Keralaeducation

Posts Tagged ‘Kerala’

IT@School is a novel concept of educational discourse. Started by the government of Kerala, it is designed to bring in information technology backed learning systems in Kerala schools. More than twenty thousand classrooms will now have electricity because of this initiative. Electricity in classrooms is the basic facility of IT backed education. Most school classrooms in Kerala do not have electricity.

Envisaging a mass spread of IT backed education, the IT@School initiative will provide each Kerala constituency with a pilot ICT education programme in select schools. By doing this the IT@School project hopes to achieve good feedback. Based on the feedback, more concerted measures will be taken to improve the quality of educational discourse.
Selected schools will be given a chance to implement an ICT Model (Information and communication technology). What it will also do is that it will train the teachers to equip themselves to the learning management systems. ICT tools and techniques will be used extensively in the model ICT schools.

Some of these tools will be a knowledge management system, and learning management system. Both these systems will have features that support online learning and tracking. For instance, the knowledge management system will be a hub of all knowledge capital multimedia content. It could host anything and everything. Using a content management system as the support base, the knowledge management system will capture tacit and implicit knowledge.

Discussion forums and wikis will also be part of the knowledge management system. Discussion forums will enable students to interact in matters relating to school and education. Wiki pages will host approved-content from students. Students can use wiki-pages to document knowledge material that is unique, erudite, and shareable.

At ICT schools, education software will be largely open source. Schools will be well-wired with good broadband internet service. Damaged computers or other peripherals will have a central place to get them repaired. Hardware clinic is the name given to this place. Administration of the school will be largely electronic. Education will be satellite based. EDUSAT, India’s only-for-education satellite will be used for this. IT@School is now a reflection of India’s changing times.

Virtual Classroom Technology is also abbreviated as VICTERS. Using EDUSAT, the virtual classrooms will provide a range of education courses for students. It was inaugurated by the president of India, in the month of July, in Trivandrum. IP-based education ensured that lessons were multimedia based and interactive.

EDUSAT is also called GSAT-3. Launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 2004, it is India’s first only-for-education satellite. India being a young country, with the average age of the population around 26, it was important for something like the EDUSAT to happen. Interactive satellite-based education meant that more students have access to education.

Kerala has been successfully running VICTERS. Its model of delivering such education courses can be simulated in other parts of the country as well. Riding on the success of this, Kerala is now looking at the Direct to Home (DTH) option. In the DTH model, satellite will beam the signals directly to the student’s home. All that students will need is DTH dish antenna, and a color television. Picking the signals, the dish antenna will relay the contents to the television. Students can control the courses on TV itself. More than 5 million children are said to benefit from this education methodology.

Sensing the rising needs, ISRO has deployed more facilities on its satellite to support DTH. Normal school timings are chosen to beam-in education courses. All education courses are compliant with the Kerala state syllabus. Aimed primarily to change the way instruction is given, VICTERS is not an initiative to offset existing teachers.

Teachers are the custodians of education in Kerala culture. Offsetting teachers means offsetting education. Given the number of teachers, it is impossible to supplement their worth through an interactive education system. To enable the transformation of teachers, VICTERS also has included them in the scheme of things. VICTERS is running on a three-party partnership mode in the classrooms of Kerala; VICTERS, the teacher, and the students being the partners.

More importantly, it does away with the business of expensive tuition’s in Kerala education system. It also stops the widespread disease of synopsis guides.

The tourism industry has opened many avenues for students who want a people-facing job. Hotel management education is one of them. A hotel management education program will have various elements designed to provide an overall understanding of the functioning of a hotel. Any place that provides hospitality services comes under the purview of the scope of hotel management or hospitality management. Therefore education is not only given keeping hotels in mind, but also motels, restaurants, luxury cruise lines, spas, resorts, game villages, and so on.

A hospitality management or hotel management education program will encompass detailed curriculum of all aspects of a place of hospitality. Typically, the kind of functions present in any hotel would be room operations, receptions, client relations, care-taking services, booking and confirmations, housekeeping, events hosting, bar and restaurant services, facilities management, spa and resort services, recreation and sports services and so on. The above list is not a restricted one. Different hotels may possess a multitude of facilities, which means that they would require more and more specialized personnel for them.

