The Hindu Business Line : Intel, inside India

Technical Education isn't about just learning how to operate computers. Students must be armed with 21st century skills that will ensure greater employability and economic prosperity. Using information successfully isn't enough. We must be able to create it too," believes Ashutosh Chadha, India Education Manager, Intel India.

In a chat with eWorld, he comments on various aspects of computer education and how ultimately it is the ability to produce information that will catapult India into being a true knowledge economy. Excerpts:

How are Intel's education programmes different from those launched by other corporates?

Three critical vectors make up this plan — first is access to technology, second, it is connectivity to make the integration of technology and information more seamless, and the third is education.

This forms the basis of the World Ahead Programme where we use technology to advance the world.

Our difference lies in the fact that our efforts straddle the entire spectrum of education levels in the country. We work at the K-12 level, the higher education and the community education space. We strongly believe that capacity building and making it systemic and self-sustaining is important.

As corporates we can keep investing but the programme has to become self-sustainable within the system to work on its own without any assistance.

What are the current teacher education programmes you have in India?

We have the Teach the Future professional development plan for teachers. This enhances our sustainability strategy.

In India, we have been doing it for five years. We have trained about 5,40,000 teachers till now. Teacher training is important since they are our master trainers who, on their own, will become hubs of excellence.

They can then set up Master Trainer Clubs in their areas and train other teachers to take this forward.

At another level, we work with the Government to see if we can make educational curriculum transformations. Which means, it isn't enough to train only teachers. Principals, administrators and the people involved in creating the educational policies need to be aware of what needs to be done. This then helps it become a part and parcel of the educational DNA and the teacher's life.

We have these programmes running across 35 countries. We hope to reach a million teachers by 2008. In this segment we are also launching a programme for teachers who have had little access to technology, on a smaller scale.

Intel's India Student Research Contest (IISRC) seeks to promote greater interaction between the academia and Intel researchers. More on this...

A scene from an Intel Science Talent Discovery Fair. - N. BALAJI

The academia and industry cannot be divergent. The first step towards becoming a knowledge economy is being able to produce information, which can be got only via research. Our Science Fair seeks to create interest in research in mathematics and science. Research has to be promoted and that's why in the higher education space, we work with engineering colleges to provide an industry-oriented research and upgrade the skills of the faculty in terms of the curriculum.

Obviously here it is from a more semiconductor point of view, as that is our core expertise. We look at sponsoring students for MS courses for without higher degrees we cannot drive fundamental research.

Recently, in the National Academic Forum, we actually got faculty from the top 30 institutes and brought them to Intel sites. They interacted with Intel technologists to know about the latest happenings in the semiconductor space.

Six months ago, we signed up with the Berkley University, California, and various business institutes in India to organise a curriculum workshop to develop a Tech Entrepreneur curriculum. To further that, we have now thrown open a competition along with the DST to engineering and management institutes to create technologically oriented business plans that will be evaluated and, once selected, will be taken through the world wide business plan competition at Berkley University.

How is India different as a playing field in promoting greater use of technology in education? How helpful is the Government in supporting such endeavours?

In India, our diversity is a fact of life. So if we have to cover the length and breadth of the country, we must have translations in the languages of the States we operate in. We have nearly 1.1 million schools in the country, which is nearly 8 million teachers of whom a small percentage have technology at this point of time but they are often far and in remote areas. We have to go out to the hinterlands and do the training.

Actually this is important so that we can train the teachers in their own context. This is a unique aspect of Intel.

What are the hindrances in the way of taking technology to classrooms more widely?

Many believe that technology is meant for the elite. But after seeing what teachers even in very remote areas have achieved, the mindset is slowly changing. I believe that India is now ready to take that leap of faith to adopt technology on a much larger scale.

At Intel, we realise that our first steps involve making technology cheaper to access, such as an affordable PC.

The Community PC is specially designed to be operated in areas with low power availability and dusty environments. Our Emerging Markets Platform Research group within Intel does continuous research, figuring out what type of platform is needed for the specific market.

What are the programmes you are running for rural areas?

We are trying to understand how we can leverage the various community centres that the Government is planning to set up. We are looking into how many more NGOs we can tap and provide with training and curriculum so that can they can operate successfully in that area.

We have another programme called Skills Success, which is basically a programme that tries to drive younger children to understand technology in a project-based learning approach, where they don't understand, for example, MS Office from an MS Office perspective but understand it from a project perspective.

It could be a simple thing like, here is a class of students who have to work on "Importance of sanitation." The children go out and interview doctors and social workers on the effects of an unclean environment.

They then present their findings to the class in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and defend themselves against the questions that their classmates might ask. The use of technology here is purely incidental.

In the community area space, we provide training for underprivileged youth in the 8-16 age bracket that aims to make them effective communicators and do research in their own small way without even having gone to school. We are doing this in Mamallapuram in Kerela with the Navodaya Vidyalaya schools.

We are piloting a high-level programme in India titled "Teaching Thinking With Technology," a completely software-agnostic programme that is designed to drive students to high levels of thinking related to things around them. It is a lot like spatial reasoning.

The programme isn't about one-to-one technology. It is about one-to-many reasoning and one-to-many causes across multiple subject areas. For example, Why did Hitler seek to invade Russia? With the ostensible reason of wanting to gain access to the eastern block, there were many other reasons too. So how do you tie them together?

paromita@thehindu.co.in