Local university ventures toward students welfare

And the country's first ever IT based private university -- The University of Information Technology and Sciences (UITS) -- has included WITM in its recent endeavours in internationally acclaimed methods of teaching.

The UITS net-server, concerned with the WITM programme, has launched this revenue generating IT approach, in its efforts to be a part of the student-scholarship programme.

"WITM will allow ensuring IT integration for both students and teachers," said Arif Rana, coordinator of the programme, himself a senior lecturer in the school of computer science and engineering (SCSE).

"Use of information technology opens students' opportunities to international exposure via internet resources and parallel benefits," said Dr Hafizur Rahman, dean, (SCSE), adding that sharing knowledge plays a major role.

Under the WITM programme, the university is currently deploying all course-materials on the web, another first in the country. "This will allow dual benefits, first, letting a student in on course materials on the web and also ensuring that all students are prompted to freely use the net in process of accessing online documents," the WITM coordinator continued.

The UITS net-server which offers commercial web-hosting for individuals or organizations, is working towards accessing students to work with the web-team under WITM, giving them an opportunity to use the knowledge they gained in web development and techniques building customer oriented sites for individuals and institutions.

"These students are directly applying what they learn

at UITS," said Rana, claiming how a student working with WITM becomes an expert in web building within a short time.

Expertise is not the only benefit that a student gets from WITM. "They will have direct access to any individual organization's environmental culture, helping them build within themselves the expectations of a corporate world when they are job-hunting after graduation" Rana continued.

He also stated how the WITM web-team members are required to meet with the customer companies two hours

a week, to ensure service updates.

This is expected to be a catalyst filling up current gap between students and industries, allowing prospective internship or careers in these companies", he added.

The WITM team also offers professional training for companies in a view to establish their own technical teams.

"We will continue to train our students to become trainers, and this will permit a better student-company exposure," said S G Ahmed Shuvro, UITS' net-server marketing manager.

Of the several packages available on the WITM venture, the 'Young Webmaster' package claims superior attention. "This package is solely designed for school students," said Rana. While the package, which includes domain registration, email facilities, and a 10-MB space, are available at a price of Tk 2,500 a year.

The package will consist of a web-building software and necessary technical training to make optimal use of the software in learning to create a personal web-page.

"This will help create a more IT-oriented and cyber-conscious student body," he said. On advertisement prospects, WITM members currently endeavour meeting school authorities in person. "We will also offer the schools with a free technical workshop for their students once their students register under the package," said Shuvro.

Professional procurement for UITS net-server is both local and international. "We have Answer Logistics (USA) working from their end towards getting foreign corporate clients, while we have two university executives working locally in approaching the local companies, non-governmental organisations (NGO), and individuals," said the marketing manager. Present clients of the net-server are Bangladesh Roller-skating Federation, Hayat Fashions Ltd., Index IT Ltd., Business Enabled Technologies Ltd., and others including several NGOs. Besides offering a 100MB space for the professional package, all professional script support to develop the sites use MySQL, Java, PHP, Pearl, Pythone, etc., making any corporate experience an even richer one for the price they pay.

"The money we get from customer relations of WITM are

for the sole purpose of supporting students' scholarship programmes," Rana said, specifying how the actual experience for a student in making a professional site by a critical deadline teaches him or her a certain degree of professionalism in addition with the academic learning requirements.