Suggestions and Recommendations for the National Policy on ICT in Education

Introduction

This is in response to the mails forwarded by H S Rai (on Linux-India-General) and Frederick Noronha (on FSF-Friends), where the Government of India is looking for suggestions, recommendations and position papers from the public prior to forming their policy on ICT in Education. Please enhance as needed.

• http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=e46836620710180127v191a2b22pad3d31e07e9483cd%40mail.gmail.com
• http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2007-October/005265.html

Overview

We discuss ICT in education from the following points of view in this document:

1. IT education
2. ICT as enablers in education

IT Education

At present, the state of IT education in India is abysmal. Students have a knowledge only of key presses and menu options, language syntax and basic I/O when they finish school. This is, of course, not very different from the general state of most school- and college-level education. Some of the concrete steps that must be taken to improve the state of IT education:

Problem-solving approach

The student must be given a problem to solve rather than being asked to repeat a set of memorised instructions (whether human or computer). The current system only requires memorisation of standard scenarios and repetition of the steps needed to replicate the solutions to those scenarios. This results in two problems for the student later:

• She does not apply her mind to problem-solving at all, and her skills in that area diminish and eventually atrophy. A complete waste of a potentially fine mind.
• Teaching problems are compartmentalised into separate disciplines, with no relationship between the disciplines. The student does not learn how to apply multiple technologies to solve real-life problems, which are typically multi-disciplinary.
• She is utterly unprepared for real life, which consists less of reacting to prepared scenarios and more of approaching novel situations and resolving fresh conflicts and issues each day.

We propose the following guidelines for students studying ICT in education:

1. The student must be made to tackle novel problems and scenarios at each step of the education process. A committee may be set up (or recruited from volunteers, the IT community, etc.) to devise fresh teaching problems for students on a regular basis at all levels, so that each batch, each semester has to solve them on their own without recourse to identical problems solved by earlier batches/semesters.
2. She must be provided with the tools that she requires to solve the problems. However, instead of being spoonfed, she must be encouraged to use the resources at her disposal (teachers, home, school and public libraries, Internet, parents, friends and community) to decide how to use a set of tools to solve a problem.
3. The student must be exposed to and encouraged to solve multi-disciplinary problems, e.g. making a formal report from raw data (which requires both programming and document preparation skills).

Learning by Rote

Today's IT students in India leave school (and sometimes even college) without any idea of how to actually prepare documents and web pages or design and code programs for applications that people can actually use. This is partially related to the problem defined in the section above, but also stems from the fundamentally mistaken premise: that knowledge of a specific software package is equivalent to being able to use that package for constructing solutions. For instance, our students, while experts in all the menus and buttons of Microsoft Word, are still unable to produce readable, coherent and attractive documents.

Further, the same students, when faced with a package that works in a different way from the one they have been exposed to, are unable to use it with any degree of effectiveness.

We recommend that the forthcoming policy contain a guideline to stop this unscientific and unsound practice. Specifically:

1. The student must be given fundamental design and user interface guidelines and skills prior to being exposed to specific tools used for implementing technologies. We want people who can prepare good documents, not people who are experts in a word-processing package; we need people who can design and implement solutions for users' problems, not people who can use a particular development environment and no other. Whatever testing and examination is done must be on the quality of the results produced, with whatever tool, rather than on knowledge of the tool itself.
2. The student must be exposed to (at least two and preferably more) significantly diverse tools that help her apply the skills that she is learning. Having the student only learn one tool narrows her mind and puts her at risk of focussing more on the tool itself than on the problem to be solved. Thus, for example, students in higher classes can learn multiple programming languages, those in primary and middle grades can work with multiple types of spreadsheets, word processors, etc.

Dependence on proprietary technology

[TBD]

ICT as enablers in education

This section deals with using Information and Communications Technologies as an education tool. We discuss the role that ICT can play in education, the benefits of using ICT, constraints to using ICT in education and finally suggest concrete guidelines for implementing ICT in education in India.

Role of ICT in education

ICT here refers to one or more of the following technologies used to communicate, disseminate, store and/or retrieve information:

• Radio
• Television
• Computers
• Internet
• Private networks
• Satellite broadcasts
• Encapsulated voice (podcasts, etc.)
• Encapsulated video
• Audio and video conferencing
• Mixed media (audio/text, video/text) conferencing

Benefits of using ICT in Education

Constraints

Guidelines

Role of the Community

[TBD]

-- RajMathur - 18 Oct 2007