Learn from home-50 educational channels to flood the TVs from May 1st

You may as well will be required to buy a whole new set of TV just for the 50 education channels that are going to be launched from May 1st. Or you can have another dish antenna hooked on to your TV along with the set-top box that you use for other entertainment channels. This special dish antenna will give you access to the education channels. Rs 1500/- will be charged to get the dish antenna.

The hard work of the Human Resources Development Ministry has finally paid off. The Indian Space Research Organisation has given them two GSAT-8 transponders to get things started. The studious will be set up by IIT Madras and they will also be dealing with the uplink and downlink facilities.

If the NOC (No Objection Certificate) was not delayed to HRD Ministry by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, the channels could have been launched much earlier. But the delay was due to the fact that NOC is given to companies to begin channels and HRD Ministry is not a company. The things worked out only after the involvement of the Prime Minister's Office. The HRD Ministry was exempted for NOC.

The project will have channels dealing with management, engineering, literature, law, commerce, communication and many more. Each channel will be specific to a subject and will have lectures delivered to students who are willing to pursue higher education from home. This distance education facility has nor restriction on age.

At the end of each lecture session you can interact with the teacher through SMS, email and phone-in for 20 minutes. The portals will have lectures for those who have missed it. The lectures will be broad-casted directly for eight hours, and they will be repeated for the next sixteen hours for the day. They will also be available on 'Sakshat'- a website from government's education.

The professors from IITs, IIMs, NITs, central universities and other major institutions will be the ones delivering lectures, which will be transmitted directly. This is advantageous as its very difficult to get admissions to such institutes to attend their lectures.

This initiative is taken to make the quality of higher education better and also to fill in gap in education where most students of India are in need of. The gap may have been due to reasons like early employment due to support family or due to not getting admission to colleges in the neighbourhood.

Currently there are four education channels that deal with higher studies and they are transmitted through DTH (Direct To Home). These channels are Gyanadarshan-1, Gyanadarshan-2, Eklavya and Vyas.

At any given time, about two crore of Indian students are pursuing their higher studies.

12% of them are enrolled in the distance education course, while 50% of them study in non-accredited institutions.

Since 50 new channels dedicated to particular subjects are being launched, the government expects a significant increase in the number of viewers, from those students who are receiving substandard education from non-accredited institutions, as per sources in the ministry.