Brief Overview of ICT in Education of Bangladesh, ( Digital Bangladesh 2021)

       With a population of 161,083,804 (July 2012 est.) (CIA Fact book) Bangladesh is one of the densely populated country with a literacy rate of   47.9% (in 2012) (index mundi); thus leaving  more than half of the population illiterate. While the currently elected Prime minister of Bangladesh exposes  an icon of Digital Bangladesh in the year 2021. Where she promises to have "100% enrollment in the primary level by the end of 2010". Whereas  the given statuesque shows that less than 50% has been successful. Furthermore the  other goals of digital Bangladesh, in the domain of education, emphasis on

• Elimination of illiteracy by 2014,
• Improvement in the quality of education,
• Creation of a generation educated in science and technology,
• Graduation degree level education made free by 2013 
• Ensuring higher salary for teachers are the other educational goals. (Government Vision)

     Whereas this goals have a long way to go and the given year for the success is very near yet the results are vague and have chances for failure. The idea of Digital Bangladesh as stated by the government is to have the best use of ICT in the sector of development, education, health care etc. My standpoint on this module is, the process of digitization or in other words globalization will only be possible if the population of the country is able to use and communicate more efficiently with the digital technologies. To have the goal fulfilled it needs to first consider the education sector where there should be 100% emergence of ICT and the population is assured with the 4A's (affordability, accessibility, availability and awareness)

Photo Courtesy: Dailystar

            

            If we consider the literacy of Bangladesh by definition it says that people "aged 15 and over can read and write" (CIA Fact book), well in this status of literacy there is a contradiction too as in Bangladesh there is two medium of education,

1.     Bengali Medium
2.     English Medium

          From the literacy rate, more than half of the students study under the Bengali medium education system where all the textbooks are written and taught in Bengali except the subject, English.(Financial Express) Thus the number of students literate also have a barrier in access to ICT as most of the ICT based information or technology are written and have a greater use of English in them. Therefore, the population of Bangladesh is limited from using ICT based information, such as access to online articles, search engines as Google, as most of the content in these digital world are written in English. Therefore, they face difficulty in using this ICT. Hence, leaving a huge difference for the emergence of ICT in the orbit of education.