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Wednesday, Sep 22, 2004

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Opinion - Leader Page Articles

A satellite to serve students

By N. Gopal Raj

The launch of EDUSAT could lead to a revolution in the education sector. Students in rural areas stand to benefit the most.

NEARLY THREE decades after it carried out the world's first effort to reach instructional programmes to far-flung villages using direct TV broadcasting over satellite, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has sent aloft EDUSAT. The satellite is expected to relay high-quality programmes that will augment the teaching at all levels of education, from primary school to professional courses.

"EDUSAT is one of its kind where the satellite is totally dedicated for providing educational services," observed the ISRO chairman, G. Madhavan Nair.

The founding father of India's space programme, Vikram Sarabhai, recognised from the outset that, in such a vast country, satellites provided a cost-effective way of reaching information to villages. During 1975 and 1976, ISRO carried out the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) transmitting TV programmes on health, hygiene and family planning to some 2,400 villages, each of which was equipped with a direct-reception community TV set. The programmes were broadcast using a satellite loaned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States.

Subsequently, after ISRO had its own Insat satellites in place, a variety of educational programmes were telecast. ISRO also initiated projects for distance education and training. Several State Governments are using the Training and Development Communication Channel (TDCC), which was started in February 1995, to train their district and village staff. The channel is also being used by various organisations for professional training. The Andhra Pradesh Government has established its own channel for training staff and to maintain easy communication with them. The Madhya Pradesh Government is continuing the Jhabua Development Communications Project, started in November 1996 to provide interactive training programmes to villages in Jhabua and other backward districts of that State. The Insat satellites are also being used to transmit educational TV programmes for school and college students. These training and educational channels are to be transferred to EDUSAT after it becomes operational.

EDUSAT, designed to serve for at least seven years, will transmit five spot beams covering the northern, north-eastern, eastern, southern and western regions of the country. These beams will use radio frequencies known as the Ku-band. There will also be a Ku-band beam with national coverage. The Ku-band radio signals transmitted by the EDUSAT, especially in the spot beams, are more powerful than that of the Ku-band on the Insat-3B. As a result, its signals can be received with a smaller satellite dish and consequently the reception terminals become cheaper, points out K.N. Shankara, director of ISRO's Space Applications Centre (SAC) at Ahmedabad.

According to an ISRO press brief, "EDUSAT is primarily meant for providing connectivity to school, college, and higher levels of education, and also to support non-formal education including developmental communication." As preparation for the EDUSAT, for the past year ISRO has been using the Insat-3B for running pilot projects with the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) of Karnataka, the Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University (YCMOU) and the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University in Madhya Pradesh. Each university has been provided a studio from where the "class" will be taken. The lecturer can use Power Point presentations in addition to the blackboard for their talk. The talk is filmed live and uplinked to the satellite, which then broadcasts it to the ground terminals.

The colleges have been provided with two sorts of reception systems. The non-interactive ones allow the talk, with all the audio-visual material, to be received. But questions from the students to the lecturer have to be sent by alternate means, such as over telephone, SMS, fax or email. The interactive terminals, however, provide a voice channel for students to ask questions.

"EDUSAT will be very beneficial considering the shortage of teachers, especially in frontier areas of technology," according to K. Balaveera Reddy, vice-chancellor of VTU, which has 118 engineering colleges in Karnataka, with 1.3 lakh students, affiliated to it. In the pilot phase, 100 of these colleges were given reception terminals; half were given interactive systems and the others non-interactive reception sets. The response from the students to the trial programmes was particularly good in engineering colleges in remote areas, says Dr. Reddy. Apart from technical programmes, the university can use the satellite system to run programmes for "soft skills" such as leadership training, techno-entrepreneurship and career planning, where too the students need to compete with their peers.

With reception terminals in 100 colleges, a single lecturer is able to reach 10,000 students across the State at the same time, observes G.L. Shekar, who heads VTU's E-Learning Centre. The talk can be stored as a computer file that students can access any time and it can be made available on a CD if required. "We want to identify good teachers in the colleges and use their services to make the programmes," he told The Hindu . VTU is trying to involve major IT companies so that students are introduced to the latest technical topics. Companies can also use the network for their pre-placement talks and campus recruitment. The pilot phase was very useful in sorting out various technical issues and practical problems, according to Dr. Shekar. Using the Insat-3B, VTU had already started the first live full-semester lectures and these would move to the EDUSAT after it became operational, he said.

Pandit Palande, vice-chancellor of the YCMOU, is equally enthusiastic about the prospects for using EDUSAT. The open university has a cumulative enrolment of over seven lakh students, with 1.2 lakh new students joining annually, and it runs 1,455 contact centres. As with VTU, YCMOU has been given a 100 reception terminals. The response from the students had been "tremendous" during the trials, he said. It was difficult to find good teachers who were willing to go to remote areas to take the contact classes. With the satellite network in place, subject experts could come to the university's headquarters at Nasik to give their talk and reach all the students. The talk could be stored on the local computer and students who missed the talk could replay it later, he pointed out.

Once EDUSAT is launched and commissioned, the project will enter the semi-operational phase. According to ISRO, the aim is to connect at least 100 to 200 classrooms with each of the satellite's five spot beams, providing educational programmes to an estimated 50,000 students. Several States and educational bodies, including universities, have shown interest in using EDUSAT to provide educational programmes, according to Bhaskar Narayan, director for Satellite Communications at ISRO Headquarters. ISRO has held regional workshops to publicise how educational institutions could use EDUSAT's capabilities. A conference of all university vice-chancellors was held in July this year.

EDUSAT will benefit school education too, asserts S. Prabhakaran, EDUSAT Advisor at ISRO Headquarters. Close to 900 primary schools in Chamarajnagar district of Karnataka were being equipped with reception terminals and programmes prepared by the Karnataka Government's Department of State Education Research and Training (DSERT) would be broadcast shortly. The Indira Gandhi National Open University was preparing a concept paper on using EDUSAT to improve primary and secondary education. The satellite system could be used not just to provide programmes for students, but for teacher training as well, points out Mr. Prabhakaran.

The semi-operational phase is expected to last about two years. In the fully operational phase, the EDUSAT network is expected to support up to 1.5 lakh reception terminals. "We hope that each State will have one or more hubs," says Mr. Bhaskar Narayan. After class hours, the network could be used as an intranet to access and download material, he points out.

While ISRO has helped users in the pilot phase, such as by providing the reception terminals, users will be expected to meet these costs in the operational phase. In addition, the pilot phase has shown that generating good content comes at a cost. VTU, for instance, estimates it costs between Rs. 3 lakhs and Rs. 4 lakhs for 30 hours of content that would be needed to cover a subject over one semester. Dr. Palande of YCMOU estimates that the university could need Rs. 2.5 crores a year for content generation alone.

"We could charge students a nominal amount to cover our costs," says Dr. Reddy of VTU. But that would be possible only after the university is able to provide programmes covering all disciplines, he points out. VTU also hopes to make money by selling its programmes. YCMOU would probably need governmental assistance to meet the expenses for satellite-based distance education, according to Dr. Palande.

The benefits of EDUSAT could even reach beyond India's borders. As EDUSAT covers other South Asian countries partially or fully, it should be possible to extend support to those countries too, according to Mr. Madhavan Nair.

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