimedia. SIET Kerala also aims to implement schemes to generate teaching technologies and learning process in the modern context.

SIET Kerala is the latest in the array of 7 SIET's in the country. Department of Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India sanctioned the State Institute of Educational Technology for Kerala in 1998.

NME-ICT:

The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NME-ICT) has been envisaged as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme to leverage the potential of ICT, in teaching and learning process for the benefit of all the learners in Higher Education Institutions in any time any where mode. This was expected to be a major intervention in enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in Higher Education by 5 percentage points during the XI Five Year Plan period.

The three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality could be served well by providing connectivity to all colleges and universities, providing low cost and affordable access-cum-computing devices to students and teachers and providing high quality e-content free of cost to all learners in the country. NME-ICT encompasses all the three elements. The Mission has two major components:

• A) providing connectivity, along with provision for access devices, to institutions and learners;
• B) Content generation.

It seeks to bridge the digital divide, i.e. the gap in the skills to use computing devices for the purpose of teaching and learning among urban and rural teachers/learners in Higher Education domain and empower those, who have hitherto remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy. It plans to focus on appropriate pedagogy for e-learning, providing facility of performing experiments through virtual laboratories, on-line testing and certification, on-line availability of teachers to guide and mentor learners, utilization of available Education Satellite (EduSAT) and Direct to Home platforms, training and empowerment of teachers to effectively use the new method of teaching learning etc.

   AVRC (Audio Visual Resource Centre):

The Audio-Visual Resource centre for the school for studies in art and culture (SSAC) in the faculty of arts and social sciences (FASS) at Carleton university (CU) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  The AVRC serves the combined faculties of Art, History ,Music and Film at CU.

Services

The audio-visual resource centre provides the following services.

·        Circulation of reserve material for courses at the second-year level and above students may consult these materials on two-hour loan arrangement.

·        Online searching of the school’s teaching and reference collections, including a digital image collection.  

 C-DIT ( Centre for development of imaging Technology):

 C-Dit is a unique institution with diverse skill sets and achievements in the areas of information and communication Technologies and their applications.  Founded in December 1988 as an offshoot of Kerala state film development corporation, C-Dit started its operations with two projects founded by the government of India-one in the field of research and development in film and electronics technology and another in the area of science and development communication using video.

AKSHAYA:

Akshaya is a ICT project by the Kerala state information Technology mission (KSITM) To bridge the digital divide and to bring the benefits of ICT to the inter population.  In the initial phase it the focus was placed on educating one person in each family to be e-literate.  Malappuram a backward district Kerala was selected for piloting e-literacy.  Now akshya is emerged as one of the finest common service centre networks in the nation.

IT@ school:

It @school is a project of department of general education.  Government of Kerala, setup in 2001, to foster the IT education in school and which on a longer term would facilitate ICT enabled education in the state.  The project is now been implemented from5^th to 12 ^th standards in the state covering as many as 8000 schools.  An estimated 50 lakhs students and 2 lakhs teachers are now part of this project who have benefited from ICT enabled education.  Today the project is one the verge of completing its 10 ^th year of operation and it has a strong network of 160 mater trainers  and 5600 school IT co-coordinators’ statewide, who are school teachers themselves.  The project functions on free software platform since it provides the freedom to an individual to study, copy, modify and re-distribute any content, a process which would ultimately benefit the whole society.

VICTERS CHANNEL:

            12 hours educational channel for school education was officially inaugurated by Hon. Cheif Minister of Kerala Sri. V.S. Achuthananthan on 3^rdAugust 2006.  The channel is unique in the sense that it caters to students and teachers on a need based manner.  The programmes are aired on demand, sensitive to school curriculum and even time-table.

            The ISRO has augmented the unlinking station in time for another channel a non interactive one. The technology deployed is similar to the direct to home (DTH) technology used in other T V channels.  Education videos, as per the Kerala syllabus and curriculm, are primarily aired during school timings.