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Saturday, 20 April 2013

Indian students' safety in Australia still a concern: Poll

Indians see Australia as a good place to be educated, but there are lingering concerns regarding the issue of safety for Indian students, said an opinion poll whose results were released here Wednesday.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr welcomed a opinion poll which has confirmed public support in India for a strong and growing relationship with Australia, said a press release.

The survey by the Lowy Institute for International Policy and the Australia India Institute indicates Indians see Australia as good place to visit, live, work and study.

Australia is viewed as a country that is friendly to India, with attractive values, strong educational institutions and a sound political system.

"This report focuses on our shared values and interests which have seen Australia's relationship with India develop into one of our key strategic and economic partnerships in the region," Carr said.

http://www.indiancolleges.com/education-news/Indian-students-safety-in-Australia-still-a-concern-Poll/3964

Trust opens new education centre for girls

MUMBAI: Having been working in the service of humanity for several years, the Aishabai and Haji Abdul Latif Charitable Trust has mainly focused on the promotion of quality education within the weaker sections of the society and also medical aid to the needy.

A key undertaking of the trust is Employment Oriented Professional Vocational Training. For this, the Trust has established the Fazlani Institute of Vocational Training at various centres in the city, wherein boys and girls are imparted knowledge and training. Covering diverse topics such as the Electrician's Diploma, Motor Winding, Air-Conditioner & Refrigerator, Mobile Repairing, MS-CIT, Computer Hardware and Networking Skills for boys and Tailoring, Jewellery Making, Pot/Glass Painting and Hospitality Training for the girls the trust has been constantly upgrading its curriculum.

Presently, the Trust is running a campaign for their all girl's Malvani vocational center in Malad where volunteers would be teaching English to the girls over 2 Saturdays in a month for 2 hours, free of cost. Hence classes will be held every month till they are well versed in spoken English.

"This syllabus has been prepared to teach Spoken English to Beginners, who do not have prior exposure to the language. It begins with Sections I to III, dedicated to familiarization and grammar basics required to frame sentences," said a spokesperson for the trust. "While learning capabilities of students vary, practice in speaking is the key to success," added the spokesperson.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Trust-opens-new-education-centre-for-girls/articleshow/19640350.cms

Friday, 12 April 2013

Education-industry joint venture rolls out online courses

CHENNAI: Some of the biggest names in Indian academia and industry are coming together for an online education initiative, which will provide certification in courses from top institutes and upgrade the quality of the workforce.

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is led by IIT and IISc and has Google, Nasscom, TCS, Cognizant and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) as partners. The web-based courses went online in October 2012.

From July, NPTEL will offer course certification with live exams at the end. It will move to massive open online course platform, which may be provided by Google's Coursebuilder or Harvard and MIT-promoted online course platform edX, or both.

NPTEL will start with certification for three computer science courses — algorithms, data structures and programming languages. While the course is free, a fee will be charged for certification.

The three courses have been developed in association with IT firms TCS and Cognizant, which are giving inputs for course material and allowing NPTEL to use their centres across the country for the final exams. Nasscom is supporting the venture and Infosys and Wipro are expected to join. Faculty from seven IIITs are providing inputs for course material.

"IT companies want to improve quality of education and are working with IIT faculty. It is not a replacement for in-house training but students will be better qualified," said professor K Mangala Sunder, national coordinator of NPTEL.

NPTEL is looking for a software platform to host its content along the lines of international providers Coursera and edX. Both Coursera and edX have millions of users, and Indians account for about 15%, second only to the US. The NPTEL channel, currently on YouTube, has 1.5 lakh subscribers and 8.7 crore views.

Moving to a platform like Coursebuilder will allow NPTEL to provide more students with a full course experience with personalised pages to track their progress.

While most international sites like Coursera and edX provide honour certificates with online-only exams, NPTEL will offer a proctored certificate with supervised exams at the end of the course which will be conducted across the country on weekends.

"The certification exam can be taken any time like the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)," said IIT-Madras professor K Mangala Sunder, who is the national coordinator of NPTEL.

NPTEL's industry partners, which include IT majors TCS and Cognizant, are not only providing inputs for content but also mentoring groups of students. "The mentors will be company employees who are senior programmers," he said. Companies are providing their facilities for final certificate examinations for a fee to be paid by NPTEL.

