| A crew from BBC World, London, struggled through the dusty lanes of Ajmer recently to reach Mayo College, often referred to as the Eton of the East. | |
| Here their cameras followed Mayur Raichura, a grade seventh student, whose parents are settled in the UK, to find out how "" and whether "" education in Indian residential schools, especially technology, was on par with international standards of education. | |
| Thankfully, Mayo's IT space did not disappoint them. What had started in the eighties "" when it used practically obsolete computers "" has since leaped into the new age with a new wi-fi academic block. | |
| S Sriram, IT administrator, co-ordinator and HoD, Mayo College, remembers when the school decided to integrate cutting-edge technology into the 137-year-old institution: "Around five years ago our principal was in London and saw the way technology and teaching was integrated in institutes like Harvard and Eton. That's when we decided to enhance IT on our campus along the same lines." | |
| It was then that the school invited tenders, with companies like Wipro, Larsen & Toubro, Satyam, Tata Infotech and NIIT responding immediately. Larsen & Toubro was selected and in 2002 the company started work on the turnkey Project IT to provide technological solutions at Mayo College. | |
| What began as an investment of Rs 1.35 crore has since grown to Rs 6 crore in hi-tech solutions for students, parents and the staff of the institution. The annual spends for IT have gone up significantly with Rs 55 lakh being kept aside for upgrading of cybernetics. | |
| Welcome to the new face of India's education system where an increasing number of well-known schools and colleges are opting for a tech-savvier avataar. | |
| Here campuses are wi-fi, students carry e-wallets instead of hard cash, special biometric readers ensure students' security; classrooms house LCD screens for lectures; parents have unique online login IDs to check wards' grades, schedules and assignments for the day and chapters meant to be covered by teachers. | |
| Campuses here boast digitised libraries that allow students to refer to books anywhere in the world, and children make short films on video cameras, editing on filmmaking software and showcasing their films in morning prayer assemblies. | |
| And if education in the real world is getting a tech facelift, the virtual world isn't far behind, going by claims made by Rahul Dutta, whose company VR1, a metaverse development firm, is actively building virtual colleges and classrooms, libraries and resource centres on the Net. | |
| What's prompting educators to shift gears to get their schools and colleges into hi-tech mode? More importantly, if on the surface this educational software is fascinating, do educators also need to draw the line somewhere to accommodate the old techniques of teaching? | |
| "Of course, we need to be balanced in our approach," says Prashant Jain, director, Pathways World School, one of the first few institutions in the country to have a 32-acre wi-fi campus. | |
| "Our school has anti-spam and content filtration processes in place. Laptops are with children only for a limited time." | |
| Pathways' statistics in IT are impressive. The school, which gets most of its tech-solutions from IBM, has spent Rs 2.5 crore on technology-related projects and, in 2004, the school was awarded by Nasscom for being the most tech-savvy institute in the country. | |
| For the record, it leaves the likes of IITs and IIMs behind too. It's a common sight here to see children completing their assignments on their laptops while sitting on the steps of the amphitheatre with the sound of flowing water and chirping birds in the background. While IBM experts at Pathways continue to check and upgrade technology-related equipment, the school is not shying away from expenditure related to IT. | |
| Veracross, for instance "" software through which parents can keep an online check on their children "" was installed in the school two years ago for an initial cost of Rs 10 lakh. Thereafter, for the application, Pathways has been incurring an annual expenditure of Rs 15 lakh on this software alone. | |
| Even cafeterias are becoming IT hotspots. At Amity University "" also called the Smart campus "" students carry a smart card which has a chip inside. This not only allows access into the campus, but also can be used as an e-wallet in the cafeteria. | |
| Atul Chauhan, chancellor, Amity University, says IT experts from the college travel all over the world and visit top universities regularly to implement IT spaces. The campus boasts of biometric readers where students show their thumb prints in order to enter or exit. What's more, these cards are linked to the institute's official website wherein parents, sitting at home, can check on the activities of their child. | |
| Started a few months ago, smart cards, according to Chauhan, have been received well. | |
| But how far can IT be integrated into education? | |
| Jeff Rollins, ICT manager, Woodstock School, Mussoorie, makes a point: "One cannot blindly start ordering software for students. In the humanities stream, for instance, I doubt if any software can come in handy. Creative subjects rarely demand technology. However, a student from the science stream will obviously find it handy to refer to software for specific diagrams." | |
| Rollins, who studied in Woodstock for 15 years, says the school needs technology simply because it follows the international syllabus (IBS). Twelve miles of fibre optic cables were laid out in the campus between 2000-03, and by 2008-end, the 300-acre campus will be wi-fi enabled, and laptops will be provided to all 450 students (currently, every four students share a computer). | |
