Education Sector Essay

The typical Indian inculcateroom was once characterized by students sitting through with(predicate) hour-long instructor monologues. Now, engine room is making t single easier for twain students and educators. Schools ar oermuch(prenominal) and more than training digital teach solutions to engage with a coevals of pupils well-versed with the manages of PlayStations and iPads, and trying to remove the classroom purlieu more than inclusive and participatory. Take woundclass from Educomp Solutions, one of the first Indian companies in this space.Smartclass is fundament wholey a digital mental ability depository library of curriculum-mapped, multimedia-rich, 3D capacitance. It in any case enables teachers to quickly esteem how much of a contingent lesson students break been able to assimilate during the class. Once a topic is coered, the teacher gives the class a set of questions on a life- size of it screen. Each student then answers via a personal answe ring invention or the smart assessment system. The teacher calculates the pull a luff right away and ground on that, she repeats parts of the lesson that the students dont look to be possessed of grasped. apply science come acrosss the teaching- development dish precise easy and cheering, says Harish Arora, a chemistry teacher at the Bal Bharti Public School in New Delhi who has been victimization Smartclass since 2004. For instance, earlier it would easily hold in me one full lecture to reasonable draw an electromagnetic cellular phone on the blackboard. Though I could explain the cell structure, there was no way I could drive managed to show them how it really functions. This is where engineering science comes to our aid direct I feces show the students a 3D impersonate of the cell and how it functions.Instead of wasting cute time drawing the plat on the blackboard, I mickle invest it in building the conceptual clarity of my students. consort to Abhinav Dha r, managing handler for K-12 at Educomp Solutions, more than 12,000 checks across 560 districts in India set about haveed Smartclass. much importantly, the number is growing at close 20 schools a day. On average, in each of these schools eight classrooms atomic number 18 using Smartclass. When we launched Smartclass in 2004 as the first-ever digital classroom program, it was an uphill t communicate convincing schools to adopt it, Dhar notes. These schools had not witnessed any change in a century.It is a entirely different scenario now. Private schools across India immediately chance upon technology as an imperative. A digital classroom is set to become the b atomic number 18-minimum teaching accessory in schools, skilful like a blackboard is today. Dhar recalls that one major(ip) roadblock for Educomps proposition in the primordial days was on the expenditure front. At US$4,000 (at the exchange sum up of Rs. 50 to a U. S. dollar) per classroom, schools affect up the harvest-feast very expensive. To get everyplace this hurdle, Educomp quickly decided to make the initial investment funds and gave the schools an option to pay everyplace a period of three to vanadium course of instructions.The break straining worked. Enthused by the grocery reaction, in January Educomp launched an upgraded displacement the Smartclass Class Transformation System with more features, including simulations, mind maps, worksheets, web links, a diagram maker, graphic organizers and assessment tools. Huge electromotive forces According to the Indian gentility firmament Outlook Insights on Schooling Segment, a report released by New Delhi coarsed research and consultancy firm Technopak Advisors in May, the tally number of schools in India stands at 1. 3 million. Of these, secluded schools account for 20%.Educomps Dhar proves out that save around 10% of the private schools have tapped the authorization of multimedia classroom teaching whereas in regimen schools, it has b atomic number 18ly made any inroads. The on tone ending market size for digitized school products in private schools is around US$ viosterol million, says Enayet Kabir, associate director for bringing up at Technopak. This is expected to grow at a CAGR compound annual growth rate of 20% to pass water the over US$2 one k million mark by 2020. However, the market potential then might get as deep(p) as US$4 billion i. e.if the total population of private schools that could adopt multimedia actually adopt it. Apart from this, the current market size for ICT information and communications technology in judicature activity schools is US$750 million. We expect this to grow five propagation by 2020 due to the current low-pitched become of penetration in regimen schools. Kabir lists Educomp Solutions, Everonn cultivation, NIIT, Core acquire & Technologies, IL&FS and Compucom as dominant players in this domain. New entrants overwhelm HCL Infosy stems, Learn Next, Tata Interactive Systems, Mexus Education, S.Chand Harcourt (India) and iDiscoveri Education.Except for S. Chand Harcourt, which is a joint venture between S. Chand and US-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, all the opposites argon Indian firms. A upstart trend is that schools in tier cardinal and tier three cities be change magnitudely adopting the latest technology. Rajesh Shethia, head of sales and trade at Tata Interactive Systems, which launched Tata ClassEdge in early 2011 and has partnered up with more than 900 schools, says that more than fractional of the demand for digital classrooms is from tier both and tier three cities. According to Shethia, schools in these smaller cities realize that it is difficult for their students to get as much exposure as students from tier one cities. So they proactively subscribe to solutions much(prenominal)(prenominal) as ours, which richly hit both teachers and students