The All India Council for Technical Education has adopted the Creative Commons Licence which will help make its study material easily accessible for both Indian as well as overseas students, the press statement said.
A Creative Commons License is one of several public copyright licenses that enables free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”. It is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he/she has created. The license has been adopted in alignment with the UNESCO resolution of November 25, 2019 (Paris, France), on Open Educational Resources (OER), the statement further mentioned.
Commenting on the latest development, Chairman of AICTE, TG Sitharam, said in a statement:
This also makes the AICTE study material now Open Educational Resources compliant, which not only respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner but also provides permissions granting the public the rights to access, re-use, re-purpose, adapt and redistribute educational materials. Presently, the license has been adopted for second year books uploaded in e-Kumbh portal in English as well as other Indian Languages. In future, the remaining books of second year and books of third and fourth year, in English as well as 12 other Indian Languages will also be released under the license.
Sitharam further added:
The move will enable millions of Indian and overseas students to access the quality 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.
The AICTE had initiated technical book writing scheme in 2021, in alignment with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to provide engineering course material in 12 different Indian Languages – Hindi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Urdu and Malayalam.
The AICTE Act was constituted to provide for the establishment of an All India Council for Technical Education with a view to proper planning and co-ordinated development of a technical education system throughout the country, the promotion of qualitative improvements of such education in relation to planned quantitative growth, and regulation & proper maintenance of norms and standards in the technical education system and for the matters connected therewith. The purview of AICTE (the Council) covers programmes of technical education including training and research in Engineering, Technology, Architecture, Town Planning, Management, Pharmacy, Applied Arts and Crafts, Hotel Management and Catering Technology etc. at different levels.
AICTE also developed an AICTE e-Kumbh portal for uploading e-books after completion. The e-Kumbh portal was launched by the Hon’ble President of India at Bhubaneswar in November 2022, in the gracious presence of Hon’ble Governor of Odisha, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Odisha and Hon’ble Education Minister, Govt. of India along with 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.
