Re:Satellite education - more than song and dance
suneel
by Venkatachari
Jagannathan
21 September
2004
India is one of the few countries that use satellites for spreading
literacy and higher education, rather than just telecasting
entertainment or facilitating telecom.
The satellite education system in India is a three-phased project. The
first one, currently under progress uses one of the Insat-3B
satellite's Ku-band transponder. In this phase, Visveswaraiah
Technological University (VTU) in Karnataka, Y B Chavan State Open
University in Maharashtra and the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University in
Madhya Pradesh are covered.
In the second phase, once commissioned in orbit, Edusat will be used in
a semi-operational mode with at least one uplink in each of the five
spot beams (See: GSLV F 01 launches Edusat successfully). About 100-200
classrooms will be connected in each beam. Coverage will be extended to
two more states and one national institution.
In the third phase, the Edusat network is expected to become fully
operational. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will provide
technical and managerial support in the replication of Edusat ground
systems to manufacturers and service providers. End users are expected
to provide funds for this.
In this phase, ground infrastructure to meet the country's educational
needs will be built and during this period, Edusat will be able to
support about 25 to 30 uplinks and about 5,000 remote terminals per
uplink.
While ISRO will provide the space segment for Edusat system and
demonstrate the efficacy of the satellite system for interactive
distance education, content generation is the responsibility of the
user agencies.
The extension of quality education to remote and rural regions becomes
a Herculean task for a large country like India with a multi-lingual
and multi-cultural population separated by vast geographical distances,
and, in many instances, inaccessible terrain.
Since independence, India has seen a substantial increase in the number
of educational institutions at the primary, secondary and higher levels
as well as student enrolments. But the lack of adequate rural
educational infrastructure and non-availability of good teachers in
sufficient numbers adversely affect the efforts made in education.
It was then decided to establish the connectivity between urban
educational institutions with adequate infrastructure imparting quality
education and the large number of rural and semi-urban educational
institutions lacking the necessary infrastructure via satellite.
Besides supporting formal education, a satellite system can facilitate
the dissemination of knowledge to the rural and remote population about
important aspects likes health, hygiene and personality development and
allows professionals to update their knowledge base as well.
Thus, in spite of limited trained and skilled teachers, the aspirations
of the growing student population at all levels can be met through the
concept of tele-education.
The concept of beaming educational programmes through satellites was
effectively demonstrated for the first time in India in 1975-76 through
the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) conducted
using the American Application Technology Satellite (ATS-6).
During this unique experiment, which is hailed as the largest
sociological experiment conducted anywhere in the world, programmes
pertaining to health, hygiene and family planning were telecast
directly to about 2,400 Indian villages spread over six states.
Later, with the commissioning of Insat satellite system in 1983, a
variety of educational programmes is being telecast. In the '90s,
Jhabua Developmental Communications Project (JDCP) and Training and
Developmental Communication Channel (TDCC) further demonstrated the
efficacy of tele-education.
With the success of the Insat based educational services, a need was
felt to launch a satellite dedicated for educational service and ISRO
conceived the Edusat project in October 2002.
Edusat is the first exclusive satellite for serving the educational
sector. It is specially configured for audio-visual medium, employing
digital interactive classroom and multimedia multi-centric system.
"The satellite will revolutionise education delivery in the country,"
says ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair.
The satellite has multiple regional beams covering different parts of
India - five Ku-band transponders with spot beams covering northern,
north-eastern, eastern, southern and western regions of the country, a
Ku-band transponder with its footprint covering the Indian mainland
region and six C-band transponders with their footprints covering the
entire country.
According to Nair, ISRO has memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a
couple of educational bodies. "During next three months, we will be
signing up around 20 institutions."
The satellite is primarily meant for providing connectivity to schools,
colleges and higher education and also to support non-formal education
including developmental communication.
In order to spread the concept, ISRO will also initially invest around
Rs95 crore in setting up the ground infrastructure at the institutions.
Later ISRO expects the institutions to make the necessary investments.
"We are not looking at this project as a commercial angle," he adds.
However the quantity and quality of the content would ultimately decide
the success of the Edusat. This involves an enormous effort by the user
agencies. To help in this, ISRO, in cooperation with the user agencies,
has already organised five conferences at the regional level, one at
the national level and one conference of vice-chancellors of Indian
universities to create awareness about the Edusat and its capabilities.