Information Technology- Education

Information Technology has made information about any even or phenomena taking place at any place in the world at any time, available to any person anywhere and the premise of the knowledge acquisition process has therefore tremendously benefited from the advances made by the information technology sector.

In the case of formal education, the main determining factor about the quality of education is the quality of the teaching material, curriculum and course content. In a conventional system, the teaching material is designed and developed by the expert resources available in a particular academic institution or at a university. In an e-educational scenario, the contents of various courses can be prepared by a virtual bank of experts. Experts from all over the world can participate through internet meetings and discussions. The content created can be stored on servers and be made available to any educational institution anywhere in the world.

The second prerequisite for a good education system is the presence expert teachers. In countries like India, there is tremendous shortage of teachers particularly in remote areas. The students are thus deprived of a good education for want of both material and teachers. The Integrated Internet Education System of e-education delivers the courses to the students directly at their door step using various tools like multimedia and interactive teaching software. The local teacher thus has to act only as facilitator. The expert resources of a virtual bank of experts are also available to the students through the internet, E-mail, chat sessions,video-conferences and video phones. In a very simple system one can use MSN messengers service or Yahoo messenger service and can get into a conference with the expert teacher and instantaneously exchange typed messages. Student can ask questions and the teachers can send replies from their respective computers at their home.

The growth of internet has accelerated the growth of many technologies. One of them is memory storage. Compact Disk – Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) and Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) are two popular media formats used in the e-education system. A large amount of data, about 640 MB can be stored and these compact disks and can be physically transported to any school. The multimedia contents of these discs can then be presented to the students, thereby giving them the benefit of best education.