Confirming this here today, the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Kurukshetra, Director, Dr M.N. Bandyopadhyay, said the workshop was being organised in collaboration with State Project Facilitation Unit, Haryana and other TEQIP networking institutions of the region under the aegis of NPIU, National Project Implementation Unit.

The objective of the workshop is to help the academic institutions by way of promoting industry-institute interaction. Eminent people from academic institutions and industry who have worked jointly on real life projects and benefited from that collaboration are invited to share their experience with the delegates of the workshop.

"The programme will continue for 15 days in face-to-face, on-line and satellite mode. It aims to create a skilled workforce which can efficiently use technology to reach out to a larger group who are out of education," he said on the sidelines of a seminar on "Education and Media", organised by IGNOU.

The company has deployed the entire suite of HP OpenView products to create service offerings for their customers, HCL BPO CEO and President Ranjit Narsimhan said in a release.

EnsureIT would address various business needs including proactive monitoring of all infrastructure components, quick restoration of service in case of downtime and SLA (service level agreement) driven quality of service, he said.

The newly-deployed system will harness 400 plus server and network infrastructure at HCL BPO.

It would also assist the company to bring its over 11,000 employees across eight geographically dispered centres to a single-point of contact for end-user management, Narsimhan said.

The Centre was inaugurated by Portugese President Anibal Antonio Cavaco Silva, who is on his maiden visit to the country.

Wipro Technologies also announced the setting up of its retail Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Portugal. "With Wipro's acquisition of Enabler, Portugal has become a key hub for our global retail business," Vinod Kumar, General Manager, Retail Solutions, Wipro Technolgogies said.

"Enabler acquisition was made not only to grow in Europe but to gain access in Portuguese speaking countries all over the world," Antonio Murta, Vice-President Enabler-Wipro said during an interactive meeting with the Portuguese delegation which is on a visit to the city.

The CoE in Portugal will cater to the need of global retailers and work on developing solutions and deployment skills that can help improve business performance, he said.

The CoE will have global expertise in retail disciplines including merchandising, planning, optimisation, supply chain and enterprise application integration.

Wipro will additionally set up three development centers for Oracle Retail.

Photo: R.M. Rajarathinam

UNREAL QUEST? There is a serious divide between learning goals and the way student are tested.

That there are serious gaps in student learning, both in government schools and in top private schools, is a matter of grave concern. In the first part of this article published earlier, we concluded that all of us teachers, schools, educationists, parents, corporates, education boards and tuition teachers are collectively responsible for this, and little will be achieved by pointing fingers at each other.

Can something be done to improve the system? Can the solution take all these various groups along, instead of pitting one against the other?

The overall solutions to address the current malaise are fairly well-known and often proposed: Change the paradigm of teaching and learning -- for example, increase group and activity work, train teachers in participative techniques, reduce dictation of notes, etc. Improve textbooks so that they may cover less content but more meaningfully, possibly in greater depth. Eliminate textbooks till Class III, having only teacher guides at that stage. Change the nature of the board examination questions, so that understanding -- not the power to memorise -- is tested. These suggestions are not new. However, attempting to make such large changes is a risky endeavour with significant chances of failure.

First of all, implementing these changes across such a large system is a complex and massive effort.

Secondly, there is the challenge of taking a large number of people along. Different people and groups have their own perspectives and priorities, and this may prove a difficult task. The negative repercussions or fall-outs of such changes can be high at a practical level, especially in the transitional stages. Protests by parents and students to drastic changes in board examinations can be imagined.

Thirdly, how does one monitor and agree that progress is being made? This involves "measuring the immeasurables" like student learning, teacher effectiveness, and school efficacy -- a discipline in which we are still struggling and have had very limited success. Without an agreed upon "barometer" for these key factors, it would be impossible to drive consensus or even have meaningful debate.

In the language of "systems thinking" when an attempt is made to change a large system by tweaking a few of its parts, the system reacts with steps that in effect compensate for the changes, so that the net change in the system is minimal. Thus guides get produced even for new textbooks aimed at improving practical learning. Parents in Maharashtra protested and forced a plan to test children in Class IV to be withdrawn, possibly without understanding that this was a measure of accountability primarily for primary school teachers, not a desire to add another examination to already over-burdened students.

What is the alternative then? Can we make smaller changes in a way we "incentivise" stakeholders and educate them, thus inducing slow but irreversible changes in behaviour that can bring about the desired results? Here then are some innocuous-looking ideas based on three simple philosophies:

The course would be conducted under the aegis of Max Healthcare India, University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Centre, John H Stroger Jr Hospital of Cook County, Chicago and Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, US.