Kerala has constantly been ranked as one of the top states in the country when it comes to the quality of education on offer. The state government of Kerala has been making constant endeavours to ensure that this standard is maintained.
Taking this a step forward, the state’s school education has been completely shifted to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), after the required permissions were granted by the curriculum committee of the state to implement the same for the state’s higher secondary education section also.
As per the Executive Director of IT@School Project, Anvar Sadath K, "With the decision of State Curriculum committee headed by State Education Minister C Raveendranath to implement Free and Open Source Software in Higher Secondary section also, it is 'Time Out' for proprietary software in School Education in Kerala, following the footsteps of Primary-High School sections."
He also told that this complete migration would bring down the financial burden on the government in excess of Rs. 300 crore. He said, "It is not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish."
He further explained the migration, IT@School would not be able to come up with such extensive ICT education programme if the proprietary software was in place and we are ready to support other countries and states in extending these programmes. Now we will add Accounting packages also into this package so that it can be used for both teaching learning and office accounting.”
In 2003, the state of Kerala made IT a compulsory subject for class 8th.