NVEQF

About NVEQF

The Department of Primary and Secondary Education through its NVEQF cell has taken lead to implement pilot project on its own resources as per the approval and guidelines given by Department of MHRD, GOI. In this regard already preparatory work is under progress. The project shall be implemented in selected 100 government secondary schools covering 10 districts. The scheme is being implemented for 9th std. students level-1 for the academic year 2012-13.

Objectives and Scope

The aim of the program is to provide class IX students in identified schools to build their IT capacities as well as those relating to English and soft skills. In case of IT skills, the program will additionally aim to build deeper technology skills covering system and application software installation and configuration, which can provide richer employment opportunities as system administrators. The program would cover forty schools in ten districts, for the IT sector curriculum including English language and soft skills.

Methodology

The program would be implemented as follows

  1. School selection by the department; this would be based on availability of infrastructure and on interest levels of teachers in the school. Annexure A provides a list of suggested schools (ICT@Schools phase 2) in the ten districts.
  2. ITfC would design and conduct workshops to train 1 Mathematics or Science teacher in each school
  3. A refresher workshop of 2-3 days after a month or two, if required, to reinforce learning and solve doubts.
  4. Teachers would carry out both periodic as well as an end of year assessment of learning.

Subsequent to the workshops, the teachers are expected to transact the NVEQF syllabus with the students of class IX as per the schedule proposed by NVEQF.

Emailing list and web portal for support and information sharing

During the training workshops, email ids will be created for all participating teachers and they will be added to a mailing-list. Subsequently, the teachers will share ideas, doubts and resources over the mailing list. In case of doubts or questions, the team or any other participating teacher can respond and resolve the doubt. In addition, resources will also be made available on the web portal www.KarnatakaEducation.org.in so that teachers can download information at any time from the site.

Guest lectures and industry visits

As a part of the program, students are expected to make visits to the nearby industry locations. The students could be exposed to the administration and HR teams to understand entry level administration and data processing processes in industries. IT training centres can also be visited to understand their functioning. The industry visit is to familiarise the student with the environment in the industry. Guest lectures too need to be organised, ideally from one of the above institutions. Another option is to have faculty from a college which offers a course relating to computer science or information science. The topics for the guest lecture can deal with the opportunities available in the IT sector, recent developments, challenges and learning/ skill requirements for the students. Such a guest lecture can also be an opportunity for the school to link with an institution of higher education. The exposure visit and the guest lectures would need to be organised by the School Head Master in discussions with the NVEQF teacher team in the school. A brief report on the exposure visit and lecture could be published on the school wiki with photographs as well.

Future possibilities

The proposal is for the current year 2012-13 and covers a set of pilot schools. The syllabus covers class IX, the first year in secondary education and pertains to basic computer literacy in the IT component. This can help in building the knowledge and skill base and also for basic jobs such as data entry operations, software installation and support etc. In subsequent years, apart from increasing the coverage of schools, the curriculum could be expanded to cover hardware and software installation and maintenance, office administration etc. There are also opportunities to learn software applications pertaining to desktop publishing, audio editing, film editing etc. which can be explored based on the experiences and insights from the first years pilot and from the syllabus that would be provided by NVEQF. During the second year, computer drawing and graphics could be added as a vocational skill (this is in great demand now). This could be covered by training art teachers on different software tools for Graphics, such as GIMP, Kolourpaint, Inkscape, LibreCAD etc. All these skills are very useful for providing livelihood and vocational opportunities in the rapidly growing digital industries (graphics and animation, digital publishing and the film industries).