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Raja Simhan T.E.

CHENNAI, Jan. 29

THE Virtual Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning (VCTEL), bringing together 13 crème de la creme institutions - all the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and all the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) - to offer over 200 courses on the Web, is set to take off.

The Rs 50-crore project has got in-principle approval from the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Dr M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT, Madras, told Business Line. The Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), US, involved in setting up a virtual university in Mexico, would be the advisor, he added.

The Ministry will release Rs 10 crore in the next Plan period, he said.

Conceptualised at a workshop here in May 1999, VCTEL would create a forum and network for the leading institutions of `technology' and `management'. The objective is to consider how technology can be used to provide greater access and enhanced learning, he said.

Dr Ananth, who was one of those instrumental in conceptualising the VCTEL, said that India has a number of universities and institutions of higher learning. At the top are the IITs and IIMs which have secured `international recognition' for their excellence in teaching and research.

In engineering education there are around 150,000 students enrolled at the under-graduate level and about 10,000 at the post-graduate level. "However, less than 2 per cent of the UG enrolment and over 70 per cent of the PG were in the IITs, and only about 10 per cent of the UG education outside the IITs is of good standard," he said.

"The demand for good quality higher education in India is estimated at about 50,000 at the PG level and exceeds the supply at both UG and PG levels," he added.

Further, since the student intake by IITs and IIMs every year was minimal, the Ministry wanted them to double the strength. However, there are physical and financial constraints on the capacity increase, including the cost of setting up the infrastructure. VCTEL could increase the intake manifold and also had the potential to reach every nook and corner of the country, he said.

Dr Ananth said that VCTEL would serve as `information clearing house' for all Indian educational institutions interested in new innovations in TEL (technology enhanced learning). It would offer case studies, library references, information on new technological developments for education and educational services related to new learning environments. Dr Ananth said a distributed classroom model in which classrooms are spread across the country is proposed. The lectures would be given by IIT/IIM faculty on television (or stored in CDs and made available through the Net) and transmitted live to the entire "distributed class". The remote classrooms and the associated facilities are proposed to be run by business partner(s).

The business partner(s) would also manage all business aspects like collecting fees. IITs/IIMs would control the requirements of each course, conduct the exams, give the grades, and finally give a certificate (say, a diploma from IIT) to successful candidates. This was a scalable model and the numbers can be huge, he said.

To be completed in three years, the project would be first-tested through Intranet in each institution, later interconnected among the institutions and finally made available on the Web. "Our initial target is to extend VCTEL's reach to a target audience of about 10,000 students, and increase it every year," he said.

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