Centre of Public Policy (CPP) at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) has been awarded the prestigious World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) 2015 Award by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and United Nations in Geneva. The award was given for CPP at IIMB for a versatile satellite learning programme – Satellite and Advanced Multimedia Education (SAME).
The prize recognizes the outstanding achievements of a wide range of organizations in strengthening implementation of the vision and targets set by the World Summit on the Information Society.
Spearheaded by Professor Gopal Naik, Chairperson of Centre of Excellence for Urban Development at IIMB, SAME was developed to bridge the quality of education gap between urban and rural education. Professor Naik and his team were awarded under innovative ICT applications with scalability category for E-learning.
The programme currently covers classes 5th to 10th and focuses on primary subjects like English, Mathematics and Science. The programme involved setting up of virtual classrooms where students were taught lessons directly from teachers in the studio set up at IIMB. The satellite learning programme was tested among some rural schools and resulted in a significant improvement in the class 10 results.
“We found improvements in pass percentages in 14 schools with the introduction of tele-education. I will attribute the success to quality inputs – good teachers in the studio who could explain the concepts very well; animation, which played a big role in making concepts clear; and the interactive nature of classes which had question and answer session”, said Professor Naik.
“We have put in our own effort to show that this technology can actually deliver good educational input to the rural students. The state government has displayed a lot of interest in this project. In fact, now they have asked us to scale it up to another 1000 schools”, added Professor Naik.
SAME currently targets rural schools in Karnataka districts. Since November 2014, the programme has covered over 1000 schools successfully reaching nearly 2,00,000 students of classes 5th to 10th. The State government, witnessing the impressive results, has taken further initiative to fund the programme and cover over 1000 more schools.
ITU has felicitated 18 awardees at WSIS Prize 2015. The winners include government departments, international organizations, private sector companies, NGOs and academia. More than 300 projects were nominated for the 2015 contest, more than twice the number of nominations in 2014, reflecting the prestigious nature of the award and the growing importance of ICTs in national development strategies.
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