DHAKA: Speakers at a seminar put emphasis on building a digital platform to ease the total education system for students.

They were addressing the seminar titled “Education for Every Citizen – Building a Digital Platform for Education and Learning” held during BASIS Soft Expo 2017’.

Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) organized the exposition at the Bangabandhu International Conference Center (BICC) in the city.

Suren Alloyen, founder of Armenia’s ‘Dasarson’ and its chief executive, presented the keynote in the seminar.

BASIS president Mustafa Jabbar moderated the function, while e-learning expert of A-I Faruque Ahmed, youth group coordinator of the Prothom Alo Munir Hasan, project director of A-I Aneer Chowdhury and managing director of Crossway IT Ltd Fahim Tanbeer Ahmed spoke at the seminar.

Pointing out some examples, Suren Alloyen in the keynote paper said, “We have created a unified platform for 1501 schools in Armenia. The platform has e-gradebook, teaching training system, e-book, e-learning system and other systems. For this, it was possible to abolish the difference between the private school and public school. The small country like Armenia has been changed due to development of the technology there. About 81 per cent teachers now use computer to teach students. Even prime minister can see the school database in his mobile.”  

Faruque Ahmed said, “We are going towards the success by using our resources.” Mentioning examples from Pythagoras and former chairman of the NCTV, he emphasized on building ICT-based education system instead of building infrastructures.   
    
Munir Hasan said, “We found in research that each school has at least one Mathematics teacher. The mathematics teacher usually teaches mathematics in class nine and ten. But the subject is taught in other classes even by religious teacher. For this reason, the students remain weak in the mathematics. They face problem also in the university level. The government has taken initiative in this regard. It is a positive side. The major problem of our education system is that the teachers and the students have no challenge. Our teachers must have challenge. Bengali concept is not sufficient in digital studying. We have to develop our Bengali concept.”         

Aneer Chowdhury said, “I came back from the US aiming to work about education system. It is concerning matter that although the rate of GPA has been increased, the rate of skill is not increased. We can use digital education system as tool for building digital Bangladesh. About 200 years will be needed to train up all the teachers physically. But we can do it easily through using the technology. We have already introduced teachers’ portal side. The number of users has become over 1, 50,000 which began with only 23 teachers.”

Fahim Tanbeer Ahmed said that fever is not disease; it is a symptom of the disease. Like this, digital Bangladesh is not a name; it is a place for creating destination. The teachers and the students have to take challenges to make digital Bangladesh. After that, the education system will be digitalized completely, he added.

Mustafa Jabbar said, “We have made Bengali concept. Digital books have been prepared from child class to class three. The children can play game alongside study. We are using cartoon in the character, because it attracts the children. We have moving towards the education system so that the children can study even without their parents. We have to consider that teachers are not the sources of information, but they are media.”      

Mentioning his experience, the noted IT expert said, “I worked for education system for children. I am now thinking to produce fresh methods for the child education. The technology will play important role to ease education system for children.”

BDST: 2035 HRS, MAR 04, 2017
EHJ/SMS