The School and Mass Education (S&ME) department has decided to add more than 300 schools to its EDUSAT programme to tackle the crunch of teaching staff in the schools.
EDUSAT programme was launched in 2009 and presently covers 127 schools under S&ME department and 89 schools under Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe (SC & ST) department.
The programme is meant for students of Class IX and X in the EDUSAT schools. The ST & SC department has also proposed to extend the programme to its about 300 schools.
The EDUSAT classrooms are an interactive platform for the students to learn and ask questions.
The teachers take classes from a production room at the EDUSAT centre in the Capital.
The class is telecast live to the 217 schools, where the students view it in a special screen.
The students have a ‘raise hand’ button at their end which they can use to ask questions. More than 15,000 students benefit from these courses.
The major advantage of this programme is the audio-visual material which accompanies the actual course material. Each school has the capacity to accommodate 50 students in one class.
State EDUSAT productions in-charge Bibhu Mishra said the innovative classrooms are the future of education system in the country and is the need of the hour keeping in mind the faculty crunch faced by educational institutions.
The S&ME department plans a year long schedule for the EDUSAT classes which begin with one shift and is telecast from 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm.
An afternoon class has also been added recently for another batch of students who are taught same course.
For setting up EDUSAT classrooms, an interactive terminal, a screen, computers and a Satellite Interactive Terminal (SIT) costing around ` three lakh per school have been provided.
Sources said Council for Higher Secondary Education (CHSE) was also contemplating to introduce the EDUSAT programme in their colleges, but no decision has been taken in this regard.