IT@School Project

IT@School provides ICT enabled education to 1.6 million students per year in the state . It endeavors to enhance the intellectual productivity of teacher and the curricular comprehension of students. The work of the project saw 4 million students and 0.2 million teachers ...

FOSS initiatives

With more than 5 years experience in FOSS in educational sector the Project has seen both economical and technological impact of FOSS that integrates the global user. The Kerala IT Education Department believes that sharing is an important virtue. However, sharing proprietary software would be a violation of the End User. Building collaboration and sharing practices are essential factors for the well being of societies and proprietary software often denies that. Against the odds that Proprietary software are user friendly, the effort of the Project saw educational community in Kerala accepting open source technology. Its own GNU\Linux supporting mechanism and a GNU\Linux resource center to clarify all the queries in operational and software requirement issues and there is constant interaction among these sections is an advantage.

In the case of Project, the free software platform is IT@School GNU\Linux, a free version of operating system was indigenously developed in association with free software foundation. The open source materials developed/used by the Project includes

• √ IT@School GNU\ Linux- Free software operating system which is now used in entire schools in Kerala
• √ Application softwares like Open office, GIMP, Dr. Geo, Rasmol, KEduca, Klab etc.
• √ Examination software –to conduct IT practical examination to more than16 lakh students
• √ Handbook for GNU\Linux – prepared as a user manual for working in IT@School GNU\Linux
• √ Training modules in GNU\Linux – to train teachers in open source
• √ Textbook for standard 8th 9th and 10th – Prepared in association with SCERT

Challenges faced while FOSS implemention

• √ Enabling GNU\Linux and FOSS based education in 2,738 high schools brought along its own set of challenges. √ Resourceful Manpower to train was the single biggest challenge in the implementation.
• √ Creating a single curriculum based on GNU/Linux was another issue to counter because there were many distributions of the OS and the schools had already installed different distributions.
• √ To provide support to the schools where GNU/Linux was being used.
• √ To train high school teachers in free software
• √ To develop software for conduct of IT practical examination in free software platform
• √ To conduct IT practical examination in free software for than 14 lakh students in Kerala
• √ Customization of all application in free software platform
• √ To develop educational content in free software platform

Solutions for overcoming challenges

• √ In the first phase, over 40,000 teachers had to be trained for over 90 hours on GNU\Linux based systems. The Project has started training its resource personnel in free software with help of Free Software Foundation. The Project has trained about 90,000 teachers in open platform.
• √ A Resource Centre has been established in Kochi for conducting teacher training in Linux.
• √ First initiative includes development of a free platform Operating system called IT@School GNU\Linux. The project has now released 3 updated versions of the OS and a IT@School GNU\Linux - Lite version which even works in computers of low configuration.
• √ Initially the examination for IT practical was developed on proprietary software. Then, it was developed in open source plat form and now for the first time in the world, examination for about 15 lakh students is being conducted in free software platform.

Cost advantage

The Project has supplied about 50,000 computers to schools. The proprietary OS and other application software come to about Rs. 10,000/- per PC for licensed software. Also the Educational content like interactive multimedia CDs are now being developed on free software platform, resulting in a savings of Rs. 75 lakhs. Also the examination software being developed using free software results in a saving of about Rs. 25 lakhs. Thus a total of Rs. 41 cr was saved by shifting to free software platform.