The best part is that students can choose any stream they want, although the first year or the first couple of years will be dedicated to learning everything. Kerala has good colleges offering hotel management education. Some of them are the Oriental Hotel Management Group in Wayanad, Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, Indian Institute of Tourism and Management in Kozhikode and lot many others.

Students can choose their education streams after some time. Given the plethora of departments in a hotel, students have plenty of choices at their disposal. For example, students might like to specialize in room services education that deals with general room maintenance, laundry, aesthetics, and custom services. Convention center and events education is all about hosting events. A lot of elements of marketing, administration, finance, personnel management is thrown in as well.

With a globalized tourism market, hospitality or hotel management education has to factor-in state-of-the-art best practices adopted all across the world. Or in other words, hospitality education is world-class education.

Kerala is a state where elementary education has been implemented to near capacity. This means, that nobody escapes elementary education in Kerala. That is why; the people in Kerala are endowed with qualities of global awareness, and the interest to opine.

Elementary education despite being the backbone of the educational franchise undertaken by the government has not lead to an equally competent higher education system. Though secondary education has evolved decently, it is the higher education system that is disconcerting.

Educationalists have had disparate views on finding the means and ends to this problem. Privatization has been pushed forward as a solution to a problem, when it is a problem in itself. Privatization is a highly debatable and contentious issue. Innocuous and innocent students are susceptible to be en-snarled in the vicious, obscure, and dubious methods of some private educational colleges. Avoiding this is one thing. But embracing this as a universal theme for a solution requires the need for a change in the way the fundamentals of educational system functioning are rendered.

Out of the 200 plus colleges in Kerala, only a handful is government colleges. Private colleges constitute a major chunk of colleges. The government aids private colleges in-spite of it being managed by private management. Then there are unaided colleges that are funded by private investors and charity investors. Ironically, charity investors reap the benefits of their investments. Unaided educational institutions are rising steadfastly. Fueled by private investments, they operate more on a business-benefit-benevolence mode. It is important to note that unaided colleges are indeed competitive in Kerala, which means students have to pay more for education.

If colleges and universities need assistance for sustenance, so do courses. Aided courses made their way due to low enrollment rates for these courses. Aided courses were a way of preventing the extinction of higher education courses. However, the insidious meddling of private management in the designing and structure of these courses was unacceptable. Another vice is the attempt of private management to start lucrative tuition centers in-campus. All these practices deepen the vindication to the suspicion evinced in privatization.

Giving a boost to educational activities, the Kerala Institute of Labor and Employment is making rapid strides in the space of education, and labor. This institute exists as an independent entity. Specially constituted by the government of Kerala, it is a purpose-built entity empowered to carry out research, training, and other development activities in the field of education, and labor.

Located in Thiruvananthapuram, this institute is headed by the honorary minister from the labor and excise department. Education, labor, training, research and development are the driving forces of this institute. Emphasis is given on Kerala’s demographics of high literacy and awareness. Tapping the best minds for the right jobs has always been priority for this institute.

Keeping in mind the emerging trends in the field of business and technology, training and education programs are facilitated on an ongoing basis. Research activities are undertaken in the field of labor, to understand the shortfalls of the lack of training and education. Research knowledge is applied, and the inferences are studied in close scrutiny. Combining a blend of statistical measures, and general socio-economic yardsticks, the viability of further implementation and adoption of initiatives related to education, and training is deduced.

The institute also develops educational content. From research publications, to journals, and general books, the institute is instrumental in developing a documented knowledge base that is vast, relevant, and diverse. Based on this approach, the institute has a strong information service that is rendered through its library. Unlike other libraries that reel with ennui, the Kerala Institute of Labor and Employment’s library is a hive of silent laborious activity.
For the development of world-class curriculum knowledge, the institute partners with foreign universities and institutional bodies. Setting out objectives to empower the labor force in Kerala, to have the right education for acquiring the right skills sets, these foreign initiatives open up new windows of opportunity.

The institute has been instrumental in providing a thrust to socio-economic reforms. By providing training to the labor force in Kerala, it has given more value to education in Kerala, which was for a long time looking for results.

