National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology

The National Mission on Education through ICT has been envisaged as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme through the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India to leverage the potential of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), in providing high quality personalized and interactive knowledge modules over the internet/intranet to reach out to all the learners in Higher Education Institutions in anytime and anywhere mode. ICT as a tool in education is expected to enhance the current Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in Higher Education from 10% at present to 15 % by the end of the 11th Five year Plan period as it acts as a multiplier for capacity building efforts of educational institutions without compromising the quality. The Mission would also endeavour to blend soft skills with knowledge modules and inculcate a discipline of holistic thinking in the learners so as to make them job creators rather than job seekers.

The objectives of the National Mission on Education through ICT are:

• Development of knowledge modules having the right content to take care of the aspirations and to address to the personalized needs of the learners
• Research in the field of pedagogy for development of efficient learning modules for disparate groups of learners
• Standardization and quality assurance of contents to make them world class
• Building connectivity and knowledge network among and within institutions of higher learning in the country with a view of achieving critical mass of researchers in any given field
• Availability of eknowledge contents, free of cost.
• Spreading digital literacy for teacher empowerment
• Experimentation and field trial in the area of performance optimization of low cost access/devices for use of ICT in education
• Providing support for the creation of virtual technological universities
• Identification and nurturing of talent
• Certification of competencies of the human resources acquired either through formal or non-formal means and the evolution of a legal framework for it
• Developing and maintaining the database with the profiles of our human resources.

Following are the programmes undertaken by I.I.T Kharagpur to meet the above objectives of NMEICT :

• Train 10 Thousand Teachers
• Virtual Labs
• Pedagogy Project
• NPTEL-Phase I&II
• Creating Accessible Study Material for Print Impaired Students

Thousands have already experienced the effectiveness of this approach and of the resulting open source contents.