: S.V. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary in the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Union government and chief architect of the National Knowledge Network (NKN), said here on Thursday that as the NKN tagline was to encourage, enable, enrich, empower and remove control, it provided a very powerful infrastructure for users to freely do actions in the best possible manner without much interference.
Addressing the gathering after inaugurating the 6th International IEEE Conference on Technology for Education (T4E)-2014 on the Amritapuri campus of Amrita University, near here, he said “the NKN was the largest and the fastest network in the world providing an almost free cyber space access to educational and research institutions.Over 1,350 institutions were associated with it.”. Dr. Raghavan launched the Amrita University’s Educational Platform A-View on the NKN.
Welcoming the delegates to T4E, Kamal Bijlani, prime architect of A-VIEW said the NKN had enabled e-Learning reach even remote rural areas. He said A-VIEW was the preferred distance education video conferencing software package used in India. It is currently deployed in over 6,000 colleges across India. A-VIEW was also being used in CBSE schools and National Skill Development Centres, he said. Prof. Bijlani said a key roadblock in the spread of educational technology was lack of adequate Internet speed or network, especially in rural areas. This roadblock is being solved by projects like NKN and NOFN (National Optical Fibre Network).
