Hindustan Lever Ltd (HLL) chairman Keki Dadiseth has advocated collaborative efforts by the government, parental community and the school management for investments in human capital formation. Dadiseth was presiding over a function in Mumbai last week, in which Maharashtra governor P C Alexander dedicated the fourth school of the Arya Vidya Mandir Society at the Bandra Kurla Complex to the community.

Dadiseth urged the government to give greater consideration to creating amenable conditions for corporate participation and support to education. He also counselled school managements to undertake reforms to make students aware of the connection between their schooling and the requirements of jobs and careers.

``The challenge today is not the supply of capital or technology, but to use it in a manner relevant to country's need,'' said Dadiseth. Citing the lead taken by Unilever and HLL in this area, the HLL chairman called uponcorporates for a broad spectrum involvement in education that transcends infrastructure support to schools. He said that companies need to engage actively with teachers and students to improve competencies in school management.

Quantum introduces part-time credit courses

The Quantum Institute, a division of Quantum Information Systems Ltd, which harnesses the power of cyberspace to offer higher education in India, is now offering two new courses in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in the US: the object-oriented design (OOD) and programming course and the multimedia systems course. Both are 13-week-long courses that will begin from May 17, 1999. This is an opportunity for systems developers, software systems analysts and other software professionals to learn directly from the `guru' of OOD, Prof. Ralph Johnson, a Ph D from Cornell and a member of the computer science faculty at UIUC.

Johnson, a pioneer in object-oriented technology, has been working in thisfield for the past 10 years and has co-authored the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a landmark work on OOD.

What makes the courses unique is that they are from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), one of the top three universities of the US and in the same league as MIT and Stanford. With 10 Nobel prizes to its credit, UIUC is amongst the select few universities of the world where learning incorporates the most recent advances in computer technology.

The India programme of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which also includes a full-time Master's programme in computer science is the result of the vision of The Quantum Institute--to link learners in India with the best universities of the world by utilising the connectivity of the Net. This involves simulating all the aspects of the on-campus environment at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, be it lectures, grading or assignments.

The OOD course teaches the students the art ofcreating flexible, elegant and reusable designs. The key technical topics included in the course are designing methodologies such as responsibility driven design and object modelling techniques; learning reusable design techniques such as pattern, abstract classes and frameworks; and training in particular designs such as mode/view/controller and testing frameworks.

The multimedia systems course imparts training on the design of modern multimedia systems. It emphasises topics like multimedia teleservices and audio and video encoding. Its aim is to strengthen the skills of multimedia systems designers and developers. The lectures will be conducted three days a week, 6.30-8.30 pm, to help working professionals.

Quantum specialises in a revolutionary style of teaching through state-of-the art modules, including digital delivery of educational materials and real and virtual classrooms. Each student participating in the new courses will be given a Net ID that will permit them to access resources at the UIUCcampus like the digital libraries and computers at the Engineering Work Stations Lab. Interactive news groups, Web boards and video conferencing are facilities that further promote student-faculty interaction.

High-tech education slipping in US

In recent years, technology companies have become a driving force behind the robust US economy, adding once undreamed of products, wealth and jobs to the American landscape. Now, a new report asks whether the American educational system can continue fuelling an industry based on mental prowess with the brainpower it needs.

CyberEducation: US Education and the High-Technology Workforce looked at pre-college and university-level education, and found both lacking. In junior and high school, the report said, students still lag significantly behind their counterparts in foreign countries when it comes to test scores in mathematics and science.

That may be one explanation for the study's second assertion: In recent years, the report found a decline of 5 percent in the number of high-technology related degrees granted to students in the US.

``We could forfeit our pre-eminent position in PalmPilot technology if the education system fails to produce the manpower to fuel the industry,'' Michaela D Platzer, the senior writer for the report, said in a recent interview.

There is one big `but' to the statistics, Platzer and others say, and that caveat helps paint a less worrisome picture about whether the future workforce will be prepared for the jobs available. Although there is an overall decline in the number of students seeking technology related degrees, some important fields like computer programming, have recorded big increases. At the same time, universities are offering degrees in new technology related specialties--and these may not be reflected in the numbers.The study was sponsored by the American Electronics Association, which, as a representative of 3,000 electronics and information technology companies, is hardly a disinterested observer ofhow the education system is training future employees, especially in a tight labour market.

The authors examined data from the US department of education and other sources. Among other things, they looked at the number of degrees granted in six technology related areas from 1990 to 1996, the last year for which figures are available from the Federal government. The six fields were engineering, engineering technology, computer science, business information systems, mathematics and physics.

The total number of degrees conferred fell from 218,820 in 1990 to 207,684 in 1996, according to the study.

Another look at the department of education figures found similar declines. Rolf Lehming, a programme director at the National Science Foundation, examined a slightly different combination of technology related degrees and found a drop of about 8 per cent over the same period.

For Platzer, the decrease is a cause for concern. ``We believe the technology related fields are core to our industry and the futuregrowth of our industry,'' she said. ``If there is not a cadre of people out there with these kinds of skills, we could face serious problems in the next century.''At the same time, she said, a close examination of the numbers yields a more nuanced picture. In some sub-disciplines, for example, there were large increases of graduates. Computer programming degrees, for example, jumped 14 per cent; degrees in information sciences and systems increased 8 per cent.