The National Mission on Education
To improve the levels of education in India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has launched an ambitious educational mission with an outlay of about US $ one billion. It is proposed to be implemented through Information and Communication Technologies. The following minimum requirements are placed to fund a project through this mission:
1. It has to be inter-institutional
2. It should be development oriented, in any general field of college level education
3. Any material developed through this mission has to be delivered as open source
4. It should belong to any one of the about twenty sub-missions identified in the mission document, available at www.sakshat.ac.in.
Open source software creation and use is one of the thrust areas of this mission. Some of the activities undertaken in this area are:
1. Promoting the use of open source/free software through workshops and other publicity
2. Creating educational content around existing open source software
3. Promoting the use of open source software in audio/video courses and virtual labs, the other thrust areas of this mission
4. Creating documentation, books and courses in the area of open source software
5. To take necessary steps to include open source software in the syllabi of various universities
At IIT Bombay, we are focusing on Scilab and Python in the area of numerical computation. This website is an overview of efforts involving Python in scientific computing under the mission.
The general idea would be to create material for the adoption of the various existing FOSS tools in the college curriculum. This will involve generation of a significant amount of documentation in the form of tutorials, audio/video demonstrations, written material, and lectures.
