Education has undergone vast changes along with technological, economical, social and political developments taking place across the World. Today educationists and institutions are grappling to find solution and means to address issues like
a) Enhancing Students capability and efficiency.
b) Preserving and sharing of hard to find specialist teaching content /resources
c) Implementing various effective delivery mechanisms.
d) Reaching out to remote rural areas where the educational standards cannot be maintained at par with their urban counterpart.
g) Extending formal and non formal educational opportunities and involving groups traditionally excluded from education due to cultural or social reasons such as ethnic minorities, girls and women, persons with disabilities, and the elderly, as well as all others who for reasons of cost or because of time constraints are unable to enroll on campus.
Distance Classes:
The current distance education programs have inherent drawbacks due to scarcity of resources and effective delivery mechanism of available resources. A proper implementation of Video conferencing and capturing and streaming technology can immensely benefit in conducting classes remotely by utilising the best of resources available in urban areas.
While Video Conferencing technology has been in use for quite some time now by educational institutions, it is restricted to classrooms / auditoriums for conducting intra institution multiple classroom lectures and/or specialist faculty sessions. These can be extended to inter institution exchanges by forming CLUSTER and other programmes. Delivery of content to wider student community at low bandwidths can enhance the mechanism to make available the rich lecture content and reach out to remote areas hitherto not possible. This can be achieved by streaming / broadcasting of the live lectures and providing access to archived content.
Content Creation in the Classroom:
Capturing lecture sessions happening in the classroom or digitising lectures, creating a ready content, broadcasting it to large number of students anywhere, recording and archiving it for providing access anytime has also been felt as a very important need so as to preserve valuable insights of various specialist faculties and as well to avoid repetitive physical delivery of the same content by resources.
Streaming & Webcasting – Few applications for Educational Institutions
- Capture lectures and make digital lecture content ready for future references and downloads by students and faculties.
- Live as well as on demand multimedia lectures over internet from home or wherever they are at – benefits students for attending classes and review.
- Access to Library magazines, research papers and other content in Digitized format for access anytime, anywhere.
Impact of Tele- Education services:
As tele education program prepares to become effective and operational, it is important to share the availability of services. In most cases, the initiative has two target audiences,
INSTITUTIONS:
- Institutions who may benefit from the availability of tele-education services by means of providing value added service apart from conventional education system to Student bodies.
- Educational Institutions having Tele-education facility can levy service charges for each Tele-education seminar / class.
- The entire system opens up new possibilities for tele-education or continuing medical education or training industry professionals for isolated or remote colleges, who may not be able to reach easily to take part in professional meetings or educational opportunities.
- As part of social objective, institutions can conduct classes and reach out to rural and underprivileged students.
STUDENTS:
- Benefits the Students as they gain knowledge through interactive multimedia platforms without having to leave their place.
- General Students, who may derive substantial benefits from improved access to various knowledge centers / institutions with sharing of knowledge not only with local experts / professors but also with foreign professors / experts