Draft Proposal for Maharashtra Government on ICT Education

Summary

The objective of this proposal is to establish a partnership between Government of Maharashtra (GoM) on the one hand and FOSSCOMM (a network of organisations promoting Free and Open Source Software or FOSS) on the other with the aim of creating a technology enabled learning environment in the school system of the state.

FOSSCOMM visualises the project within the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) framework as part of the Computer Aided Learning (CAL) programme though we are open to discussing any other framework suggested by the GoM. The proposed partnership between the GoM and FOSSCOM will work towards:

• Creating awareness of ICTs as an integral part of the teaching-learning processes in schools as opposed to the limited and skill-oriented 'computer literacy' view, which is prevalent.
• Providing training in the area of ICT education to 105 teacher trainers within Maharashtra, and through them, further training of teachers, to eventually cover all state-run and state- aided schools, in a cascading format.

The software, including a free GNU/Linux operating system and several office tools, computer graphics tools, educational packages covering most subjects, Internet and email applications, programming environments, software for networking and communication infrastructures linking all schools, will be provided free of cost by Free Software Foundation of India with a certified license to use, study, modify and distribute the software for eternity, with upgrades to the latest available software. The team will work in coordination with the relevant agency of the GoM to advise on the curriculum for ICT education.

The training will be imparted in a vendor neutral mode, with focus on imparting ICT skills and not restricted to specific brands or vendors.

The project is envisioned as starting with 3 selected teachers from each of Maharashtra's 35 districts, 105 in all, to be trained as Core Trainers. Each of these Core Trainers will be a full-time teacher posted at a school and they will be from all subject backgrounds. A passion for knowledge and for sharing it with others will be the main qualification, along with a curiosity about the role of technology in learning. The first step of the process for selecting trainees will be a call for volunteers, as computer learning requires enthusiasm. Subsequently, the approach to teacher training will be based on the trainees' pace and willingness to learn and no compulsion will be exerted.

The Core Trainers' assignment will be to initiate and sustain a technology-enabled learning environment in their own schools in a phased manner that gradually comes to include all in the school and ultimately the community. We see these teachers developing into nurturers of creative ICT-based projects in their schools and as creators of massive digital repositories open to all other teachers, students and out-of school community in the area.

Once they pass certain qualitative and quantitative milestones, and having gained the experience thereby, they will then move on to training other teachers to do the same in their particular districts. Thus the 3 Core Trainers in each district will act as agents in a process of sharing and co-learning amongst themselves, across the state, as they advance in their tasks and share their experiences and resources with more and more people.

The project's focus will be on imparting ICT skills, moving away from the current emphasis on hardware acquisition which is usually linked to branded software products. The training will be imparted using the already available and committed resources of the Central and State Governments and the participating organisations and will be based on public infrastructure.

The details of the cascading expansion model would have to be worked out in consultation with the GoM as also a timetable of periodic assessment of achievements and fine-tuning of the project plans. If everything works out, FOSSCOMM is ready to commit 4 years to the proposed project. After the initial period of 4 years, the project is expected to have built its own leadership and to sustain itself with continued support from the GoM's Department of Education.

FOSSCOMM's terms of involvement

At the outset, the FOSSCOMM network wants to set out some basics terms of the offer made in these pages.

• The training will be focussed on ways of thinking and working with ICTs and imparted in a vendor-neutral mode. The partnership offered by FOSSCOMM to the GoM is a dynamic one. It includes planning, curriculum development, development of training materials, training of Core Trainers, as well as a continued engagement, with periodic review and assessment of the project and changing of course as required, for a continuous period of four years.
• We expect that the GoM's resources would be made available for the programme. The travel, stay of the resource persons and participants, event management expenses and compensation to individuals contributing to the project may be borne through the resources available to Government. These services will be made available at a fee calculated on the basis of time and effort involved, to be discussed and decided mutually.
• The software for the project will be provided free of cost and in perpetuity. That is, no licensing fee will be charged, nor an expiry date set for the license. FOSSCOMM will be responsible for providing copies of the upgraded software as and when released upstream. A team of experts will collaboratively determine the specific software to be included. This software includes:
  • a free GNU/Linux operating system
  • office productivity tools
  • a set of computer graphics tools
  • educational packages covering most school subjects
  • Internet and e-mail applications - programming environments
  • software for networking and communication infrastructures linking all schools
  • all software applications will be progressively made available in English and later in Marathi and Hindi
  • any other relevant Free Software applications will be distributed as they become available
• The certified licensing terms for the software packages described above come under the legal instrument of copyright. However, the format of the particular copyright permits the user to study, modify and distribute the software for eternity.
• The FOSSCOMM team would like to work in coordination with agencies such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum, the SCERT, SIET, DIETs and other relevant agencies to achieve this end. We would expect the office of the Education Secretary, GoM to set up the appropriate administrative mechanisms to give FOSSCOMM the mandate to work with the concerned agencies and to draw on their experience and expertise in carrying out this project.
• Some members of the FOSSCOMM network, such as TIFR and IIT, will be happy to make their infrastructure facilities available to the project. For example, the Gnowledge Lab of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) of TIFR, has committed to maintain the community portal for teachers, schools and training organisations. This means that servers, bandwidth and software for the purpose will be all set up and run at the expense of the HBCSE. This portal will provide communication infrastructure, social networking applications, mailing lists, blogging and page hosting for professional development and mutual support of the Core Trainers and other teachers and students.
• Other organisations, companies, public trusts etc. who may like to be part of the project may add to the resources required, provided they do not impose any conditions that modify the vendor-neutral character of the proposed curriculum.
• We invite the GoM to add any additional resources for the success of the programme.

