In 1947, when India got independence, there were nearly 46% untrained secondary school teachers. In 1970-71, 24.64% of the 630,000 secondary and higher secondary teachers were untrained; and  in 1990-91, in spite of massive distance teacher education initiative of dual mode universities, there were still nearly 9.05% of 1.27 million teachers untrained. During 1996-97, nearly 10% of the 1.5 million teachers were untrained. As a rough estimate, today above 500 thousand in- ervice teachers are untrained. Nearly 12% of the three million teachers at the primary and elementary level are untrained.

Can ICT take a reformative measure in improving teacher competency?

It will not be an exaggeration if one says that the present and the future of education and the society lies on the teachers, and especially the quality of teachers. Not surprisingly, considerable importance has been given to teacher education in all the Five Year Plans and in all the Commissions and Committees on Education in India. The Kothari Education Commission had noted that the fate of India was being shaped in the classrooms, and that the teachers were the most important determinant of this. However, with increasing use of technology and blended learning, the fate today is shaped more outside the classroom, and the definition of a teacher has changed considerably.

Today, teacher education is organised through:

• University teaching departments of education
  
• Colleges of education
  
• District institutes of education and training
  
• Shiksha Karmis and non-formal teacher training centres
  
• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and DRCs, BRCs and CRCs.

There is National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) responsible for continuing professional development of teachers, and also the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) responsible for regulation, accreditation, and quality assurance.

The three million primary and elementary teachers need recurrent orientation to innovations in teaching and learning at the school level. The District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) have been charged with this responsibility. Of the 520 districts in the country, there are 424 DIETs, which are able to meet the training needs of 0.3 million teachers every year, out of a total of three million teachers. NCERT has made considerable efforts through the Special Orientation of Primary Teachers (SOPT) scheme in the past years to train primary school teachers as well as teacher educators housed in DIETs

In parallel with the development of educational technology itself, use of ICT in teacher education has evolved from the traditional audio-visual method to the present multimedia-based online learning/online professional development. NCERT had made significant efforts through SOPT and PMOST (and Classroom 2000+) to use teleconferencing for teacher continuing professional development. When the fully dedicated educational satellite (EduSat) was launched in 2004, I, as head of Inter-University Consortium at IGNOU, was given the responsibility, on behalf of the NCTE, to orient/train the directors and faculty of SCERTs and DIETs on effective use of EduSat and other ICT interventions through a series of workshops organised in many parts of the country.

Distance Teacher Education

In 1947, when the country got independence, there were nearly 46% untrained secondary school teachers, and therefore, pre-service training was carried out by one-year teacher training institutions located in many states of the country. In 1970-71, 24.64% of the 630,000 secondary and higher secondary teachers were untrained; and  in 1990-91, in spite of massive distance teacher education initiative of dual mode universities (DMUs), there were still nearly 9.05% of 1.27 million teachers untrained. The 1960s saw the initiation of correspondence teacher education. In 1966, the Central Institute of Education (later known as the Faculty of Education) of the University of Delhi initiated a B.Ed. programme through correspondence-cum-contact, followed by the Bangalore University and the Regional Colleges of Education of NCERT. This was in pursuance to the 1968 delegation to the erstwhile USSR for teacher training and its strong recommendation for teacher training through correspondence education.
 
By 1991-92, out of 46 university level correspondence course institutes and six open universities, 15 correspondence course institutes and two state open universities were offering B.Ed. programme through the correspondence/distance mode. The highest enrolments were at the correspondence course institutes of Maharishi Dayanand University (33,000 students) and Annamalai University (21,417 students), and the Kota Open University had about 9,000 students in 1988-89. The lowest was 223 students enrolled in Kakatiya University. In absolute terms, the number of untrained teachers came down from 155,000 in 1970-71 to just 115,000 in 1990-91 due to these efforts.

The situation got aggravated due to appointment of still untrained teachers; and, during 1996-97, nearly 10% of the 1.5 million teachers were untrained. As a rough estimate, today above 500 thousand in-service teachers are untrained. Realising the importance of such a massive effort, NCTE  a statutory body of the Government of India to regulate and maintain quality of teacher education in the country, also expressed grave concern with regard to the quality of teacher education through distance mode. Strict guidelines were issued to state governments and teacher training institutions to discontinue the practice of pre-service distance teacher education and concentrate on in-service distance teacher education. Each institution was to enroll no more than 500 teachers in a year. 

Given the satisfactory quality of in-service teacher training by university level correspondence course institutes, the open universities took to the initiation of quality in-service distance teacher education. During 1990-96, three state open universities  Kota Open University, Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University, and Baba Saheb Ambedkar Open University began to launch in-service programmes. IGNOU initiated a two-year distance education B.Ed programme, which, with English and Hindi as the media of instruction, can be completed by students admitted into the programme within a maximum of four years from the date of their admission, and which requires in-service teachers to have two years of full-time teaching experience and clearance in a national entrance test. 

In case of primary and elementary teacher education, nearly 12% of the three million teachers at the primary and elementary level are untrained.  Both NCERT and IGNOU in the past have made attempts to provide untrained in-service teachers with training through a combination of print, teleconferencing, and face-to-face interaction.

The three million primary and elementary teachers need recurrent orientation to innovations in teaching and learning at the school level. The District Institutes of Edu