With the government’s ambitious ‘Let’s Go Digital’ scheme finding more takers by the day, as many as 35 colleges are in line to come under the ambit of the digital enablement project by September.
Kerala State Higher Education Council (KSHEC), which has been spearheading its implementation, has already trained nearly 2,500 teachers in MOODLE as part of the endeavour that aims at bringing the higher education sector under an open-source learning management system (LMS).
According to council member secretary Rajan Varughese, the MOODLE LMS platform has currently been operationalised at the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram and Government Brennen College, Thalassery. The entire faculty at these colleges were trained recently.
“Around 50 colleges have expressed their willingness to be involved in the digital enablement drive and to avail the server facility required to install the platform for institutional use. Thirty five colleges will be brought under its ambit in the first phase. These include 20 government colleges,” Dr. Varughese said.
He added that the Digital University Kerala (DUK), which has been partnering with the KSHEC in project implementation, currently possessed the capacity to provide the LMS server for at least 50 colleges. The State Data Centre (SDC) has allocated server facilities for both KSHEC and DUK for the programme. Other State universities that were also equipped with such facilities could become part of the movement by dedicating their available servers for affiliated colleges, he said.
Faculty training
The council has imparted training on LMS to 2059 teachers, thereby exceeding the government’s target to equip 2000 teachers with the necessary know-how on the cloud-based LMS during its 100-day programme. A six-day faculty development programme for 400 teachers from State universities and affiliated colleges that will commence on September 1 will take this count to 2459.
In the next phase, institutions that have successfully completed the training programmes will be able to set up the MOODLE-based LMS by obtaining servers from the SDC, the respective university or DUK. Besides bringing down the initial investment and running costs drastically, the platform is touted to enhance flexibility when compared to proprietary software.
