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Abbreviating the Digital Divide: Towards Generating a Computer Educated
Third World Youth.

Author : Hakikur Rahman
Date added : 2000-09-02 
Regional Scope : South Asia and Pacific

Abstract :

A dedicated knowledge based community is developing rapidly and preparing this
community peoples with pragmatic hierarchy of IT platform through computer related
elaborate programming tools and techniques would ultimately upgrade the primary
foundation of software industry in the country. This could be a bright lesson to other
community development NGOs to encourage them in producing other forms of education.

There are few other institutes engaged in similar activities, but very few are thinking of
accommodating this low income group of the community and providing them with a
internationally recognized curriculum at subsidized rate.

Established in 1989, Institute of Computer management and Science (ICMS) has been
affiliated by the Bangladesh Technical Education Board in 1996. Up until now this project
has produced 72 batches with 40 students in each batch. Providing basic computer
programming knowledge has certainly elevated aspirations in the community and produced
a group of practically programme oriented group forming useful asset to the job seekers.
These students who could barely leave by their hand to mouth and never be able to educate
in this highly sophisticated field of education technology, are preparing themselves for
global job market. Also, these students are being made ready for professional collaborative
computer-based activities by engaging in software development industry. If this project
sustains for a longer period, it would produce potential upgradation in human resource
management by creating IT based knowledge group in the community.

Story : 

Introduction:

To provide computer programming tools and techniques to low income group students completing 12 years of Schooling attaining at the level of Higher Secondary Certificate with brilliant result in their carrier to form a nationwide pre-qualified group in software development activities.

After successful completion of the computer literacy programme (the first phase of the project) top ranked students completing their 12 years of schooling and attaining the level of HSC (Higher Secondary Certificate) would be able to participate in this phase of the project. Provisions will be kept for accommodating new students with high national ranking in HSC from country wide selection.

Participants enrolled in this project could take the benefit of IT based education including learning of programming tools and techniques from popular programming languages. The project would like to take the challenge to educate this community students towards a six months learning process through providing lessons from programming languages, like Visual C++, Visual BASIC, Java, SQL and Visual Foxpro who could barely have the chance to educate themselves.

Objectives:

Aim of this project is to prepare the students at a level so that they can assist in different software development houses in this developing society with making a great contribution towards forming a large group of IT based population, who in terms of time could become specialized programmers.

Students from Sub-Urban town of Mirpur located 20 Km away from Dhaka city centre covering a population base of more than 3 millions would become a focal point of IT resource in the country.

Nearby area of Mirpur has large number of students who could not afford a higher level of computer education. The project is to prepare a target group for software base thus abbreviating the digital divide as second phase of a three phased project. A target group of 40 students in a 3-day per week class for six months would cover 800 students in the 3rd 5th year (1989-1993, 1994-1998, 1999-2003) lifetime of the project from October 1999 to September 2003. The concealed idea is to prepare these students towards the third phase of the project where they could avail some collaborative programmes from institutions providing distance education/ credit transfer/ study exchange programmes or leave ICMS to furtherance higher education from other institutes/universities. 

40 students would attend a 3 hours class lecture, discussion, workshop, seminar, slide show, Internet browsing, games, multimedia presentation, tour, etc. including some hands on tutorials at 3 days per week basis offering 80 students in a month covering 6 months programme would bring to the total number of students to 800 in 5 years. Multimedia presentation, workshop and seminar participants could be much higher than the number of perticipants interacting with ICMS, as few of the seminars, etc. are being arranged outside the campus where it would kept open to all.

Only a small group from clustered communities of the Mirpur town has been selected for this type of IT based education. If fund permits, building larger campus with modern computational facilities and covering a wider region would create more useful job oriented curricula and faculties.

To accommodate students from lower hierarchy level of education with average ranking, creates problem in forming a sophisticated IT based educational group. Filtering process has been adopted by monitoring educational background, result of Schools, skills of programming knowledge and recommendation from the head of immediate passing institute. Secondly, small sized class room prevents to accommodate higher number of students in each class. Thirdly, low bandwidth of Internet browsing makes it sufficiently difficult to run online demonstrations. Lastly but not the least, due to complexity of producing interactive CDROMs, specialized courses could not be prepared in the campus. They would be procured from local market and scope would be there to produce the same in near future.



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