Team Herald
PANJIM: Amidst the ongoing debate over needed infrastructure to conduct online education in the State, it has come to fore that Goa lacks in providing facilities with regards to online admissions and setting up ICT laboratories across educational institutions.
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The India Digital Education Report released by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) on Wednesday has also pointed out that Goa is yet to enroll educational radio and Web TV channels along with Mobile applications. The State is amongst those, who have developed digital classrooms along with adopting various other digital initiatives.
The information comes at a time when the State government has been facing the ire of the opposition as well as cross section of society, over the prevailing online educational system given the lack of adequate infrastructure including internet connectivity, especially in the remote areas and availability of smart devices with students as well as teachers.
The Directorate of Higher Education (DHE) had recently developed a Common Online Platform for admissions for the first year degree courses in various colleges. In the first round, nearly 14,000 students have enrolled themselves.
The MHRD in its report has highlighted various steps initiated by the State government like E-content and Repository, initiatives to help students to prepare for entrance examinations and online training programs for primary, secondary and higher secondary school teachers.
The Ministry added that through DIKSHA portal, adopted by State, students studying in schools affiliated to Goa Board can access e-textbooks, video lessons, interactive materials and other educational content like practice sheets and worksheets relevant to their regular curriculum.
The VidyaDaan Portal for the State of Goa has been launched to encourage teachers and institutions to create different types of content such as explanation videos, teaching videos, practice questions, competency-based items, lesson plans etc. as per the guidelines provided for the purpose and upload the same. The content thus uploaded will pass through a quality control mechanism before making the same available to students and teachers.
“The State has constituted the editorial panel consisting of several teachers of the primary classes, faculty members from DIET and faculty from TISS Mumbai. Presently, all subjects of various mediums at Primary stage are covered. In the coming days, all classes up to Class XII in all subjects will be included. To ensure that the content is created regularly for the state, several schools have been designated as content creators for specific subjects,” the report mentioned.
The Directorate of Education, SCERT and Goa Samagra Shiksha, in association with Adhyayan Foundation, Tata Trusts and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai have trained around 11,000 teachers in various online teaching learning platforms, online open educational resources and assessment mechanisms.