Phases

Year 1: Phase I Basic ICT awareness

• 3 training sessions of 5 days each or 15 days of training for each of the 105 Core Trainers

Year 2: Phase II Teacher-specific professional skills

• 3 training sessions of 5 days each or 15 days of training for each Core Trainer

Year 3: As Phase II & Phase III run together this year, there is a total of 20 days of training for each Core Trainer.

• Phase II Teacher-specific professional skills
  • 2 training sessions of 5 days each or 10 days of training for each Core Trainer
• Phase III: Developing and sustaining a self-supporting infrastructure
  • 2 training sessions of 5 days each or 10 days of training for each Core Trainer

Year 4: Phase III Developing and sustaining a self-supporting infrastructure

• 3 training sessions of 5 days each or 15 days of training for each Core Trainer

Phase I: Basic ICT Awareness

The components included under our 12 month plan for Basic ICT Awareness is consistent with the guidelines provided by UNESCO's ICT Competency Standards for Teachers, Implementation Guidelines Version 1.0. They include the following:

• Introducing various computing devices seen in the ICT environment: desktops, laptops, mobiles, hand-helds, scanners, printers etc. Using storage media such as CDs, memory sticks, SD cards, micro SD, etc. Connecting these to a computer and using them.
• Internet mobility: browsing, searching, bookmarking, saving and printing web publications,
• Introduction to collaborative Internet-based applications: wikis, blogs, microblogs and mailing lists.
• Word processing in Marathi, Hindi and other Indian languages, including functions such as spell check. Search in Indian languages and conversion from legacy encoding to Unicode.
• Working with text files: opening, typing, spell checking, creating structured text documents, saving, making folders, organising files and folders, printing the documents, copying files, tagging, searching.
• e-mail: creation, sending, receiving, maintaining address books and groups.
• Creating spreadsheets, tabulating data, basic mathematics, graphs with spreadsheets.
• Computer graphics, painting, line art, opening digital images.
• Using presentations in the class room
• Developing presentations that contextualise standard lesson plans and make them locally relevant.
• Introduction to a series of educational applications that use computers for teaching and learning in specific subject areas such as geography, maths, geometry, environment studies, music etc.

Phase II Teacher-specific professional skills

This phase of 24 months is about using ICTs for professional development and class room support. By this time

• Use and misuse of computers, how to decide when to use a computer
• Transforming syllabus into teaching-learning sequences
• Concept mapping
• Lesson planning
• Knowledge organisation
• Research
• Building digital libraries for the school, creating bibliographies
• Digital photography
• Basics of graphic design
• Recording and editing sound digitally
• Working with videos, recording and editing
• Animation with children's drawings
• Personal information management: time keeping, task management, calendar, scheduling, journal keeping
• Uploading resources on collaborative platforms
• Participating in discussions, joining user groups, reporting bugs, writing user documentation and translation
• Advanced collaborative communication, participating in teaching communities
• Social networking among teachers for a continuous dialogue and updating of knowledge.

Phase III Developing and sustaining a self-supporting infrastructure

The last phase of 24 months with 12 months overlapping with Phase II above, aims to create an ICT-enabled community of teachers who build resources for professional development and the knowledge environment of the schools they are in. It has two aspects, school administration and building a self-supporting social network, which are detailed below.