A teacher’s role in a student’s life is the most important one. Good teachers are always remembered, and revered. Young minds often intake influences of a person who imparts education, discipline, and life skills to them at an early age. Teachers are a breed of people who are instrumental in shaping the perspectives of evolving minds.

Teaching is one of the oldest and one of the noblest of professions. Teaching is about sacrifice, and patience. A formal education in teaching equips the teacher to deal with the ups and downs in teaching. In Kerala, teaching has always been considered as a great job option. More to do with Kerala’s penchant for cent percent literacy, a teacher is seen as a proponent of positive change.

In Kerala, there are teacher training & education colleges at numerous places. To name some of them, they are College of Teacher Education in Kozhikode, Government College of Teacher Education in Thiruvananthapuram, and Institute of Advanced Study In Education in Thrissur etc.

A bachelor’s degree in education, abbreviated as B. Ed is a teacher training course. On completion, the student is awarded this degree, and is eligible to take up other national level exams for teachers. The bachelor of education (B. Ed) course is focused on getting teachers to follow accepted methodologies of teaching. Designed to widen and strengthen teaching skills, the course helps teachers impart education of the highest quality to students.

Behavioral sciences are integrated into the course, to understand the psychological implications of education on students. Teachers are trained to look at students not as a heap, but as a collection of unique individuals. By and far, this quality of B. Ed education is its most distinguishing quality. It’s not just about teaching it’s also about counseling, encouraging, and recognizing. Falling students need good teachers to salvage them back into what they do best. Astray students need strong teacher dominance to effect a psychological taming that might be difficult in adulthood. Therefore being a teacher is not just about teaching. It is also about being a catalyst of positive change in the society.

The Centre for Continuing Education Kerala is a project that was born as a result of a Canadian-Indian partnership in the field of education. Orchestrated by the Indian government in the year 1995, this education initiative won the Canadian government’s partnership and patronization. Involving the southern Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, this education initiative promoted the birth of a slew of technical education institutes as well as Canadian colleges.

But the financial assistance was short-lived. The situation created the need for the government of Kerala to take charge of this centre. Since then, it has solely been developed and sustained by the government of Kerala. Now the Centre for Continuing Education Kerala is an independent entity, coming under the aegis of the government of Kerala. More centers have been added to complement the main centre, in various parts of the state.

The centre is an education centre, in that it comes in various manifestations, like engineering colleges, polytechnics, professional training centers, schools and so on. A principal or dean heads each centre. Educational initiatives like professional training, skills-gap trainings, and market-need education is given here. Correspondence courses are also conducted. Students who cannot attend regular classes can make use of the correspondence courses, in long-distance education mode.

Applied education has always been the endeavor of educational institutions. Normal colleges and schools would design a curriculum, and think less about re-inventing it periodically. Obsolescence of courses is evident in these circumstances. Students pass out of schools and colleges learning and getting trained on subject-matter that has long been archived. To prevent this, the Centre for Continuing Education imparts training based on industry needs. Employment orientation is a distinguishing factor of this centre, compared to other education & training institutes.
If one has a look at the curriculum provided by this centre and its sub-centers, it is not surprising to note that they have courses that are often considered insignificant to be singled out in other colleges. Therefore, the initiative to establish relevance to education provides valuable return on investment for students, for the fees they pay.

Nursing is an occupation of compassion and kindness. It is all about looking after patients. People who are injured, sick, and terminally ill need the special attention and care that a nurse brings. A nurse is an able foil to a doctor. Both of them act in unison to cure, heal, and alleviate health conditions of people.

A nursing education program provides the theoretical and practical education to aspiring nurses. Nursing students will have experienced nursing professionals from the nursing industry to give them education. During the recent past, there has been an increase in organization and structure given to nursing education in Kerala. Difficult to stereotype, but most nurses from India are from Kerala.

If you juxtapose tourism related education, with nursing education, both have a lot of similarities in terms of objectives and appeal to students. Since the people of Kerala are attuned to hospitality, it is not surprising that even nursing falls in close range. When you consider that nurses can easily get a job overseas, it adds more student interest to nursing education.

