Southern States - Tamil Nadu   

TVU certificates soon for first batch from California

By K. Ramachandran

CHENNAI March 22. Three months from now, a group of young learners from California in the United States will become the first batch of students to get the Tamil Virtual University's (TVU) certificates for completing a basic course.

About 130 students, who have enrolled as a group of the California Tamil Academy (CTA), will adopt the TVU's `basic' learning course and become eligible to get the certificates in June.

"We want a TVU representative to come and distribute the certificates to the students," says the academy president, Vertiselvi Rajamanickam.

For two years now, she has been offering the learning course to first generation learners among the large Tamil community in the San Francisco area.

The TVU was established two years ago to provide Internet-based resources for learning Tamil and acquiring knowledge of the history, art, literature and culture of Tamils. It offers certificate, diploma and degree-level programmes. Its director, M. Ponnavaikko, says the certificate course has `basic', `intermediate' and `advanced' levels. At the basic level, one can learn the alphabets and read and write words and sentences, all through multimedia contents.

One can log on the site `www.tamilvu.org' and enrol for free. The enrolled members can get access to the lessons and the digital library, including virtual dictionaries. Only, those who want to take an examination need to pay a fee. Over 6,500 persons from 94 countries have registered as users of the site; of them 2,500 are students.

A large chunk of the users is from Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the U.S., besides India. To facilitate easier access to the learning materials, the TVU also plans to sell the content in the CD-ROM form.

Under a memorandum of understanding, the TVU signed with the CTA (www.catamilacademy.org) on Monday, the academy will function as a franchisee of the university in California. The academy with five teachers and classrooms, will provide infrastructure a "study centre" and an `examination/evaluation' centre. It will enrol students for the TVU programmes and promote the programmes.

Ms. Vetriselvi Rajamanickam and Dr. Ponnavaikko signed the MoU in the presence of the Virtual University Chairman, V.C. Kulandaiswamy; the Tamil University Vice-Chancellor, E. Sundaramoorthy, and the Vice-Chairman of the Science City, Chennai, A.M. Raman.

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