Tele-education: Issues and prospects; A study of the existing pilot and a plan to help imlement it at the gram panchayat level

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to study the current pilot on the tele-education services that is beingrendered through the tele-centers in the Gubbi taluk of Karnataka and to understand the issuesthat could be faced when this project would be implemented at the gram panchayat level. Thehard infrastructure, that is, the technological connectivity of the villages is clearly an issuethat we would face upon on expansion. But for the purpose of this paper we have chosen tofocus on the finer details that could jeopardize the whole initiative given that suchconnectivity was provided by the government. The finer aspects include the acceptability andthe expectations of the parents, the schools and the community from such an initiative andalso the day to day operational issues that could hamper the full scale implementation of suchtele-education services.The methodology adopted was that of discussions and interviews with the tele-centersexecutives. In order to understand the perspective of the parents a survey was done. Theschools’ opinion was obtained through discussions with two schools in the region. Upongathering the response and combining them with the discussions, we arrived at the issues thateither currently exist/could exist while implementing the initiative at the gram panchayatlevel. One of the primary issues was the low attendance of the students for the tele-educationclasses, followed by issues regarding lack of clarity on the content and the syllabus that needsto be followed in these classes. Also evident were the issues of power cuts and spaceconstraints. Upon analysis the paper suggests certain recommendations that would helpaddress most of these issues. Some of the recommendations include increasing awarenessabout the initiative through the use of self help groups, changing the enrollment procedure, aclear syllabus that supplements the existing school education and shifting the tele-centerclasses within the school premises.The major limitation of this study is the strong geographical context as the study was carriedout only in one taluk of Karnataka and hence the findings cannot be directly generalizedacross either the entire state or the entire nation. However this does provide a scope for futureresearch. And once the model is implemented and is stable, further research can also becarried out to understand if a business model can be developed in this domain to attract theprivate players and hence reduce the dependence of this initiative on government subsidies.