With the thrills, there will be travails. Nursing education is one thing, but the real education comes when nurses start to work in hospitals. Disconcertion may creep in as nurses treat patients who might be at their hygienic lows. Mental preparation, strong guidance, resilience are keys to conquering these fleeting emotional invasions. Ultimately the service to humankind is a noble one, and the most fulfilling.

Fossil-age knowledge has it that the first nursing establishment rendering nursing education was indeed setup in India at around 200 BC. Ancient manuscripts had it that reputable men were trained to attend to the ailing. From this we realize that nursing education has been initiated well in advance.
In Kerala, there are nursing education centers, and colleges in almost every district. A nursing education program will encapsulate subjects like anatomy, community health, microbiology, hygiene, sociology, pediatrics, surgery, psychiatry, gynecology, ENT, and hospital management education. Courses offered could be a diploma program and/or a bachelors program of three and four years respectively.

Kerala remains one of the Indian states with the highest social development index. Human development initiatives are absorbed with a lot of vigor by ambitious students. Looking at statistics, it does indicate that Kerala can be clubbed with some developed countries in the social and human development area. The icing of the cake is the literacy rate. Kerala is the most literate state in India. Almost all children below the age of ten would have gone to school, or would have received some kind of basic education.

The model of human development in Kerala is good up to a certain level. Many educationists feel, that Kerala’s model is worthy of being considered for replication in other parts of the country. Going back in time, Kerala has also received investment in education from past kings and rulers. Realization of Kerala’s strength in erudition, and knowledge-based competence had descended even then. Following up on history, present participants in Kerala education kept the flag flying high in the primary and secondary education areas. But never in all these times was higher education given consideration. And this was where Kerala faltered.

Kerala’s education system is like a strong foundation on which the building was forgotten to be built. The foundation stayed that way, and the building never rose. Thousands of students had an excellent start in their educational lives, but were whisked away to educational-obscurity in the higher education area.

So this is the Kerala paradox. Unless higher education is given the importance that primary and secondary education enjoys, education will remain a stunted plant that never grows. A paradigm shift in education has to come about. Lack of quality in Kerala higher education remains the cause for its poorly skilled human resources. Though the people of Kerala have the tenacity, and the intellect to master any skill, lack of specialized training makes them fall flat to the competition. Like its neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, Kerala has to setup more and more professional training centers that equip students to get trained for an immediate job, rather than being trained to be trainable-ready.

Kerala’s high pool of literate people provides an opportunity for the IT sector to utilize it. Outsourcing has created the need for technologically literate and skilled people in Kerala. Students in Kerala have responded well to the needs of the times. Now with education needing the assistance of technology, gone are the days of traditional education methods that consumed time, and provided no tangible results.

Auguring the shift to educational technology, the State Institute of Educational Technology (SIET) is consumed with the promise to revolutionize the socio-economic scene of Kerala. Education being a fertile field in Kerala is most congenial and receptive to invoke components of positive change. And educational technology is among that.

Educational technology is the academic study of learning. Given the nature of the approach, use of technology is given importance as well. The State Institute of Educational Technology plans, researches, outputs, and assesses all educational material. E-learning software, self-paced web-tutorials, and other multimedia educational courses come under its scrutiny. Working to develop innovative instructor-technologies, the SIET aims to modernize education in Kerala. Amongst the seven SIETs in the country, SIET Kerala is one among them. Under a collective effort by the Education Department of Kerala, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and the Indian Government, the SIET, Kerala was established in the year 1998.

Educational technology uses methods of delivery like satellite television, satellite radio, web-based tutorials, and so on. SIET trains its instructors on the use of all these methods of delivery. An important development is the training given to teachers on designing multimedia educational content. The SIET way of making computer-awareness mandatory for teachers has inspired Bachelors in Education colleges to take a leaf out of these developments, and consider implementing these in their own scheme of things.

The future looks bright for SIET. Education is now going the modernized way in Kerala. Higher education foundering of the government can now be made up for. Using technology in Education is the best way to beat backwardness. SIET Kerala is gearing to uplift the economy of Kerala through educational technology, and providing skilled human resources.