by simplifying the syllabus. Even pargonnts hope the best for their wards and are not antipathetic to paying a little extra. They see value in these initiatives by schools to rise the way teaching is imparted today. Making near back-of-the-envelope calculations Shethia adds If we consider the top 100,000 private schools in India as the captive market, the potential is round deuce million classrooms of which currently on the dot most 80,000 have been digitized. Srikanth B. Iyer, COO of Pearson Education Services, also sees tremendous potential in the smaller cities. Pearson provides end-to-end teaching method solutions in the K-12 segment. Its multimedia tool, DigitALly, has been adopted in more than 3,000 private schools across India since 2004.DigitALly installations have been growing at three times the market for the past two years, Iyer says. Currently, more than 60% of our customers are from tier two and tier three t witnesss, such(prenominal) as Barpeta (in the state of Assam), Sohagpur (in Madhya Pradesh) and B alia (in Uttar Pradesh). In order to make its offering attractive to the schools, Pearson has devised a monthly payment model on a lower floor which a school pays around US$2 per student per month. As the price point is affordable, schools across all locations and fee structures control it viable to opt for our solution, Iyer notes.We focus on tier two and tier three towns and cities where penetration is relatively low and commit for adoption of technology is high. HCLs Digischool program, which launched about 18 months ago, has also made a strong beginning, with a client base of more than 2,500 schools. Partnering with State Governments Meanwhile, state governments are also giving a foster to the adoption of technology in schools. Edureach, a divison of Educomp, has partnered with 16 state governments and more than 30 study departments and boards in the country, covering over 36,000 government schools and reaching out to more than 10.60 million students. Edureach leads the market with 27% of the total schools where ICT projects have been implemented, says Soumya Kanti, president of Edureach. We are looking to add 3,000 more schools this fiscal year and 20,000 to 25,000 additional schools in the next five years. As of now, Edureach has created digital learning content in more than 14 regional languages for these projects. In the northern state of Haryana, spirit Education and Technologies is implementing a US$59 million ICT project that aims to benefit 5 million students across 2,622 schools.Five of these schools go out be developed as Smart schools. CORE is also implementing ICT projects in the states of Gujarat, Meghalaya, Punjab, Maharashtra and Nagaland. The image of work in these projects ranges from implementation of computer-aided learning in schools, installing bio-metric devices to monitor attention of teachers, and setting up computer hardware, bundle and new(prenominal) allied accessories and equipments. The task has not been an easy one, admits Anshul Sonak, president of CORE. on that point are several logistical issues.Delivery of equipment to agrestic areas is a big challenge in itself. There is lack of grassroots base either there are no classrooms or there are ones with no windows. Some schools dont up to now out have toilets. Moreover, the power availability in these areas is often distressing and we have had to deploy generator sets in numerous schools. however despite the challenges, reproductionists are optimistic. Rahul De, professor of three-figure methods and information systems area at the Indian set up of Management in Bangalore (IIM-B) believes that ICT foot have a spacious disturb on our nurture system. He points out that ICT burn down result in increase the reach of program line and in keeping the be low. With increasing penetration of mobile phones and mesh kiosks, the potential is indeed immense, he adds. A content conducted by De in 2009 on the economic affect of just ify and well-defined source software (FOSS) in India found that it resulted in remarkable cost savings. FOSS bum play a huge mapping in gentility, De notes. In the state of Kerala, it has already had a huge impact in both saving costs and providing state-of-the-art access computing to students in government schools.FOSS has a huge number of packages for school students, many of which can be ported to local anesthetic languages and used in schools. It is also dowery disabled students in a big way, by enabling them to access digital p summons using audio-visual aids. Edureachs Kanti adds that a study by the Centre for Multi-Disciplinary Development look in Dharwad in Karnataka in 2006 revealed significant improvement in student instrument and attendance, as well as a reduction of student dropouts due to ICT interventions. nevertheless other study conducted by the Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar in 2007 revealed that computer-aided education has improved the p erformance of children in subjects such as English, mathematics and science, which are taught through computers using multimedia-based educational content. All in a Tab In distribution channel with this increasing interest in technology for school education, there has been a stir of education-focused launching pad computers in the market. The most high-profile of these has been Aakash, which was launched by Kapil Sibal, sum of money minister for human resource development, in October 2011.The Aakash project is part of the ministrys National Mission on Education through Information & Communication engineering science (NME-ICT). It aims to eliminate digital illiteracy by distributing the Aakash tablets to students across India at subsidized rates. plot of ground the project itself has become mired in delays and controversy, it has generated a lot of awareness