Vidya Samiksha Kendras

• 12 Sep 2023

Source: TH

Why in News?

Under the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR), the Ministry of Education is pushing the establishment of Vidya Samiksha Kendras (VSKs) across states.

• This initiative aligns with the National Education Policy, 2020.
• Currently, at the Central level, a VSK centre is housed in the Central Institute of Educational Technology building in the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) campus .

What is Vidya Samiksha Kendras (VSKs)?

• About:
  • VSK is aimed at leveraging data and technology to bring a big leap in learning outcomes.
  • This will cover data of more than 15 Lakh schools, 96 Lakh teachers and 26 Crore students and analyze them meaningfully using big data analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in order to enhance the overall monitoring of the education system and thereby improving learning outcomes.
• Objectives:
  • To monitor the real-time status of various projects/ activities under the ambit of Samagra Shiksha.
  • To keep track of enrolled students including learning outcomes, Dropouts, support required by teachers and schools, etc.
  • To monitor and track field level academic and non-academic activities at state level and also empower administrators and teachers in the field to take data driven decisions.
  • To set up a centralized help desk for grievance redressal mechanisms for stakeholders of the School ecosystem.
  • To identify and analyse improvement areas for decision making and implementation that needs urgent attention.
• Significance:
  • The ability to effectively collect, monitor, correlate, and analyse data will lead to timely actions to implement schemes.
  • Integrating various data sets and breaking through the barrier of operating in silos will help us effectively leverage different entities towards a common goal.

What is NDEAR?

• About:
  • NDEAR is federated, unbundled, interoperable, inclusive, accessible, evolving which aims to create and deliver diverse, relevant, contextual, innovative solutions that benefit students, teachers, parents, communities, administrators and result in timely implementation of policy goals.
  • NDEAR is under the aegis of the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY).
  • It aims to enable a common set of principles and approaches to be followed in building, using and re-using technology for education.
• Vision:
  • A globally pioneering effort in education - A unifying national digital infrastructure to energise and catalyse the education.
• Outcomes:
  • The Students get access to on demand learning materials, videos, graphics and animations, virtual labs and different forms of assessment tools. Access to personalized adaptive learning (PAL), Transition to higher education and skilling to be tracked
  • The Teachers get access to online support for lesson plans, use of TLM (Teaching-learning material ), pedagogic transactions, online reference materials, competency based evaluation tools etc. They also get access to online modules for improving professional standards.