BIS #2058 JUST MOODLE IT

Extract: MID-DAY Sunday, September 19, 2010
KURLA, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010: Education must keep abreast with technology. Soon chalk and blackboard will be irrelevant and so too the whole art of handwriting may disappear. In a Midday review last Sunday, Mr. M. Srinivasan from Gifted Education And Research (GEAR) is unequivocal in his support of technology of learning. “The question in not how intelligent you are, but how are you intelligent? The use of technology can bring out a genius in any child as he/she gets a chance to be more creative.”

Like GEAR, Don Bosco Institute of Technology (DBIT) in Kurla, allows its students to access information that the teacher didn’t have time to share in restricted time. Course Management Software (CMS) called MOODLE comes handy. Gunashekar Nandi, Systems IT Manager at DBIT calls it “a stable, robust and effective tool for taking teaching and the learning process beyond the four walls of a classroom.”

MOODLE was chosen because lecturers often fight against time. What if they want to find something more that’s relevant to the subject? What is a student had not been able to clear his doubts in half hour or it absent that day? That’s where MOODLE steps in. Lecturers can upload extra notes on the online forum, which students can then access, download and discuss among themselves and later on with the teacher. Tests and quizzes are also conducted using MOODLE,” says Nandi.

Add the fact that it virtually eliminates the need for a tutor, and it’s easy to see why the response has been “tremendous”, Nandi puts it. Today, at an initial cost of three lacs per server, MOODLE at DBIT effectively caters to a total of 1,500 users and 200 simultaneous users