School administration

• Admissions
• School time-table setting, annual calendar, exam schedules etc
• Attendance management
• Fees collection
• Examination setting
• Evaluation and grading
• Preparing report cards
• Communicating to students and parents, including automated SMS where possible
• Writing reports
• Collaborative task management: delegation of duties, task tracking and teachers' shared calendar (e-group office)
• HR functions: recruitment, training, personal records, leave, salary, pension etc
• Scholarship management: announcements, allocations, allotments, disbursal etc
• Review: support to any annual review processes of staff
• Curriculum wiki in Marathi

Building a self-supporting social network

• Participating in creation of syllabus and curriculum design
• Collaborative creation of courses and lessons
• Creating a community portal
• Uploading presentations and proceedings at community portal
• Discussing and assessing recorded classrooms
• Locating and translating of best resources from elsewhere into Marathi
• Creating a digital library of issues and resource materials, subject-wise and level-wise, question banks and other resources
• Evaluating and authentication of resources in the library
• Forming a social network of committed teachers across the state to sustain and support ICT activities in schools in the longer term.

Elaborating the project rationale

The present scenario

This proposal stems from a concern that though a huge amount of funds have been invested in computer hardware and software by GoM under various schemes during the past decade, compared to the expectations, the outcomes of this expenditure have largely proved to be a disappointment. Apart from GoM's own schemes, a cursory school computer census taken around any district in Maharashtra will unearth idle hardware in village after village. Purchased from a wide variety of sources, such as MP and MLA funds, Panchayat funds, corporate social work (CSW) programmes, Gulf-returned local persons and other sources, they represent a lost opportunity which this proposal seeks to address.

Despite the desires of the donors to make a difference to children's futures, these resources are often dropped at the school without sufficient thought to their incorporation into education, perhaps expecting the hardware to create its own environment by itself. It is a common sight to see computer upon computer stacked up in overhead storage lofts of schools, new and unopened in their original packings. The school teacher says he has no place to keep them and does not want the added responsibility. And why not, when he was never given the required orientation that would show him how to adopt ICTs in schooling?

There are resources, however limited on the one hand; there are potential learners in unlimited numbers on the other. How can we bring these two ends together? We at FOSSCOMM have brainstormed amongst ourselves and have come up with a design for a self-sustaining system, where teachers feel empowered, children become co-creators and the entire community learns, grows and eventually gains economic strength through their own ICT-based activities.

The light at the end of the tunnel

The thinking in Delhi

Since the release of the National Curricular Framework (NCF 2005) profound changes have been slowly stirring the educational system. Educational planners are trying to discourage the learning of text books by rote; methods of testing that reward straightforward reproduction are being replaced by open book tests that check ability to apply concepts to new situations; even the sacrosanct 10th Standard board exam has been abolished by the CBSE.

Constructivist principles of learning are increasingly influential in the organisation of classrooms and curricula in schools throughout the country. Such ideas, emphasising learning and not teaching, giving the learner autonomy to construct knowledge through matching new against prior information and establishing meaningful connections, are discussed in all the recent NCERT documents and are being taken up in the state systems of education as well.

We see our initiative as part of this new impetus. The idea is to raise the understanding of ICT education from the level of running computers competently to that of extending the capacities of minds and hands through computer enabled active learning, for teachers and students to feel free to ask critical questions, to express their thoughts before others and learn collaboratively with them.

The Central government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) funding for CAL (Computer Aided Learning) in upper primary grades during the upcoming period, stands at 50 lakhs for each of Maharashtra's 35 districts. This proposal from FOSSCOMM offers to go with this opportunity, as detailed further in this document.

At present CAL is largely seen as a computer acquisition programme, and if Internet is included at, it is usually installed only in the Principal's office. The understanding at the apex SSA body is that this is a very limited view. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India (GoI) is now moving to a new paradigm regarding technology, based on the NCF 2005.

The understanding is that children should be encouraged to use technology to follow up their own questions and to construct their own worlds of knowledge. Their assessment is that the merits of vendor-originated knowledge packages are doubtful and that local creation of resources is what they would like to enable. There are examples of learning materials made by teachers working with state government agencies from Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi State, bearing out the effectiveness of this approach.

This is in contrast to the prevalent BOOT (Build, Operate, Own & Transfer) approach which has been criticised for creating dependence on ready-made materials from vendors. In future it is proposed that in place of CAL, this concept of bringing technology into the learning process is to be called TEL Environment (Technology Enabled Learning Environment) and it should emphasise local production of learning materials by teachers and children.

The National Knowledge Grid

We propose that as and when the National Open Knowledge Grid is commissioned, such infrastructure would be made available for this programme. This idea of connecting the resource-rich infrastructures of institutes of higher education and research with their less-endowed neighbours has been promoted by the National Knowledge Commission. The proposal is aimed to advance technology-enhanced learning, for improving the quality of education everywhere.

