Distance Learning India 2003

ICT to raise HRD pool

Rajendra Prabhu

NEW DELHI -- Despite having some 300 universities and hundreds of professional and technical courses on offer in its 13,500 colleges, the higher education system reaches out to only 7 percent of the age group eligible for such instruction in every discipline. India has the opportunity to become the world's pool for knowledge personnel. There is a backlog of some 400 million illiterates who could be given an opportunity in further instruction within this decade.

Now, in a rare development of partnership between government, academia, and non-governmental efforts, the system is set to reach the other 93 percent through an integrated approach using modern information technology, communications and space technologies. Through well formulated programs in distance education, millions and millions will get the opportunity to be mobile on the learning ladder and change the country's face and their own destiny. This message emerged out of a daylong expert' discussion at the Distance Learning India 2003 international conference organised by Exhibitions India the other day in New Delhi.

Reaching out to construction workers
Consider, for instance, the regular construction workers all over the country. If you thought that the prestigious Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has nothing to do with the illiterate majority of construction workers in the country, be ready for a pleasant surprise, says Dr. Manoj Kulshrestha, "Discipline Co-coordinator" (Civil Engineering) in the School of Engineering and Technology at IGNOU. IGNOU has over a million students on its rolls reaching out to the remotest parts of the country.

The facts about the construction industry are breathtaking. It is the second largest economic activity in the country absorbing 40 percent of the national and state plan outlays. The industry employs 31 million workers. It is shocking, but true, that the ill clad, emaciated, men and women going up the bamboo scaffolding, often without any protective gear at all, not even a helmet, to build from single story tenements to 50 story behemoths, are mostly illiterate -- 73 percent of whom are semi or unskilled workers.

"A carpenter here may be able to tell you the sum of four kilos of vegetables at Rs. 5 per kilo, but ask him the surface area of a table top four feet by five feet, and he would blink in ignorance," points out Dr. Kulshrestha, who is co-coordinating IGNOU's Competency-based vocational Qualification System. If you knew that most of the workers who constructed your house or office, building it brick by brick, were unskilled and barely literate could disturb your sleep, even though qualified architects and engineers would have certified to its safety.

IGNOU is programmed to reach out to the construction work force through distance education techniques to train them in competency mostly at or near their work spots. Not only have the employers agreed to co-operate, but financial support from financial institutions during the short period of training has been arranged as well. After the screening of workers on the basis of their existing competency, they are given training to improve their knowledge and efficiency of the trade they are in, or to learn other trades as well. "Emphasis of the teaching process is on the learner demonstrating the work outcome instead of "know or understand" as is the case with the existing educational methods," Dr. Kulshrestha points out.

The general competency standards, performance standards and performance criteria have been set down in each trade. Among the workers, there would be some who already meet the standards, having been trained on the job, and who could be utilized as a master trainer or facilitator. The second category comprises those who need the opportunity to acquire such competency. IGNOUs modules are prepared by the university, and have located local institutions that can help provide the training. The whole purpose is to help the construction worker to move up the job vertical and provide a well-trained work force with ever rising levels of performance and efficiency as a boost to a major sector of the economy. IGNOU has developed the whole program -- from certificate courses as a general mason, bar bender, plumber, shuttering carpenter, etc., to the next level of supervisor. There is a missing link beyond this -- a diploma in construction engineering that could lead to an advanced diploma in construction management, or a B. Tech and higher courses in construction management -- the entire vertical mobility channel delivered through distance learning by IGNOU.

The construction industry has virtually grown in size from Rs. 1.7 trillion (Rs. 170,000 crores) in 1996 to Rs. 2.48 trillion (Rs. 248,000 crores) in year 2000. It is slated to rise by leaps and bounds in the years ahead as the government has launched a huge infrastructure building program of highways, railway lines and ports -- all linked together from one end of the country to the other in all four directions. IGNOU's competency enhancement program is critical to its success to turn the unskilled construction worker into a properly trained and certified tradesman and supervisory worker. By 2005, the estimated demand for construction manpower is 36 million, five million more than what it is today.

Catering to the unreached
It is not possible to meet this huge demand through the traditional method of setting up training institutions within the short time frame at the disposal of the education system. Nor can the astronomical costs be met from the government’s budget that is already creaking from the weigh of the many demands on it. This is where distance education will come to the aid of the country during its time of dire need.

