Right to Education Act- Challenges of access and use of ICT to accelerate goals - Advice, Examples

Solution Exchange for the Information Communication Technology for Development Community

The notification of the Right To Education (RTE) has generated much debate and discussions on the promises given in the RTE. State Governments, NGOs, CBOs and multilateral agencies such as UNICEF and other UN agencies are having to consider and address the new dynamics of education in India.

The Right To Education act needs to be converted into a realistic implementation strategy to be able to reach the last child at the last mile. Moreover, any implementation of the RTE will take years to make any impact taking into consideration, the sheer numbers, shortage of teachers and the challenges of access.

Given that, ICTs have the potential to accelerate development goals and hold the promise to reach large numbers of stakeholders simultaneously.

India’s new age development has been built on innovative IT solutions through which the world has become more efficient and productive. From Nandan Nilikeni to Naryana Murthy to Bill Gates everybody has talked of how IT can be used to meet the education challenge. At the conceptual level, IT is supposed to be that Magic Mantra which can help leapfrog national development in a shorter period of time. The mobile phone penetration offers another opportunity for India to bridge the development divide.

Can all these be meaningfully used for Right To Education for all children in India. I request members of the Solution Exchange community to discuss and offer possible solutions so that implementing agencies can consider them for their current projects and if possible, incubate pilots, which Sate Governments could scale up.

In this regard:

• How could ICTS be used to implementation the RTE to enable access to the target age of six to fourteen years. Are there any examples that can be studied?
• There are many technologies ranging from computers to mobiles today, which offer possible solutions. Could members provide solutions of the most appropriate technology to reduce the cost of implementing the RTE by State Governments?
• Are there any examples of use of ICT in education, which would enable quality learning at a large scale and at an affordable cost.

Check out the link below for the consolidated reply

ftp://ftp.solutionexchange.net.in/public/edu/cr/cr-se-ictd-ed-08061011.pdf

I found the entire discussion extremely interesting as AIF is setting up an apex level resource-cum-training centre, for training teacher educators and administrators, of the School and Mass Education Department (SME), (Govt. of Orissa) in SCERT, Bhubaneshwar while six other resource-cum-training centres will be set up by the SME Dept, in three Revenue Divisions and I am exploring how best to use the resource centres as sensitization-cum-dissemination centres for RTE apart from their techno-pedagogy training part. 

Secondly the training provided for the selected teachers in the six resource centres is a pilot  in the sense that the eighteen days training module on techno-pedagogy focuses on capacity building through skills up gradation, in line with the requirements of RTE. This is urgently required in view of the fresh appointments which has become necessary, in the light of the teacher-pupil ratio which needs to be maintained as part of the RTE requirements.