The Hindu : Front Page : Boom in education to bridge the gap

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Sunday, Feb 27, 2011
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Boom in education to bridge the gap

Ramya Kannan & Ajai Sreevatsan

The products range from high-end to open source, free material

Samsung India's ‘e-board' and other applications will make classroom experience more interactive
Question and answer guides are hot property

CHENNAI: The utility of technology and its ability to adapt itself to multiple formats and requirements are s what have given it the near omnipotence it has now. And tech watchers say the next IT boom is going to be in the education sector.

Already, products that ride on technology have begun to walk out of manufacturing plants and websites aimed at making a difference in education and teaching. They range, as most things in the market do, from high-end, premium products to open source, free material available on the web.

Samsung India has recently unveiled its ‘e-board,' its digital display solution, and customised applications on the Galaxy tablet that make the classroom experience more interactive and smarter.

Ranjit Yadav, Country Head- Mobile and IT, Samsung India Electronics, says the company's complete portfolio in the display arena — digital signage, thin clients, e-boards and video wall solutions — would serve the education sector well. Add to this the company's interactive e-boards and customised tablets, and anyone who can afford them is no doubt going to be in a very smart classroom.

Anti-reflection coating

The Samsung Interactive ‘e-board' has an anti-reflection coating to facilitate clear display even in bright light or sunlight, has a built-in PC with embedded windows XPP to remote-access and manage content directly on the display, and a built-in speaker. There are a webcam and a dummy pen to enhance interaction between students and teachers.

Mr. Yadav says the aim is to target more than 20,000 educational institutions (both schools and colleges) in the country. In the first phase rollout of its plan to tap educational institutes, Samsung plans to focus on nine cities — Delhi/National Capital Region, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad.

The question and answer guides are hot property on the education scene. Shiksha Cafe has recently launched Reputation Index to give the advisers recognition for providing the answers and to ensure quality answers to users. The system works on the principles of self-learning and community moderation to bring the high-quality content on the top layer, while suppressing the contributions of lower quality.

RI's algorithm has the following principles built-in: answers with more upvotes (thumbs-up) and ‘best answer' selection fetch reputation points, while answers with more downvotes (thumbs-down) are penalised reputation points. Contributors with more followers are treated as influencers and get additional reputation points.

Furthermore, a vote from a user who has written good answers in the past (higher reputation) carries more weight; a strict anti-spam policy discourages spammers and marketers from gaining any kind of influence in the system; and the system automatically minimises the voting weight of people indulging in collusion and collaborative voting, according to Prakash Sangam, business head, Shiksha.com

Books for free

And then, completely in the ‘free' realm is the International Children's Digital Library. ICDL [en.childrenslibrary.org/] was initially created by an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Maryland in cooperation with the Internet Archive. It now hosts a collection of more than 4,000 books in 54 different languages. Tim Browne, executive director of the ICDL Foundation, says the aim is to build the world's largest online multicultural repository of children's literature.

Gautam John of Pratham Books, a non-profit trust that publishes children's books, says access to books at a young age has a measurable impact on educational outcomes. Pratham Books, for example, has been putting up its content on Scribd [http://www.scribd.com/group/2183-pratham-books] so that anyone can access it for free. Since all the books are licensed under Creative Commons, the content has been translated, transformed into audio books [http://soundcloud.com/prathambooks] and converted into Braille for the visually impaired.

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