Why in news?
The Department of Higher Education, M/o Human Resource Development has developed an e-Governance platform, SAMARTH (Enterprises Resource Planning) ERP, under National Mission of Education in Information and Communication Technology Scheme (NMEICT).
Details
- ERP, SAMARTH, is an Open Standard Open Source Architecture, Secure, Scalable and Evolutionary Process Automation Engine for Universities and Higher Educational Institutions.
- Now, the ERP, SAMARTH, has been implemented at National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, a participating unit under the World Bank supported Technical Education Quality Improvement Program (TEQIP).
- It caters to faculty, students and staff at a University/Higher Educational Institutions.
- The objective of this initiative is to automate the processes of the Institute.
- This initiative will enhance the productivity through better information management in the institute by seamless access to information, and its utilization for various purposes.
National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT)
The National Mission on Education through Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) has been envisaged as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme to leverage the potential of ICT, in teaching and learning process for the benefit of all the learners in Higher Education Institutions in any-time anywhere mode.
- It seeks to bridge the digital divide, i.e., the gap in the skills to use computing devices for the purpose of teaching and learning among urban and rural teachers/learners in Higher Education domain.
- One of the primary objectives of NMEICT is making available of e-knowledge contents, free of cost to Indians.
- The Mission would create high quality e-content for the target groups.
- It plans to focus on appropriate pedagogy for e-learning, providing facility of performing experiments through virtual laboratories, on-line testing and certification, utilization of available Education Satellite (EduSAT) and Direct to Home (DTH) platforms, training and empowerment of teachers to effectively use the new method of teaching learning etc.
- Central Government would bear 75% of the connectivity charges for 5 years even for institutions not belonging to it.
The Mission has two major components:
- Providing connectivity, along with provision for access devices, to institutions and learners;
- Content generation.
Notable Initiatives under the NMEICT Program:
SWAYAM and SWAYAM Prabha:
Click Here to read more about SWAYAM and SWAYAM Prabha
National Digital Library of India (NDL):
- It is a project to develop a framework of virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility.
- Presently, there are more than 3 crore digital resources available through the NDL.
Spoken Tutorial:
- They are 10-minute long, audio-video tutorial, on open source software, to improve employment potential of students.
- It is created for self-learning, audio dubbed into 22 languages and with the availability of online version.
Free and Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE):
- It is a project promoting the use of open source software in educational institutions.
- It does that through instructional material, such as spoken tutorials, documentation, such as textbook companions, awareness programmes, such as conferences, training workshops, and internships.
Virtual Lab:
- This is a project to develop a fully interactive simulation environment to perform experiments, collect data, and answer questions to assess the understanding of the knowledge acquired.
- There are about 225 such labs operational, with more than 1800 experiments that benefitted more than 15 lakhs students.
E-Yantra:
- It is a project for enabling effective education across engineering colleges in India on embedded systems and robotics.
- More than 275 colleges across India have benefited with this initiative.