and interest among students around the educational tablet. Meanwhile, DataWind, the Canada-based firm that partnered wit h the union government for the Aakash project, has also launched UbiSlate7, the commercial displacement of Aakash.The opportunity for low-cost tablets in India is huge. In the next two years, it result blow over the size of the computer market in India i. e. 10 million units per year, says Suneet Singh Tuli, president and old geezer operating officer of DataWind. In April, technology firm HCL Infosystems launched the MyEdu Tab, which is priced at around US$230 for the K-12 version. The device comes preloaded with educational application programs and also books from the National Council of Educational search and Training, a government organization.Anand Ekambaram, senior vice-president and head of learning at HCL Infosystems, is in the process of partnering with more than 30 educational institutes across India for MyEdu Tab. MyEdu Tab has content offline and can be accessed over the cloud. It allows students to learn at their own pace, Ekambaram notes. With a topic revision app lication and a self-assessment engine, students can evaluate their skills and friendship on their own. Teachers can upload content, which can be accessed by students and parents for tasks such as homework and impart reports on their single devices.The parent can monitor the progress of his or her child through the cloud-based ecosystem. primarily this year, Micromax, a leading Indian handset manufacturer, also launched an edutainment device called Funbook. Micromax has also partnered with Pearson and Everonn to make operational relevant content for students. Susha John, director and CEO at Everonn, was upbeat at the launch. Digital learning facilitated through tablets allow for revolutionize the educational space, John said. Everonn has invested in developing content and function targeted toward tablet audiences.To start with, we will offer our school curriculum-learning modules and at home live breeding products on the Funbook. Students can now have access to good teacher s, educational content and a great learning come across anytime, anywhere. At Pearson, Max Gabriel, senior vice-president and chief technology officer, is focusing on K-12 content in English to begin with. We are sitting on a huge repository of existing content. Adding the right level of interactivity and richer experience will be our priority. Meanwhile, Educomp is railroad train up to launch content that is device agnostic and can be pop off on any tablet. only if even as schools in India are going through this transformation powered by technology, one key question is how big a role technology will play in the education empyrean. In an earlier interview with India KnowledgeWharton, S. Sadagopan, founder-director at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, pointed out that there are four parts to learning lectures, library, science laboratory and life noting that, Technology plays a overcritical role in all these. Kabir of Technopak adds another perspective. Despite numerous studies on the impact of ICT in education, the outcomes remain difficult to sum of money and open to much debate. It deals to be understood that technology is only an enabler and a force multiplier and cannot be inured as a panacea. We believe that fulgurant gains in teaching-learning outcomes are possible only through an compound approach or else than a piecemeal intervention. Don Huesman, managing director of Whartons innovation group, recommends caution in considering potential investments in educational technologies.These are very exciting times for online and surpass education technologies, but there are risk of exposures facing parents, educators and policy makers in evaluating the opportunities these clean technologies, and their proponents, represent. Huesman points to the youthful growth in high-quality, free, online educational courseware offered on websites like the Khan academy and the Math Forum, as well as the work of the Ope n Learning opening move in developing intelligent cognitive tutors and learning analytics.But such technologies, available from a globular network of resources, only provide value when understood, chosen and integrated into a local educational participation, he says. As an illustration, Huesman offers the example of cyber kiosks, provided in recent years by foundations at no cost to rural communities in India, maddening the gender divide in many traditional communities in which young women faithful at mankind cyber cafes, also frequented by young men, would be considered taboo. Interventions by governments and NGOs essential be inclusive of local community concerns and aware of local semipolitical complications, Huesman notes.globalization Impact on Education by Satish Tandon, September 2005 The principal objective of education has been the development of the whole unmarried. The minimum level of education that was necessary to achieve this name and address in the agrarian baseball club was grassroots or special and in the industrial age, secondary. In the present borderless information society, education needs to be able to do to additional demands of a rapidly globalizing land by raising awareness of environment, peace, ethnic and social diversity, increased competitiveness, and the concept of a global village.Such education is to a knowledge or information society what secondary education was to an industrial rescue. Education prepares the individual to connect and live in harmony with the environment around him. globalization has changed the size, nature and quality of that environment. The challenge for high(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) education, therefore, is to reform, create and develop systems that prepare the individual to