EDUCATIONAL SCENARIO IN ODISHA AND THE CHALLENGES
Education plays an important role in building of the Nation and is instrumental in bringing about a change in the society as a whole. For quality improvement in education of mass, every citizen has to be covered, without any disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the rural and the urban, the linguistic & geographical regions and more importantly between the genders. Due to advancement of Science and Technology in Education curriculum it needs to update teaching standard and knowledge.
Although the No. of schools has been increased since independence, the No. of dropouts at the end of schooling is still quite high. If illiteracy has to be eliminated, the school drop-out rate has to be minimized and quality education has to be imparted, then correspondingly the No. of schools and teachers has to be increased multifold. This needs a large number of qualified and trained teaching staff for providing quality education. In reality, however, there is a problem of getting trained as well as quality teachers due to globalization and other lucrative job opportunities.
Edusat Hub Antenna and SIT installation
To meet the challenges of growing no. of High schools and student population with limited trained and skilled teacher population, the concept of Tele-education comes in the mind of State Govt. It is planned to set up high capacity satellite based interactive network to meet the requirement of various users in education sector, across the country and run it as an application project on Edusat.
To begin with, Edusat Hub and Antenna have been installed in the year 2007-08 at Orissa Remote Sensing Application Centre under the Dept. of Science and Technology. The installation and commissioning of SIT in 40 High Schools of Orissa were completed during the year 2007-08. It is being planned to increase further the no. of SITs.
The teaching end facility collocated with the Hub has been established in ORSAC premises. The live lecture will be telecast using suitable cameras or recorded programmes which will be transmitted. The virtual classroom configuration captures a live classroom by the use of camera and multimedia PC and transmits it to the remote student end. The teacher delivers has lecture just like in a normal classroom discussion but with significant reorientation in delivery mode to include multimedia based approach like power point slides, animated movies, electronic white board etc. Existing Gramsat studio will alsobe utilized for Edusat purpose. Studio based teaching end configuration will require from all necessary studio set up and the teacher will be delivering the lecture from ORSAC studio. The student ends in a SIT installed High Schools are provided with multimedia PC and project system for audio-video interaction.
GSat 3 (EDUSAT)
GSat-3 or EDUSAT is the first Indian satellite built exclusively for serving the educational sector. It is mainly intended to meet the demand for an interactive satellite based distance education system for the country. It strongly reflects India's commitment to use space technology for national development, especially for the development of population in remote and rural locations
The 1950 kg EDUSAT is launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) Sriharikota into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) by ISRO's GSLV Mk1(2) launch vehicle. From GTO, EDUSAT will reach the 36,000 km high Geostationary Orbit (GSO) by firing in stages, its in board Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM). In GSO, the satellite will be colocated with KALPANA-1 and INSAT-3C satellites at 74 deg East longitude.
Compared to the satellites launched in the INSAT series so far, EDUSAT will have several new technologies. The spacecraft is built around a standardized spacecraft bus called 1-2K. It has a multiple spot beam antenna with 1-2m reflector to direct precisely the ku-band spot beams towards their intended regions of India, a dual core bent heat pipe for thermal control high efficiency multi-junction solar cells and an improved thruster for optimized propellant use for orbit and orientation maintenance. The satellite uses radiatively cooled ku-band Travelling Wave Tube Amplifiers (TWTAs) and dielectrically loaded C-band Demultiplexer for its communication payloads.
Edusat carries five ku-band transponders providing spot beams, one ku-band transponder providing a national beam and six extended C-band transponders with national coverage beam. It will join the INSAT system that already has morethan 130 transponders in C-band, extended C-band and ku-band providing a variety of telecommunication and television services.