"Even providing bare literacy to some 400 million people within a short time framework and upgrading the skills of the already literate on a continuing basis is an enormous task," said Dr. Sanjay Paswan, minister of State, Human Resource Development, in his inaugural speech that was read out in his absence. Distance education tools like open universities will reduce the cost of constantly upgrading the human resource of our one billion people. Good teachers, effective training modules, etc., are expensive and hard to come by. However, tools like radio, TV, Internet, even postal tuition, help this spread at minimal cost and maximum benefit, enabling in many cases, to provide education in a flexible manner by shifting the cost of learning to the student in an affordable way.

"It is a major challenge to cater to the unreached," says Prof. Sunil Garg, pro-vice-chancellor, IGNOU, even as India is facing the emergence of the "knowledge society necessitating the role of education as a key determinant of development." It is not just a question of numbers only, though that is also huge. The population that has to be reached is heterogeneous, widely dispersed, speaks multiple languages with various cultural practices. The problem is equally difficult for higher education as well. In the post-independence era, there was rapid development of higher education without a corresponding expansion in infrastructure. "Against a demand of 10 percent, the facilities grew only by 2-3 percent," Prof. Garg adds. That means a huge backlog. "Financial and infrastructural inadequacy, even for premier conventional institutions, are making it difficult to ensure desired levels of quality," he notes.

The overwhelming majority, that is 90 percent of the workforce, is in the non-formal sector. " The formal system is just inadequate to train in-service teachers, elected panchayati raj functionaries, nurses, government employees, and agricultural workers." That makes distance learning "no longer an option but a compulsion", the IGNOU pro-vice-chancellor emphasises. It is not only in providing simple literacy that we face the challenge of huge numbers. Even in higher education, so critical for the emerging knowledge society, the backlog as well as the future requirements is mind boggling, as discussed above.

The government expects to provide quality education for 40 percent of the potential enrollment in higher education by the end of the Tenth Plan, the educationist points out. So, the plan is to set up more open universities, encourage premier institutions like IITs for open distance learning programs, use agricultural universities for extension programs to reach out to educate farmers etc. "It is an expression given to the long range commitment toward meeting the huge task of providing education opportunity through collaboration, resource pooling and sharing, networking and synergising," Prof. Garg adds.

Dynamic use of emerging technologies
Dynamic use of emerging technologies, mainly IT, communications and broadcasting, is enabling the challenge of numbers and quality to be met. Radio has an 80-percent coverage of the population. Ten FM stations are already functional under the Gyan Vani initiative and 40 more are likely to be added during the Tenth Plan. Three educational channels are already being run as a collaborative venture of IGNOU with the IITs and the ministry of Human Resource Development. An agricultural channel is to be added and finally, the powerful educational satellite EDUSAT that will power a countrywide open delivery of learning is likely to come up next year.

S. Prabhakaran, director of ISRO's educational satellite, also emphasises that distance education is no longer an option. He says, "There is no alternative if we are to expand our manpower pool apart from bringing learning to hundreds of millions at their places." The EDUSAT spacecraft is on its way and should be operational by end 2004 providing a powerful instrument of spreading learning courses across the country. Prabhakaran, however, cautions that the problem area is not hardware but educational content. He suggests a national resource center for content, where there could be collaboration of different institutions to make optimal use of what EDUSAT can offer.

About the 2,000-kg class dedicated satellite EDUSAT, Vilas. S. Palsule, program director at ISRO has exciting information. Scheduled for a launch in the latter half of 2004 using a GSLV launcher, it will have one all-India beam, five regional beams, each with 10 to 20 low-cost uplink facilities, it will be equipped with extended C band with 37dBw and Ku band with 54dBw. Each beam can support four simultaneous independent networks or 10 simultaneous networks. It has different antennae for receive only terminals, state capital, professional universities, higher secondary and college and school broadcasts and telecasts.

EDUSAT's objective is to provide effective teachers training, supplementing curricula based teaching, greater community participation and monitoring, providing access to quality resource persons and strengthening the distance education programs initiated by others. It can provide multicasting in an interactive mode with multimedia, advanced ground technology and a modular approach. ISRO's multimedia distance education phase I using INSAT will begin this October as a preparatory to the use of EDUSAT. Palsule says there would be a 70 percent reduction in the costs of distance education with the functioning of EDUSAT. It would allow faster downloading of data. It will use DVB-RCS technology from phase II of the project, which will have many benefits, he says. The satellite would use open standards as specified by the European Union. "The satellite will bring education to home (ETH) nearer," the ISRO scientist claims.

