Chhattisgarh Infotech Promotion Society (CHiPS), a Government of Chhattisgarh undertaking has initiated work for implementation of Virtual Education Scheme with funding support from Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), officials informed.
The project envisages leveraging technology to improve student-learning outcomes, assisting teachers through ICT enabled classrooms, building teachers capacity using online and offline platforms for teacher training, creating and providing digital content for the entire education system and support the District-State administration with relevant, accurate and timely data to inform policy decisions.
The project will look at School Education, Higher Education, Technical Education and Vocational Education.
The Scheme offers to set up a learning management system which will provide content mapped with the state syllabus to be used by teachers and students. The project is coupled with ICT at schools scheme which has a focus on secondary and higher secondary schools.The Learning Management System will further be extended to colleges, vocational institutes and ITIs.
CHiPS has also proposed to set up a Centre of Excellence on Innovation and Technology in Education to manage the execution of this Scheme.
Notably, Chhattisgarh has already established itself as a major educational hub with presence of premier institutions like NIT, IIM, NLU and AIIMS. It also, has many other world class educational institutions for professional programmes such as Engineering, MCA and MBA as well as in Humanities, Commerce and the Sciences, officials informed.
However, there is a gap between the number of students graduating and the number of students getting placed. There is a tangible gap between present state of aptitude and the required aptitude for getting selected in prestigious organizations, they informed.
Hence, there is a need to establish the platform which could increase the employment opportunities. It is an observed trend that most employers in IT and ITeS sector have rigorous training programmes that provide the necessary technical skills that are required to perform the jobs for which they hire. The focus, when these employers hire, is on assessing a range of abilities.
The general curriculum of our education system has been focussed on imparting technical skills. However, aptitude is an area which tends to get ignored and thus students from Chhattisgarh tend to lose out to fresh graduates from larger cities which offer better opportunities for schooling and more exposure, officials informed.
Therefore, imparting abilities training to help them prepare for the selection process in a short and concentrated capsule is expected to improve greatly the chances of the students of Chhattisgarh securing employment with some of the best employers in the IT/BPM space.
The training will also be complemented with efforts to establish the credibility of Chhattisgarh in providing quality talent as well as to ensure that reputed organizations come to Chhattisgarh for recruitment. This may start the trend where students, corporates and government of Chhattisgarh are mutually benefited, officials informed.