Technology

Competition in education crosses country borders

Wi-Fi zone at Dharmaraja College, Kandy

by Gamini WARUSHAMANA

[email protected]
 

While technology enables people to interact and provide access to information and knowledge, in the field of education, the competition has crossed the country borders, said Director Sales and Marketing, South Asia of Intel Corporation S. M. Soryanarayan.

He was addressing the opening ceremony of the Wi-fi zone at Dharmaraja College in Kandy recently.

He said today Sri Lankan students have to compete with their counterparts across the globe. In this environment, problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration have become key in education. In the next five years Intel will invest over $1 billion on fifty countries in three focus areas of accessibility, connectivity and education, Soryanarayan said.

Intel donated Classmate PCs to the students of Dharmaraja College and awarded certificates to 100 IT teachers trained under the Intel Teach program. The ceremony was organised by the Central Province Education Ministry on the ICT day, a feature of the "Education Week" celebrations.

Education Minister Susil Premajayanth said that the ICT programs launched by the government were successful and the objective of the government is to take this technology rapidly to the people.

The Minister said that in government administration, today Divisional Secretariat offices have been connected to the Government Agents office. Nenasala and Vidatha centres have taken technology to the rural areas.

Our achievements are impressive in the field of education. We have introduced IT as a subject in the school syllabus. Teachers use IT as a teaching tool. We have provided IT laboratories for 3,415 schools and distributed 57,000 PCs to schools. Our objective is to provide IT centres for 6,000 schools by 2010 and we have initiated a project to provide 1,000 IT centres run by solar power to rural schools that do not have access to electricity.

"We have also developed the HR capacity in ICT in the education sector and 96,000 teachers have been already trained. We will set up a full fledged IT teacher training school in Ratnapura with financial and technical assistance from companies such as Intel and Microsoft", the Minister said.

The Secondary Education Modernisation Project of the Ministry of Education has launched several programs together with the private sector to enhance the quality IT education.

The Project Director Anura Dissanayake said that there was remarkable progress in the ICT sector development and the aim of these programs is to achieve a 60% e-literacy rate by 2010. In 2000, the e-literacy rate was at 6% and as a result of various programs launched by the government, today it has improved to 31%.

The World Bank and ADB funded project targets to train 200,000 teachers in IT. Already 34,000 teachers have been trained and Intel supports this project.

The "School Net" network has connected 15,000 schools and students and teachers are increasingly using internet in education. There are around 1.7 million hits per day and this shows the connectivity through the school net, Dissanayake said.

MoU Country Portal project signed

Close on the heels of the shot in the arm which the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) received recently with the passing in the House of Parliament of the Information and Communication Technology (Amendment) Bill which has replaced its five-year life span with an open-ended on-going one, ICTA saw yet another of its people-friendly projects reaching a landmark phase.

This was when the MoU for its Country Portal Project was signed at a ceremony at the ICTA premises last week.

ICTA's COO/Director Reshan Dewapura said, "I am glad that today after much 'behind-the-scene' work ICTA is able to witness the signing of the Country Portal Project, thanks to which, citizens, non-citizens, businesses agents and government employees to various government organisations and businesses in Sri Lanka will be able to access and obtain information and integrated government services on-line from a single portal in a highly user-friendly manner wherever they may happen to be."

Virtusa Corporation (NASDAQ:VRTU), a global Information Technology (IT) services company that provides IT consulting, technology implementation and application outsourcing services through an enhanced global delivery model, partnered with the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) to develop the "Country Portal", which serves as a primary interface that connects users to the electronic services (eServices) provided within the Lanka Gate concept.

General Manager of Virtusa's Sri Lanka Advanced Training Centre, Madu Ratnayake said, "We take great pride in joining hands with ICTA in creating the Country Portal featuring multiple service delivery channels to accommodate various end user realities such as mobile devices and web browser.

Our core competence is information technology and we create opportunities to achieve extraordinary results, value for our clients and all our stakeholders".

WTC Colombo gets more agile with IFS

IFS, the global enterprise applications company has signed up with Overseas Realty (Ceylon) PLC to implement IFS Applications into the groups property development and facilities management businesses.

The two companies are working together to optimise business processes related to infrastructure support and provide services to centralise ORCPLC's core functions to meet its current and future requirements.

Overseas Realty (Ceylon) PLC (ORCPLC) is a BOI flagship company incorporated in Sri Lanka in 1980 to undertake the principal activities of investment in properties, property development, trading and management.

Listed in the Colombo Stock Exchange, ORCPLC acts as the owner-manager of the World Trade Centre, Colombo comprising two office towers of 39 floors each which provides approximately 750,000 sq.ft. of commercial and retail space and is also the majority shareholder of Mireka Capital Land, developer of the Havelock City project providing two million sq ft of residential and commercial space.

The need for a full fledged ERP system was felt by the Group due to its current expansion into housing and commercial development and its future expansion plans.

An ERP system would enable the Group to amalgamate and centralise some of its core functions such as Finance, Facilities/Building Management to improve cost and process efficiencies.