Pipilika

The First Search Engine of Bangladesh

PIPILIKA

written by 'Shojib'.

Digital Education

Computer is a key educational tool of the information age. Digital Education is the appropriate application of tools and technologies for equitable access to quality education content for learners, teachers and educational policy makers. ICTs are used to ensure improvement of governance in education from bottom to the top. ICTs can play a crucial role in supporting teachers with appropriate skills development.

Computer Literacy and the availability and use of computers and ICTs are integral to the Digital Education component of the Digital Bangladesh, which requires restructuring the education system to ensure equity in terms of access to quality education. The quality education can be ensured through regeneration of dignity of teaching profession with appropriate skills development, where ICTs play a vital role. The education system produces quality human resources for meeting the demand of domestic knowledge based economy and also global demand for quality human resources.

While almost every home in the developed world has at least one personal computer, disadvantaged students in rural Bangladesh often have no access to a computer. The gap in available opportunities between a student in rural Bangladesh and one in a developed nation thus keeps on increasing. The primary objective of the Computer Literacy Program is to alleviate Digital Divide through access to computers and other resources of information technology. Another objective is to leverage these resources to modernize the instruction and learning of other subjects, in particular, Science, Mathematics, and everyday English. Experiences of computer learning in successful developing nations demonstrate that this ‘digital divide’ is more amenable to remedy than many other disparities. What is even more encouraging is that a proper computer education can create a robust workforce capable of exploiting the global opportunities provided by the information technology for local economic development. It is crucial that underprivileged students in Bangladesh receive proper computer training that will enable them to seize the worldwide information technology opportunities.

Toward Vision 2021

"Digital Bangladesh" is currently the most commonly used words in politics, media, among the intellectuals and the civil societies. Since our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in her party's election manifesto pledged to develop a digital Bangladesh by 2021, it has given a great hope to the citizens of Bangladesh. It turned out to be an opportunity for our prime minister to be in the United States during the time of election, and experiencing the Obama election campaign. Her learning has helped Awami League wining the election in Bangladesh in 2008 with Obama-like campaign strategy-the call for 'change', which has been responded widely by the Bangladeshi citizens. However, the focus here is Digital Bangladesh, widely accepted by Bangladeshi people from all walks of life. Not too many people understood the concept of digital Bangladesh but they believed it, as something related to information technology. It has been widely accepted by a good number of young voters, believing that the concept of Digital Bangladesh will solve most of our national crisis involving corruption, unemployment, illiteracy, poverty and price-hike. Even though without knowing Bangladesh has already gone through a bit of experience on digitization through few national level of ICT projects, such as, Chittagong Customs Automation System, selection process of teletalk mobile user through internet, project initiated by the pervious government on machine-readable digital passport system and finally the successful computerization of national voter ID. However, we have full trust and faith in our newly elected government, that hopefully one day, it will give us the gift of Digital Bangladesh, as promised, by year 2021. 


By,
Shojib