Gurumurthy Kasinathan

Gurumurthy Kasinathan is founder and director of IT for Change, an NGO based in Bengaluru, India. IT for Change aims for a society in which digital technologies contribute to human rights, social justice and equity. Most mainstream approaches to digital technologies for development are either techno-utopic or promote a market-fundamentalist approach, often both together. IT for Change is in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

Mr. Gurumurthy has 28 years of experience in the development and corporate sectors. Guru leads projects in the area of education, including in research, demonstration projects, systemic teacher education reform and policy advocacy. His areas of expertise include open educational resources, ICT integration in education and school leadership. He is a visiting faculty at TISS Hyderabad for their MA Education program. He was earlier with Azim Premji Foundation, where he was deputed to work in the ‘Policy Planning Unit’in the Karnataka education department.

Key areas of Gurumurthy’s work

• Led the 'Subject Teacher Forum' programme, a capacity building program of Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (National Mission for Secondary Education), Department of Education,Karnataka, to use digital tools and methods to create a network of teachers and officials for peer learning and digital resource creation. More than 14,000 Mathematics, Science, Social Science and English teachers have been trained to become members of the forums and have interacted with one another through over 62,000 emails in around four years, which is the largest virtual interactions of its kind in the country. (2010-2016)
• Leads the 'Subject Teacher Forum' programme for Assam, India and Andhra Pradesh, India. (2015 - 2016)
• Leads the Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) action-research programme of IT for Change (2014-ongoing) with Department of State Educational Research and Training, Government of Karnataka that aims at building a context-appropriate, cutting-edge Open Educational Resource model for curricular resource design and development in the public education system. The resource portal developed under this programme using Wikipedia software has had more than 5,000,000 page views in 48 months. The KOER portal has been recognised by policy makers at state and national levels in India. The KOER research study is part of a global network of OER Projects, the 'Research on OER for Development' (ROER4D) which is supported by IDRC, to study and understand the development of high quality and cost effective OER for the developing world. The project covers countries in South America. Africa and Asia.
• Part of the Teachers Community of Learning (TCOL) programme, an intensive teacher-education programme in all government high schools in Bengaluru South 3 Block, Bangalore South district. The programme focusses on teacher-education, classroom processes and school leadership for institutional change. (2010-ongoing)
• Led the 'Chiguru' project, part of the 'Kalike' programme, supported by the Sir Ratan Tata Trust, in the socio-economically backward district of Yadgir, Karnataka. In this project, IT for Change worked with teachers and schools on ICT integration for teacher-education, classroom processes and school leadership. (2010)
• Led a project on 'Open Street GIS Mapping' in Mysore, with support from UNESCO. (2012-13) · Designed programs to help NGOs, academic institutions adopt public software (free and open source software) in their institutions. These include well known and large organizations in and outside Karnataka. (2008-ongoing) Gurumurthy Kasinathan 1
• Part of a program with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai (www.SpokenTutorials.org) on creating CBTs a part of a MHRD program – National Mission on ICTs in Education (NMEICT) – www.Sakshat.Ac.in. In this project, we also worked with National Institute for Technical Teachers Training and Research, NITTR (MHRD) to revise syllabi of the Department of Technical Education's courses. (2010-2012)
• Supports networks of educationists across India (ict-education-india@googlegroups.com) and a founder of the FOSSCOMM (network of Indian FOSS communities). (2010-ongoing)
• Participates in the 'Internet Governance' (IG) program at ITfC, which covers research as well as advocacy on the global governance of the Internet.
• Member of various committees and groups setup by the IGC, the premier civil society body in this space.
• Member of the 'JustNet Coalition (JNC), a global coalition of civil society organisations for democratising IG. IT for Change is a founding member of JNC.