An analysis of the draft National Policy of ICTs in School Education (NPISE)

Early this year, the Ministry of Human Resources Development initiated a process of formulating a National Policy of ICTs in School Education (NPISE). However, the draft policy as it stands, has several issues which need to be addressed. This posting looks at those issues and ways to address them:

ICT policy or education policy
At the outset it would be useful to clarify – is “ICT in education” policy an ICT (or IT) policy or is it an education policy. While this may seem semantic or even rhetorical, this distinction is crucial, (even as I understand, MHRD has initiated this, thus at least nominally defining it within the education realm).

If this is an ICT policy, then it is the prerogative or responsibility of the IT department to look at the technology related changes which are plenty, such as connectivity, infrastructure, hardware etc. However an education policy made by MHRD would need to focus on education challenges and issues, based on an understanding and analysis of the education context, with the aim of realizing education aims.

Though a policy for ‘ICT in any domain’ will need to certainly consider both the ICT and the relevant domain aspects (in our case, education), my submission is that it needs to be significantly driven by the 'domain contexts and needs' and not by that of technology. e.g. the infrastructure aspect of the policy will need to serve the objectives of the substantive part of the policy, and not the other way around. The current processes to provide inputs to the ICT in education policy, however seem to veer largely towards the technology perspective.

Looking at some of the identified themes of infrastructure, capacity building, e-content, Public-Private Partnerships, it is clear that that a discussion on, say, on an ICT in Health policy, or ICT in Agriculture policy could be based on these very themes. These identified themes thus are quite domain non-specific, which is strongly suggestive that these themes are not driven from domain issues and concerns. The accent here appears to be not on the ‘what’ but on the ‘how’ which in my view comes later and is subservient to the ‘what’.

If we accept that ICTs are really tools for the actors in the domain to use for addressing their challenges to achieve their goals, then we need to re-interpret ICT in school education from an educational perspective, beginning by defining the themes for discussion.

The initiating mail states “These policy guidelines will, obviously, be implemented by a variety of stakeholders, including government education departments, school systems, schools, vendors, technology providers and most importantly, by the teachers”.

This does not explicitly include two important stakeholder groups –

(1) Parents and community members who are the most important ‘beneficiaries’ of the school system and who have enormous stake in its effective functioning.

(2) Educationists including those working in academic institutions, NGOs, CBOs etc. The discussions and debates over the recent National Curriculum Framework (NCF) were led in many cases, by these educationists and their output, the NCF 2005 is acknowledged as a curricular landmark in India.

Involving these actors in determining the agenda will be useful to shift the basis of discussions, and the eventual policy, from the domain agnostic themes suggested here, to domain based and domain driven themes for a meaningful policy. After all, ICT in Education should primarily be a curricular concern.