Haryana Department of Higher Education has signed a Memorandum of Agreement with IIT Mumbai, under which the latter will provide spoken tutorials for various IT-based softwares for the students of government colleges in the state.
Under the MoU, the E-content will be provided to the students for use anywhere and anytime.
The memorandum was signed by Mahavir Singh, Principal Secretary, Higher Education, on behalf of the Haryana Government, and Rudra Biswas, IIT Bombay, in Government College, Sector 1, Panchkula during the state-level workshop of principals and faculty of government colleges.
Mahavir Singh, who presided over the workshop, emphasized the digital age and detailed the benefits a student can get from e-learning in this era. Now, students will get all the facilities of e-learning free of cost under this MoA which is billed to be a major intervention in enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education in the state, said he.
Funded by the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEI) of the Union Ministry of Human Resource Develepment, spoken tutorials aims at teaching programming languages, office tools, graphic and circuit design tools through audio video tutorials.
Singh said the three cardinal principles of education policy viz., access, equity and quality, could be served well by providing connectivity to all colleges and universities, providing low-cost and affordable access-cum-computing devices to students and teachers and providing high quality e-content free of cost to all learners in the country.
To overcome the shortage of lecturers, as many as 6,647 lecturers will be made available by May 2017, Singh added.
The programme was attended by Principals and faculty of 31 government colleges.
Notably, the State Government has planned to take initiatives to make students computer literate and proficient in information technology to enable them to compete in the employment market. Compulsory computer education has been introduced and language labs have been set up in many colleges of the state.