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Era of the e-women
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Keeping up with the trend, computer courses have only got shorter and more specific. And the latest course from the NIIT stable starts with a minimum duration of ten hours and could be completed in a couple of days.
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DID YOU know that more educated women use computers than educated men in the professional sector? According to the Chief Scientist Sugata Mitra who heads the NIIT R and D, studies conducted on a lakh people across different age-groups and backgrounds has revealed that though more men use computers than women overall, the skew was towards women in the post graduate (55 per cent) and occupational categories (60 per cent).
This discovery was what got Mitra and his team thinking about women and computer education.
For the studies seemed to indicate that women used computers for utilitarian purposes and were more task based towards technology than theory based.
``Women tend to think more about the end-result. They just want to know `What will it (the computer) do for me?' While men just wanted to know `How does it work?' So we evolved a curriculum where we reduced the `theory-behind-the-operations' portion and increased the practical aspect of computers to carry out tasks — we made the curriculum goal-oriented,'' Mitra talks about NIIT Swift Jyoti for Women, that was recently launched.
Keeping up with the trend, computer courses have only got shorter and more specific. And the latest course from the NIIT stable starts with a minimum duration of ten hours and could be completed in a couple of days.
``Soon, we might go in for smaller courses. People might just say `Here's 15 rupees. Just teach me how Winzip works','' jokes Mitra. Talking about money, the Jyoti Swift course costs Rs. 500.
``Not that the course disqualifies men in any way. Just that men would find this particular course dissatisfying. They would want to know internal mechanisms of the computer and also want to know `why it happens','' Mitra reasons.
The new course gives students various tasks or exercises that are life-related. ``Research showed us that younger women in the age group 13-25 used computers largely for communication... email, sms, chat while women in the age-group 26- 45 used it for learning applications like word-processors and spreadsheets, things that saved them time and women over 45 used computers for communication, pressurised by children,'' continues Mitra.
The methodology used therefore is informal too.
``We encourage almost everything that a usual course would not allow. We let students talk, we make them work together, take each other's help and share/borrow work. When they work collaboratively, learning is incidental and students enjoy their discoveries,'' the scientist says.
Mitra believes that `the last thing a faculty must do is to teach'. ``A faculty must simply wait and watch. If he/she finds a student having problems, he/she should simply say `watch me do it' and guide them to find a solution themselves. Only if even that doesn't work out, you teach. To teach is the worst way to do it. Informal tools therefore have been used as formal methodology in this course''.
By Sudhish Kamath
Graphics Varghese Kallada
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Life
Bangalore
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