Kochi, July 12 : The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), The Advanced Center for Informatics and Innovative Learning (ACIIL) and IBM India have signed an MoU that would re-invent IT education in the country.

As a part of the MoU, IGNOU and IBM India would partner each other skills to students on IT standards in emerging verticals like healthcare, financial services and retail that have a significant growth potential, in addition to providing open source software skills and open standards, with live projects.

The three programs that will be offered in the first phase under this MoU would include: A Certificate in Open Source Software, Diploma in Open Source Software and Industry Vertical Domain Open Standards and Advanced Diploma in Industry Vertical Domain Open Standards (Healthcare/ Retail/ Insurance).

The Innovation Centre for Open Standards (iCos), an online platform, will be the underlying framework for the engagement between the IBM and the IGNOU for the execution of the courses.

The IBM iCos platform links students'' project based learning with IT industry and mentors. This will be seamlessly integrated to IGNOU''s in house developed Unified Learning Platform in due course.

This effort will fill up the finishing school efforts of the IT Industry today, enabling the day one deployment.

The students will immensely benefit from the flexibility of learning at their own pace, anytime, anywhere and make the students future-ready.

Speaking on this, Professor Srivathsan, Pro-Vice Chancellor, IGNOU said, "The MoU aptly fits into IGNOU''s vision of democratizing the education and offering quality education to all. It opens up the modernization of IT and Computer Science education as well as their applications in different verticals. Students stand to benefit immensely from this initiative as it provides them a platform to help them transition from academia to industry while they are still on campus".

The IBM will work with universities and colleges that support open standards and seek to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes both directly and virtually via the web. (ANI)