| The school has already spent Rs 25-30 lakh on the project and Rollins is in touch with software companies like Dell and HCL. While Woodstock has online facilities for parents to log on and check their children's grades, Rollins explains that the school authorities are very careful and do not unnecessarily give out details of students. | |
| "Constant e-monitoring could be damaging for the child's psyche," he says. Jain of Pathways pitches in: "Our teaching still makes use of the blackboards but the software obviously facilitates our students for the global tech scenario." | |
| He could be right. At Lawrence School, Sanawar, using pen drives is becoming popular. "Students take information from teachers' laptops," says Brigadier I S Cheema, president, Old Sanawar Society, "and take it to the computer lab and use it according to their convenience so that the lesson doesn't end with the class." | |
| While the classrooms accommodate projectors with blackboards, the next step is to have plasma screens installed in each classroom and to wire up the sprawling 139-acre Sanawar campus. Last year, the school spent around Rs 25 lakh on tech-related exercises and software. | |
| While education gets a makeover with technology, teachers too are getting trained to keep pace with changing times. | |
| Mayo, for example, trains teachers in three-four different software, some of which are from Educomp Solutions, a leading e-learning solution provider that has, till date, wired over 200 schools in India with tech-tools. | |
| The company is now on the "eradicate mathophobia mission", as Shantanu Prakash, MD, Educomp Solutions, calls it, and has launched a new website called Mathguru. A paid website (Rs 1,200 per annum), it has more than 12,000 questions from the NCERT textbooks with content that is refreshed and modified regularly. | |
| "Since it is animation driven and interactive in nature, students do not require any additional support," claims Prakash. Rollins disagrees with this e-learning concept. | |
| He says, "Educational software can only aid students, staff and parents, but no software can actually teach the entire subject. Most of the teaching will have to be done verbally in classrooms and the software should only complement the teaching methods." | |
| Educomp is planning to launch similar models for other subjects too. Prakash is confident that school students will begin to demand online tutorials, computer-based lessons and interactive classrooms in 2007. | |
| Are IT recipients happy with the changing face of education? Says Shalini Kak, a Delhi-based high school science teacher, "With the curriculum expanding and being modified every year, there is an urgent need to employ technology and Internet tools to cover the syllabus effectively." | |
| Kak is in favour of laptop programmes in which students and teachers have 24x7 access to technology. Then there's Rahul Sharma, a first-year student at IMT, Ghaziabad, "Since ours is a residential institute, it helps to be connected through wi-fi. It saves us a lot of time." | |
| Sharma, like every other student studying at IMT, is given server space for storing important data for his reference. This server also provides a platform where the faculty can provide an academic resource base like study material, useful software and other important information for the benefit of students. | |
| B-schools in India were perhaps the first to get a tech makeover in the country. Now, they are upgrading. Institutes like MDI, Gurgaon have installed a video conferencing facility to help students participate in discussions. It also uses learning management systems through which faculty members distribute course content to students on the Internet. | |
| "We have updated our Internet connectivity to 6mbps, probably the fastest among B-schools in the country," says Dr V Shridhar, dean (research and consulting) and professor in-charge (computing services). | |
| The institute spends spend close to Rs 1 crore every year on computing infrastructure, while investing Rs 12-18 lakh every year on Internet-related activities. In addition, close to Rs 12 lakh has been invested in acquiring video conferencing, learning management systems and wi-fi technology. | |
| The Indian School of Business is the first institute in Asia to have Wharton Research Data Services. | |
| A comprehensive, web-based data management system, this allows easy retrieval of information from a wide variety of financial, economic and marketing data sources, including getting security prices and trading volume, income and balance sheet items for over 30,000 companies from across the world. | |
| At Symbiosis, Pune, where investment in technology runs in crores, all the library material is digitised. Dr S B Mujumdar, founder director, Symbiosis, says, "Facilities in technology offer students the flexibility of studying anytime and anywhere." | |
| At United World College, teachers are connecting projectors and computers in classrooms to show videos on YouTube. In fact, Rollins talks about filmmaking software where senior students from Woodstock are making short films for their morning assembly sessions. | |
| Ron Schildge, university guidance councillor, United World College, where Mahindra is the corporate sponsor for all tech-related activities, says, "Students have access to a diverse set of opinions from all over the world through IT." | |
| And adds, "Technology allows for a greater variety of teaching methods. "But it's Grace, a mother of two, whose children are taking online tutorials , who gives us the perspective of Gen Z vis-à-vis technology: "This generation of kids," she says, "is Generation 'We' and growing up to prefer YouTube to television, Wikipedia to encyclopaedias, and listening to music on their iPods rather than hanging out at the local record store. So obviously, technology in education is the perfect combo for them." | |
| For now, no one is complaining. | |
| With inputs by Priyanka Joshi, Radhieka Pandeya and Aabhas Sharma | |
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