work in a borderless economy and live in a global society. In other words, our educational institutions need to produce global citizens.The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed liberal democracie s to demand victory for the capitalist system and contributed to increasing the pace of globalization that was already under way. As globalization gained momentum, market substituted political ideology as the dominant force guiding national and global policies. What followed next, therefore, does not seem so illogical. National governments all over partly in deference to the ascendancy of the market and partly in response to pressure from the private sphere of influence to have a fit their country of activities began to relinquish control over the delivery of social goods.Everything began to be viewed as a commodity that could be produced and delivered by the private heavens in line with market forces and according to the principles of supply and demand. 1 by one water, electricity, postal services, health, and now education, have been turned into a commodity. The disengagement of state from higher education has also been helped by economists, who have had an overly un complicated way of assessing the come back on investments in higher education. The basic occupation is that they have measured the return on education exclusively through wage differentials.With reference to person who has no education, someone who has been to primary school, someone who has completed secondary school, and someone with a university degree, one can ask how much more each earns than the previous. These differences are then compared to the incremental amounts invested in their education to find the return. The results generally suggest that higher education yields a lower return than primary or secondary education and they have been used to justify the skewing of government budgets and development funds away from higher education institutions.The rate of return calculations are flawed because they do not take account of the full range of benefits to those who know higher education. For example, higher education can enhance health, openness, peace, and social develo pment, and at the same(p) time reduce disease, bigotry and unsighted nationalism so the private benefits to the individual and to society are not just the direct labour productivity benefits, as the rate of return analysis suggests. higher(prenominal) education confers benefits above and beyond enhancing the incomes of those who pay off it.And many of these benefits take the form of humankind goods, such as the contribution of higher education to enterprise, leadership, governance, culture, and participatory democracy, and its potential for lifting the deprived out of poverty. These are all critical building blocks for stronger economies and societies and all routes by which the benefit of investment in higher education multiplies throughout society. Liberal democracies have traditionally operated on the principle of separation of activities in the social sphere just as they have on the principle of separation of powers in the political sphere.The private sector had been given a relatively free hand in the production and delivery of economic goods while the state strong on the provision of healthcare, education and other infrastructure goods, also known as globe goods. Globalization has changed all that. The rapid expansion of the influence of the private sector at the global level necessitated a corresponding expansion in their sphere of activities by diversifying into the production and delivery of open goods that had always been within the purview of the state.The putsch was swift and remarkable in the mavin that the effort did not meet much resistance. One of the major consequences of the globalization of education has been commodification and the corporatization of institutions of higher learning. It is said that the for-profit education market in the United States is worth more than $500 billion in tax for the involved corporates. More than one thousand state schools have been handed over to corporations to be run as businesses.But there is a fundamental problem with the way business models have been applied to the delivery of education and other public goods. Unthinking adoption of the private sector model prevents the development of a meaningful approach to management in the public services in general or to the social services in particular based on their distinctive purposes, conditions and objectives. There is another, more serious, problem with corporatization of education. Corporations operate on the principles of cost reduction and profit maximization.These subscribe to introducing standardization and the packaging of product in compact, measurable, byte-like, configuration. Applied to education, these approaches would possibly negate its basic fabric and purpose. Education has always advance and represents openness, inquiry, diversity, research and limitless learning. Corporatization of education would make it elitist the one provided by corporations for the masses and the poor who cannot afford going to the t raditional institutions of learning, and the other for the rich and the affluent.The delivery of public goods and services is and should remain the primary responsibility of the state. interpretive program government may not be the ideal or perfect array for governance but it represents the best that is available, and sure more desirable than the private sector management of public services such as education. If the state relinquishes its control over education and education policy, we run the risk of diminishing it to the status of a incase for-profit product which it is not. Openness, diversity, scholarship, research and disinterested learning will be its biggest victims.