Several other technology solutions for distance education are already available. Like EDUSAT, we have the Europe*Star with its program of learning via satellite, "three satellites, one globe" says Rahul Nehra, regional manager for Asia, Europe*Star. Europe*Star provides point-to-point and multipoint delivery of data, voice and video content for videoconferencing, Internet, broadcasting and video streaming directly to PCs. The pay-as-you-use basis enhances its cost effectiveness. "It is simpler and more cost-effective setting up a satellite dish of 45-60cm in rural villages around India than to build a whole terrestrial network," says Nehra. The rollout rate could be as high as 50,000 schools a year. The French-Indian University in Bangalore and Toulouse (in France) are exchanging Maths tutorials via Europe*Star. With the projection of India as a learning hub in future Europe*Star, with its footprint across the Indian subcontinent, Middle East, Africa and Europe, could be a major player in the emerging distance learning scenario.

Inmarsat's regional BGAN program, says Julian Hewson, manager, New Partners, is specifically useful where VSAT might not be an ideal option. Where portability is required for easy transportation among multiple locations, and power and budget is limited, the BGAN solution fits the bill if the volumes of data involved are not large. BGAN is "twice as fast as conventional GPRS, compact and convenient as it works with a notebook sized IP satellite receive-transmit unit weighing only 1.6kg with ready Bluetooth, Ethernet and USB connectivity. Users only pay for the amount of data sent or received."

Inmarsat's footprint is across India, the Middle East, Europe and North, Central and West Africa. It has been used in many villages where there was no local infrastructure. Delivery of education material was found to be more exciting than books. It avoids travel to big cities for accessing libraries and in case studies has shown effective delivery. Hewson emphasises that it is good for home education like career research, learning new languages and for educating workers in rural communities. It supports multiple users from one unit through a router, thereby reducing costs for each user.

Broadband VSATs a viable option
Broadband networks could also be another option for connectivity in distance learning. Ashok Juneja, CEO of Bharti Data and Broadband Group, says both Indian and foreign universities are increasingly using distance learning technologies to spread out their reach. A growing demand is from the corporate segment for dissemination of information and training to its remote offices. The second set of users is no mean or lean market. The last financial year, it generated revenues of US $400 million, a 34 percent annual growth. Bharti is an enabler, working with content creators of high reliability like the Manipal Group, Delhi Public School and others using a state-of-the-art broadband VSAT infrastructure and the terrestrial network of the telecom group creating a sustainable business model.

On both costs and connectivity, VSAT "is the prefect technology," says Juneja. It enables teachers and students to access distant libraries and databases on a global scale and remains interactive with peer groups. One teacher can address multiple audiences. Overall recurring costs are very low and flexibility is in-built. Bharti's IP VSAT under the brand name "Skymantra" does not require a local ISP's point-of-presence and can provide always on access.

In a joint endeavour between the Manipal Institute of Technology and the government of Sikkim, instruction in vocationally focused learning initiatives in healthcare, engineering and IT are being delivered in the North-east and other regions using distance education over "Skymantra" that provides up to seven live sessions every day. Already 40,000 students have been enrolled revealing the potential in distance education even in remote areas. Yet, another success story is the networking of DPS, a leading public school in Delhi. It has established a central studio in the capital and links up with 25 of its branches through "Skymantra."

"VSAT is the best suited technology for distance education," claims HCL Comnet's vice president S. Barathy. It is interactive, can use multimedia, create a real classroom simulation and reach out to the remotest parts of the country. HCL Comnet's "SpaceTeach" is helping elite institutions like IITs to extend their faculty to other engineering colleges and provide world-class education to every engineering student, instead of only to those who are fortunate enough to get into the IITs. The two-way video interactivity using SCPC/DAMA VSATs with a provision for lecture storage, multicast, centrally controlled sessions, sharing of high-speed video channels in multiple locations, optimised bandwidth usage, etc., with Internet access given through the same set up -- all lead to true to life adventure in education. It is a high cost saver with unlimited reach, with ease of operation and management, points out the HCL Comnet executive. The company has an ambitious program to reach out to every Indian school and introduce scientific teaching in our educational institutions and also faculty development.

Most of these developments took place in the post-90s and came in the wake of the economy being freed from the license-permit raj with IT as the vehicle of growth. Five years earlier, however, some visionaries like Dr. N. Seshagiri in the Department of Electronics had conceived of networking and data pick up, processing and storage schemes like the NIC (National Informatics Council) and the satellite-VSAT based networking of educational and research resources. Dr. Gulshan Rai of ERNET India reminds us that this networking project was conceived in 1986. It was used to enhance national capabilities by bringing together resources at the R&D and educational institutions, and was used for training as well. The then Department of Electronics had set up this network by involving the IITs, Indian Institute of Science, National Center for Software Technology, etc. It has helped integrate campus networks, trained network system administrators and users and created 16 data centers across the country for local storage, Web hosting and expanded public domain content, e-mail hosting for researchers even before the Internet came to India.