Similarly, such lateral links should be built with other agencies such as the GoI-owned BSNL, which has announced plans to set up Base Transmission Stations in every panchayat. As and when this becomes a reality, the project should negotiate a cell phone and broadband Internet connection for every school that comes within their network area.

Developments in Kerala

The successful experience of the IT@School project of Kerala gives us several insights for the project. A study shows that the Kerala approach has succeeded due to:

• Effectively integrating computer aided learning into the Education Department's internal teacher education and teaching structures (DIET-BRC-CRC-School). This has strengthened the entire system and enabled children to benefit.
• Adopting Free Software in preference to proprietary software. Customising available packages to the context by using the educational packages available in Debian-Edu GNU/Linux and also by incorporating local language features.
• Creating a core team of master trainers from within the system and investing in teacher capacity-building. Funds saved from vendor payments (in the BOOT model) have been channelised to teacher training.
• Investing in computer labs, adding to them year after year and training teachers to understand the technology sufficiently, so as not to be intimidated by vendors and external maintenance agencies.
• Networking with engineering colleges and technology training institutes to support technology in school education, giving their students and faculty many interesting practical projects, productively linking the higher and school education streams. Here again, these are locally managed and have saved the state crores of rupees in avoiding paying vendors (in the BOOT model).

As is evident, the investment in building internal capacities is continuously being returned in the form of savings which go into more training and equipment upgrades, required as technology becomes enhanced.

Tentative Plan for Phase I, II & III

Please note: these are tentative plans, and fine tuning and course corrections on the way will ensure effective implementation. However, it is being presented in the tabular format below to enable estimation of the provisions to be made for it. The contents are detailed under the section entitled Phases above.

Software resources planned for project

1.The following software will be provided with support manuals in English. The Core Trainers will work on the software listed below and one of their jobs will be to prepare a Marathi version of the respective manuals: GNU/Linux Operating System, a secure, virus free environment for computing. System Management tools Configuration applications Networking and Internet Configuration tools and applications

2.OpenOffice Suite an open standard compliant office suite that includes: a word processor slide presentations spreadsheet database HTML editor drawing tool maths editor in both English and Indian languages PDF generator so that all outputs can be produced as print quality documents.

3.Internet A Mozilla based Internet browser such as Firefox or GNU IceCat An e-mail client like Evolution or Thunderbird Personal Information Manager such as Evolution Instant messenger such as Pidgin Video conferencing using a software like Ekiga Softphone Remote Desktop viewer to enabler the teacher to guide the students from her desk. Remote log-in and file transfer

4.A school management program that takes care of school office automation time table admissions event announcements

5.A school master plan enabling projection into the future design of steps accordingly

6.Sugar Desktop environment for primary and upper primary children. It includes various applications known as Activities, that run on the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) system, but can also be run on the school desktops. These include: Read, Write, Paint and Record activities for building basic computing skills Calculate, Measure, Distance and Time tools TamTam suite to compose music digitally Logo, Pippy and other applications that encourage programming skills Other mathematics and science activities. Wiki Browse, a children's version of Wikipedia and plenty more

7.An integrated environmental education package incorporating a GIS suite for earth sciences including: water management astronomy projection of data from the District Gazetteer onto an interactive map a program enabling the building of a local bio-diversity register with students' participating as investigators

8.A school website application for every school in Maharashtra to have its own website showcasing students' work and teachers' achievements.

9.Screen reader or text-to-speech software for students with low vision or blindness.

10.An integrated graphics package incorporating: Photo Manager GIMP(Graphic Image Manipulation Program), Scanning software, Inkscape vector drawing program, Scribus page layout software

11.Software Development Environments for young programmers: Emacs and Eclipse with support for C, C++, Java, Logo, Perl, Lisp, Ruby, Python and several other programming languages. Though the software listed will be made available, and basic skills imparted, the related training in the programming languages will be left to the learners to pursue.

12.A suite of 25 selected educational applications containing programs for Mathematics, Geometry, Languages, Chemistry, Physics, Biology etc. Once these are familiar, the teachers will be able to select anything they need off the Internet and adapt it to their requirements

Hardware requirements for ICT enabled school lab

This section of the proposal is devoted to hardware. The current programme does not require any additional hardware because the focus is on human resource development and providing skills, knowledge and software resources. It will reuse old low-end hardware available in the existing infrastructure. As and when increased infrastructure is made available, teachers will be ready to deploy them as they would be clear about usage and potential. We have briefly outlined below the nature of expected hardware requirements for training.

