The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has adopted the creative common license that will help making the AICTE study material accessible for both Indian and overseas students. The license was adopted in line with the UNESCO resolution on open education resources.
AICTE will be providing open education resources within the boundaries of intellectual property rights of the copyright owner while also providing permissions and granting the public the rights to access, reuse, repurpose, adapt and redistribute educational materials.
AICTE technical books in Indian languages
According to a press statement, at the moment, the license has been adopted for the second year books uploaded on the e-Kumbh portal in English and other Indian languages. The remaining second, third and fourth year and books will be adopted in English and 12 other Indian languages under the license in the future.
The licensing is in line with sustainable development goal (SDG) 4 – Quality Education, to enable students, faculty and institutions across the world to use engineering books developed by AICTE. In December 2022, University Grants Commission (UGC), chairman, Mamidala Jagadesh, met international publishers to introduce them to undergraduate-level English textbooks in Indian languages. The UGC formed a committee to prepare a road map and work towards bringing out textbooks in different Indian languages.
While speaking about the licensing, AICTE, chairman, TG Sitharam, said that the ‘CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0’ licensing to the AICTE books will enable millions of students to access the material developed by AICTE for their study and classroom teaching. “It will allow others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform and build upon the material for any non-commercial purpose,” he added.
AICTE and National Education Policy (NEP) 2020
AICTE initiated the technical book writing scheme in 2021, in alignment with National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to provide the engineering books in 12 different Indian languages such as Hindi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Urdu and Malayalam.
The council started writing the original book in English for the first year and then translated it in 12 Indian languages, as per AICTE’s model curriculum and outcome-based education model. In addition to this, AICTE also developed ‘e-Kumbh’ portal to upload these e-books after completion.
The e-Kumbh portal was launched by the President of India, Droupadi Murmu at Bhubaneswar in November 2022, in the presence of other dignitaries. “There are 88 courses, 42 degree and 46 diploma levels in the II year and most of these technical books have been written by eminent authors from IITs, NIT etc.” read the press statement.
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