Linked to global networks, it has five Internet gateways. It uses satellite, dedicated lines and VSAT (about 250 of those) providing alternate channels. In effect, it was an indigenous Internet, though limited to the academia and R&D institutions. It is now a satellite based WAN, the SATWAN. The plan is to strengthen it further with 300 VSATs in the network expand point-to-point SCPC links and 24Mbps broadband out route for better bandwidth. "It is a critical infrastructure," Dr. Rai says and will have a direct role in the higher education sector. As we will see further on, this sector will be a critical factor in the transformation of the economy.

In yet another endorsement of VSATs, Sehzad Azad, regional manager, Essel Shyam Communication says that they have emerged as the ideal platform for distance learning. The company has built fully interactive and online classrooms across various cities that are highly scalable and cost-effective, as well as fast and easy to deploy and maintain. One of the interesting things Azad revealed in his presentation was that 30 percent to 40 percent of the distance education students are women -- a big step toward women empowerment, considered so critical to the success of our democracy.

Seamless interactivity key to success
For the success of distance education, "interactivity should be as seamless as possible," says David Gardner, director-innovation, Dynamic Distance Learning Ltd. He referred to the UK based project TOIA (Technology for Online Interoperable Assessment) that is moving question banks around, and organises learning objects libraries in an effort to evolve new education standards for e-learning and management systems. Though many technologies are now available in distance learning programs, this expert's word of caution is that "only when technology is invisible is it of value." He wants greater emphasis on content that communities can adopt. "If content is king, communities are sovereign," is a quote from a communication expert, Dr. Stephen Hepple.

A development of considerable importance in preparing the manpower pool of the country for a larger global role is the programming in distance education that elite institutions like IITs are already providing in engineering, IT and other skills. Prof. Mohan Deshpande of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT, Mumbai, and Dr. Gayatri Kansal, reader in mechanical engineering, School of Engineering and Technology at IGNOU, revealed their institutions' programs in taking IT and engineering skill up gradation to the communities outside their campus so that the output of skilled engineers and professionals is raised by several factors. Using distance education techniques, they are replicating the IIT instructional environment in lesser institutions like engineering colleges.

Dr. Kansal says what IGNOU is providing in engineering education is the latest technology with training at the learner's location and at the learner's pace. It is customized education, but world class nevertheless, as in an IIT. Both in IT and engineering, a whole range of options are available in different skills, degree as well as diploma courses. "Assignments are used as a teaching tool in distance mode of education to ensure two-way communication between learner and tutor," according to Dr. Kansal. Program study and telelearning centers enable transference of training without any loss in quality despite the physical distance between the learner and the faculty.

The success of IIT, Mumbai (Powai) in creating what ISRO adviser Prabhakaran calls "mini-IITs" at nine centers currently, provides a new dimension to the DEP. Both Prabhakaran and NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik advised the Distance Learning India 2003 conference of the tremendous opportunity awaiting India in the next few years in the context of declining populations and growing shortage of skilled people in the industrialised countries, and the large pool of young talent that India will have. Karnik who played a significant role in the SITE (satellite instructional) program and then in Discovery channel before taking up the NASSCOM assignment, says that by 2010-12, the US alone will have a shortage of 30 million working people. Even China, owing to its one family one-child norm will face manpower shortages.

Karnik and Prabhakaran say that India and a few other countries alone will have a surplus in the age group of the young and the talented. "India can meet the HRD needs of the entire world," says Karnik. Some 40 percent of the population in the country will be the youth. Karnik adds, "Implanting knowledge into HRD will generate a multiplier phenomenon." Distance education would help cross both the physical and affordability barrier. To this, Dr. Harjit S. Anand, director of Haryana Institute of Public Administration adds the capability of creating the right pedagogic blend and global criticality of instructional design.

Experiments like creation of mini-IITs will enhance the pool of highly skilled people by several factors -- less than 10 percent of those who seek entry into IITs eventually get selected, not because most are not qualified but there are not enough seats for the qualified. Imagine what a huge resource repository India would be if we could churn out professionals by the millions in every area. In a way it would be a reversion to the role the country played ages ago, as the place to which seekers from all parts of the world came to learn, whether in technology or philosophy.

Fiber, broadband, satellites, complimentary media, we have them all. What we need is a clear understanding of the emerging opportunity to leverage the technology to play a global role, and to generate the management in a cost- effective way.