With 13.6-lakh untrained teachers registering with the National Institute of Open Schooling to get trained by 2019 to retain their jobs, the Union government has chalked out a programme to roll out televised lectures in regional languages and enable them to interact with experts in the studios during the lecture.
The decision was taken at a review of the programme held by Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar.
Since many schools had come up after the launch of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the RTE, many teachers without requisite training had been hired. Some had studied just till school. They were given five years to train themselves, but many have not acquired the training till now. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Amendment) Act, 2017, mandates teachers to acquire B.El. Ed (Bachelor of Elementary Education) or D. El. Ed. (Diploma in Elementary Education) qualifications by May 31, 2019, to retain their jobs. The NIOS, an autonomous organisation under the Ministry, is tasked with training these teachers.
Till now, the government had one DTH channel in English and Hindi — of the 32 channels for telecasting educational programmes — dedicated to teacher training, as part of its Swayam Prabha initiative.
More languages
“From the one DTH channel available for viewing lectures in Hindi and English, there will soon be three more channels dedicated to teacher training: one in Tamil and Telugu, one in Bengali and Assamese, and one in Odiya and other regional languages,” said an official who did not wish to be named. “This apart, an encoder will be used to allow TV audience to interact directly with subject experts sitting in the studio and ask questions.”
The encoder, the official said, is a device that permits live video interaction with a large section of the audience at the same time, and has been given to the NIOS by ISRO.
The IIT-Bombay, which is offering lectures to students of 345 engineering colleges across India, has offered to provide time slots to the NIOS to broadcast its lectures live, the source said.
“We are also planning to have a toll-free number operational for 16 hours a day to answer the questions,” said an official.
