Pondicherry University and Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to address the needs of higher education through the use of multimedia, TV and emerging information communication technologies.
Prof. Anisa Basheer Khan, former officiating Vice-Chancellor of Pondicherry University and Prof. Rajbir Singh, Director of CEC signed the MoU recently in New Delhi.
The MoU aims to develop infrastructure to create multimedia educational content and provide guidance and technical support in creating digital content access stations/platforms in institutions. It also seeks to integrate digital learning with conventional learning in higher education.
Pondicherry University is one of the 21 centres that CEC has identified to host the centre, where a digital lounge will be established to enable users to access digitalcontent in various disciplines, subjects and courses related to UG and PG education.
The content will be developed and made accessible to students, teachers and researchers in higher education.
Over the last 30 years, CEC has been creating 40,000 hours of educational content, e-content videos and Learning Object Repositories (LOR).
As part of the MoU, CEC will provide e-resources as Open Educational Resources (OER) under creative commons non-commercial license to the registered member institutions.
Offline content
It will also provide content offline which will be transferred to a local server in the digital lounge to be set up in the central library in the university.
The university will provide space, infrastructure including high-end server with 10 TB space and an adequate number of student terminals and LAN networking to set up the digital lounge. Academic staff, employees, registered students, researchers and alumni members of Pondicherry University will have access to all resources provided by the CEC.
For the first time, the content is being made available through non-broadcast and non-internet media to teachers, researchers and students. Students can access content through their mobile phones through a wireless network as well. The e-resources provided will be used only for academic and research purposes.
Pondicherry University by virtue of having Educational Multimedia Research Centre (EMRC) shall be a host university and will enjoy a free membership under the MoU.