The inputs from IT companies and the certification are expected to improve the quality of graduates. "Although there is no written commitment, the understanding is that the companies will consider people who fare well in these courses for recruitment," said Andrew Thangaraj, IIT-M professor and head of the certification process.

NPTEL officials are debating whether to include the progress of a student during the course in the final certification or just the marks. "The course will be free but we will charge a token fee for certification to meet some of the expenses," said Thangaraj.

Separate from certification initiative, NPTEL is planning 'Special Lectures'. Eminent academicians and industrialists will prepare a series of video lectures on topics ranging from mathematics to Ayurveda. "It will be like a TED talk given by a learned and experienced personality, not one but a series of lectures on various topics," said Sunder.

NPTEL is transcribing all its video lectures and offering them as text and audio files. This will be launched on textofvideo@nptel.iitm.ac.in. Of the 20,000 courses on offer, 2,500 have been transcribed. Videos will also be sub-titled so that students from all language backgrounds can use the material. NPTEL is looking to develop speech-to-text for various Indian languages so that complete course material is available to all students.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Education-industry-joint-venture-rolls-out-online-courses/articleshow/19501921.cms?

Proposed compact offers online education common market



A proposed compact among the states unveiled by educational organizations and state officials Thursday would create a kind of common market for online education and make it easier for institutions to enroll students anywhere in the country.

The proposal would also set some uniform consumer protections, which could give students in some states more recourse to complain to regulators, though it could weaken state oversight in places that already have strict rules.

Nearly 7 million US students are currently accessing college courses online, but the regulations that authorize the universities and companies that provide those courses to operate vary from state to state. Many date to the pre-Internet era when colleges operated only in the state where they maintained a physical presence.

That confusion has somewhat hampered the spread of online options for students. While most for-profit and large non-profit online providers have invested the time and money — in some cases millions of dollars — to get approval to enroll students in all 50 states, others have turned away students from states like Arkansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts where the barriers to gaining approval to operate are higher. The system has also sowed confusion over such issues as what happens if students move to a state where the institution isn’t approved.

Another cost to the patchwork has been confusion over jurisdiction when students want to complain to regulators about a program based in another state. Currently, many states don’t have a way for students to complain about distance education, said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, one of several organizations that developed the proposal.

The proposed compact — a kind of treaty among the states — unveiled Thursday will require voluntary buy-in from all the states, which in some cases will require legislation. Some states that imposed tighter requirements may prove reluctant to join. But organizers said the agreement represented extensive work with input from all constituencies, and they were hopeful that representatives of 47 states meeting this weekend in Indianapolis would start taking steps to implement it back home.

‘‘We don’t have any indication of states that say, ‘I’m all against this, I’m not interested,’ ’’ said Paul Lingenfelter, president of SHEEO, a group of state higher education officers. ‘‘But in the end they’ll make their own decision.’’

The plan calls for something akin to what states do with driver’s licenses — agreeing to recognize credentials issued by other states. Georgia, for instance, would agree to allow a California-based online education provider to enroll Georgia students so long as the institution was authorized by California.

The most important novelty in the compact is that regulators in, say, California would agree to address complaints brought by students elsewhere against California-based institutions. If they failed to do so, they could be expelled from the compact.

The compact would also regularize what it takes to get approval to operate in any state. The proposal borrows, for state licensing purposes, requirements by accreditors and the federal government for quality assurance and financial stability that institutions must already meet to receive federal aid. For instance, to get federal aid, institutions must disclose policies about things such as costs and refunds. Now failure to meet those and other requirements could cost institutions not just access to federal dollars, but a license from their home state to operate at all.

In the states that have provided little oversight of distance learning, that threat could amount to a new and tougher layer of state-level accountability. But states that have imposed more stringent requirements on institutions may have to loosen their grip, said Michael Goldstein, an attorney in Washington who specializes in higher education.

‘‘This is a minimalist approach,’’ Goldstein said. The education groups that have pushed the proposal are ‘‘not looking to increase regulatory burden. To the contrary.’’

Richard Garrett, vice president and principal analyst at Eduventures, a research and consulting firm, said students have still had plenty of online options, so while they could have more if the compact goes into effect, the effect would not be dramatic.

http://bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/11/proposed-compact-offers-online-education-common-market/JIe6wYIWijNLVysuntRy0O/story.html