CSR project from Dialog Telekom:

The gateway towards an empowered society

Sanjeevi JAYASURIYA

Empowering future generations, Nenasa, the state-of-the-art Digital Satellite Television based distance education bridge managed and operated by the Ministry of Education and the National Institute of Education (NIE) was launched last week

Nenasa will connect 1,000 rural schools in Sri Lanka on a high quality rendition of the national curriculum, developed by the NIE over a digital satellite television broadcast medium.

Nenasa was launched by President Mahinda Rajapaksa together with the Minister of Education Susil Premjayantha in a rural school in the Moneragala district opening a new vista in access to education to students in Grades 9,10 and 11 at the Ranjan Wijeratne Maha Vidyalaya in Pelwatta, Moneragala and simultaneously to an estimated 500,000 other students accessing Nenasa across Sri Lanka, including the Northern and the Eastern provinces of the country.

Nenasa is a gift to the Ministry of Education and Sri Lanka's student population from Dialog Telekom PLC, which also operates a state-of-the art digital satellite television service.

The project has been funded by Dialog Telekom as a part of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program aimed at delivering empowerment through ICT and is a totally non-commercial initiative of the Group.

Collective effort

The program is a collective effort by the Ministry of Education, National Institute of Education and Dialog Telekom and will harness the potential of students living in rural areas to enhance educational facilities in remote regions, Premjayantha said.

It is a solution for the teacher shortage as 100 teacher-training centres will be linked to this program to facilitate distance learning methodology. The technology will enable the students to have extra classes after school. With 2009 being declared as the Year of English and IT, Nenasa is the gateway towards achieving an empowered society in our march towards the future as one nation, he said.

The NIE will develop the content for Nenasa which in turn will be broadcast by Dialog to 1,000 identified schools connected to the network. It will be dedicated towards broadcasting educational content and cater to the GCE Ordinary Level and Advanced Level syllabus in Sinhala and Tamil. In addition, teacher-training and skills development would also be included in the program line-up.

These lessons will be supplemented by a Learning Management System (LMS) through which the interactive element of Nenasa is facilitated. The LMS enables children who have access to the internet to download educational material on Nenasa from the internet via www.nenasa.lk, which will effectively be the first time the Sri Lankan educational curriculum would become available on the internet.

The NIE initiated the Nenasa program with the help of its two well established audio and video studios donated by JAICA. We prepared the curriculum and teacher instructions manual.

We have experience in this area as we have prepared over 1,000 audios and videos in the field of education for the benefit of students and teachers, NIE Assistant Director General H.M. Guneratne Banda said.

Financial support

"We did not have the funding to telecast these programs. However, due to the financial support from Dialog the Nenasa program was a success. Our studios were provided with the latest technological devices under the ADB's secondary education modernization project", he said.

When the NIE submitted the project proposal it was approved by the Treasury realizing the importance of the media in the education and a substantial amount of funds were allocated. The curriculum from Grade six to thirteen has changed over the years and the teaching methodology too has changed. This is where the Nenasa program fits in to bridge the digital gap, he said.

Nenasa is a digital education bridge which connects students across Sri Lanka to a high quality, curriculum based educational content created by the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the Ministry of Education.

We are extremely proud to have the opportunity to partner these progressive and pioneering institutions in deploying state-of-the-art technology to bridge the existing divides in terms of access to high quality teaching and educational content, said Group Chief Executive, Dialog Telekom PLC, Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya.

Commitment

The content developed by the NIE is of a very high standard and demonstrates the high levels of commitment and competence of the teachers, content producers and facilitators who have been engaged in the project.

Combined with its inbuilt Learning Management System, Nenasa will form a multi-faceted learning infrastructure with an islandwide reach which in turn can be deployed for a variety of activities, not limited to teacher training and vocational education in addition to curriculum based education for school children, he said.

Dialog has been consistently committed to delivering on its corporate vision, which envisages the empowerment and enrichment of Sri Lankans through multi-sensory connectivity.

Through Nenasa, we believe that many Sri Lankan children will be empowered with parity access to knowledge and teaching resources. We look forward to working together with the Ministry of Education and the NIE to maximize the dividends this infrastructure would deliver to our society and nation, he said.