1. The school IT infrastructure should preferably be built on a client-server architecture. Thus each client can be an inexpensive PII / PIII machine with at least 128MB RAM. This will allow use of donated hardware with minimal upgrades. Only, the server needs to be a resourceful machine. All software will be loaded on the server. Optionally, wherever required, software may also be loaded on other machines.
2. Keeping the software on the server simplifies maintenance and upkeep for we need to maintain only one machine. Further, all clients should preferably be diskless, with storage allocated on the server disk. This will allow the teacher to get an overview of content and ease in administration. A considerable saving will accrue, as hard disk costs are eliminated, supporting the server costs to an extent. To mitigate a server side failure, an additional backup machine may be deployed as a daily backup facility and standby arrangement.
3. Broadband Internet connectivity must be provided to all schools. The system will have facilities for filtering objectionable content and sites. It maybe noted that the GNU/Linux operating system is totally immune to the security attacks faced by other operating systems. Consequently this inherent immunity eliminates a substantial expense on anti-virus remedies and the attendant disruption due to virus attacks and loss of data.
4. A summary of the required infrastructure at the level of the 105 Core Trainers, at their base schools follows.

Infrastructure for the school ICT labs, 105 sets

Please note: GNU/Linux is architecture-agnostic. Consequently client machines need not be restricted to the i386 architecture and we may consider low cost alternatives like the Longsoon Mips or ARM architectures.

Special software to be provided on the school server

• Debian GNU/Linux OS
• Squid Proxy and net access control system
• Apache web server
• Postgres Relational Database

• DansGuardian objectionable content filter

• Webmin system administration tool
• Shorewall firewall
• Wiki collaborative content editor

Budgetary Considerations

A detailed budget can be worked out if the Department is willing to take this proposal further. However the principles on which the budgeting will be done will be that the expenses for the training workshops will be borne by the GoM. This will include amounts for The number of participants for each workshop is 105. For each session of five days there will be 10 resource persons, supported by 5 support personnel. This makes a total of 125 persons per workshop.

The workshop will be conducted in an existing lab with at least 65 desktops in place with high speed Internet facility. In order to continue the learning from the workshop, it is necessary that each teacher trainer is equipped with a laptop which will be loaded by the participants themselves with the software provided. They require the laptops, since they will be conducting further training in their respective districts. A relatively sturdy and powerful laptop (without any pre-loaded software) which would last beyond the four year period of the project, can be obtained at about Rs.35,000 per laptop. This will also serve as an incentive to the trainers to continue with their learning on ICT related developments.

GoM's training facilities could be used with boarding and lodging expenses being covered. If other facilities have to be hired, FOSSCOMM will make an effort to make them available from public institutions. Travel of the resource persons would be charged at actuals. The number of days of training spanning across four years is 65 days (15 + 15 + 20 + 15 respectively for each year.). A suitable compensation for training could be negotiated with GoM, payable to FSF India, from which honoraria will be given to the resource persons and used for project management.

Some instructional material, reports and other documentation will be occasionally printed and distributed to the participants and other relevant parties. A budget could be set aside for this purpose. Miscellaneous provisions could be made for stationary and digital media.

To repeat, all the software required for the workshops as well as for deployment in the schools will be provided free of charge by FSF India. These will be certified and licensed. If the license fee for all the loaded software were to be paid for at commercial rates, the bill would amount to at least Rs.2,00,000 per desktop. To estimate the saving we will have to count every desktop in every school in the state.

Long term view of this proposal

Our vision beyond the four year period of this project is to set up a state resource institute which provides training and produces resources which work to integrate ICTs with all educational activities. We see this as an independent body supported by a range of stakeholders from the Education department of the GoM to public institutions such as IITs, TIFR, Universities, NGOs, ICT vendors, ICT service providers, GOI agencies etc.

The institutions behind this proposal

The institutions and groups participating in the writing of this proposal and its eventual execution are a collective called FOSSCOMM network.

• Free Software Foundation India will be the coordinating agency and will be supported by:

• CDEEP, IIT-Bombay http://www.cdeep.iitb.ac.in

• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in

• Comet Media Foundation http://www.cometmedia.org

• IT4Change http://www.itforchange.net

• I-LUG Mumbai, the GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai http://www.ilug-bom.org.in

• SPACE (Society for the Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment), Thiruvananthapuram http://www.space-kerala.org

There are several other organisations and individuals who will join the programme as it advances and the wiki of the project (http://fosscomm.in/Interventions/ProposalForMaharastra) will keep updating the list of contributors and participants.

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CategoryInterventions