corporate diary
ICT for Better Learning Outcomes Vivek Govil, President and CEO, Pearson Education talks about teacher being the key person in education delivery system with Dr Ravi Gupta and Yukti Pahwa What is the main focus of Pearson Education group? One of our concerns is that a large part of the ICT agenda in education is being driven by the technology companies rather than education companies. Mostly the conversations are about hardware or software without any focus on adequate quality of content or providing support to the teachers. We, on the other hand, believe that it is all about the teachers. Even in a highly technology enabled environment the teacher holds a vital role, though it might get modified according to the former. We work from perspective of enabling the teacher and otherwise. What were the initiatives taken in 2010? In higher education, we have been piloting a product called ‘My Labs’. We had the pilot run in 125 colleges across the country, for various subjects, amongst the high end institutions and fairly middle level institutions. We had professors working with ‘My Lab’ and their response to it has been quite remarkable. It is a unique combination of an e-learning tool, a homework management tool and a holistic reservoir of teacher’s resources. It also has an assessment tool, which helps not only to assess but also provide the diagnosis of the given assessment (who all are doing well, what topics are doing better than others),
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along with shortening the duration of the time spent in administrative aspects of carrying out assessment. In the school education segment we have created an e-book which is the digitised version of the book. This is the first time that someone has tried to integrate the text book and the digital aspect in a meaningful fashion. Although a rudimentary pilot, it did quite well. What are the unique features of your products? We focus on teacher’s perspectives. Mostly, the technology story in classrooms is more about marketing . Ou research shows that a lot of teachers and principals mention about their struggle when it comes to the use of technology. In an institution, technology use usually seems to be driven by the quality of the resource person’s training capabilities. But we focus on putting the control back to the teacher. Secondly, we are not trying to invent something from scratch. There are various successful models that exist. The idea is not to have thousands of things on your server but to integrate all of them for the teacher to aid learning. Is the Pearson’s e-book cost effective? The e-books we provide are ridiculously cheap and cost effective. They cost about ` 500 per child for a year. Most of the eLearn-