Two teachers died possibly from ‘heat stroke’ in Chattogram and Jashore districts on Sunday (April 28, 2024) morning when sever heat wave is scorching the country. In Chattogram, madasha teacher Maulana Md. Mostak Ahmed Kutubi Alkaderi, 55, fell unconscious while going to his workplacefrom his home in the Mohra area of Chandgaon. Kutubi Alkaderi, son of late Khalilur Rahman of Kutubdia Lemshikhali in Cox's Bazar district and father of  two sons and one daughter, used to work at Khitapchar Azizia Mabudia Alim Madrasha in Boalkhali upazila of Chattogram. Woman, 2 children electrocuted in Barishal Witnesses said when the madrasha teacher boarded the ferry at Kalurghat around 9am suddenly he collapsed. Later, he was taken to Chattogram Medical College Hospital (CMCH) where doctors declared him dead. In Jashore, Ahsan Habib, an assistant teacher of Ahmedabad High School, died from apparent heat stroke on Sunday in sadar upazila. AZM Parvez Masud, headmaster of the school, said Habib fell sick around 9 am when he went to school after working in a field. Two children drown in Rajshahi pond   Later, he was taken to Jashore General Hospital, where a doctor declared him dead. The body was kept at Jashore General Hospital morgue for autopsy, said Abdur Razzak, officer-in-charge of Jashore Kotwali Police Station. The reason behind the death will be known after autopsy, he said.

Depression among students is a critical issue that demands urgent attention. The gravity of this problem magnifies the alarming rise in dropouts from colleges, study breaks, drug addictions, even suicidal attempts among students. As parents and educators, it is essential to be proactive in addressing this crisis through understanding, support, and guidance. Let’s take a look into how to prevent depression in students. Common Reasons for Depression among Students  Depression among students can be attributed to various factors, and understanding these reasons is the first step in prevention. Here are some common causes: - High expectations and academic stress can lead to feelings of hopelessness - Loneliness and a lack of social support can make students vulnerable to depression and suicidal thoughts - Bullying, whether in person or online, can devastate a student's mental health - Drug or alcohol abuse can exacerbate depression and increase the risk of suicide - Relationship problems can be a major source of stress and anxiety for students - Conflict with their parents, siblings, or friends can make them isolated and alone - Economic constraints and worries about the future can take a toll on a student's mental health - Traumatic events during childhood, like physical or emotional abuse or loss of a parent increase the risk of depression - Mental health conditions, such as bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder can trigger depression - Having certain personality traits, such as low self-esteem or being overly dependent, self-critical, or pessimistic is a reason for depression.  Read more: Protecting Your Child’s Mental Health: 10 Tips for Parents

There are 37,926 vacant posts of headmaster and assistant teachers in 66,566 primary schools in the country at present. State Minister for Primary and Mass Education Ministry Md. Zakir Hossen informed this at parliament on Tuesday. In response to a question of Awami League MP, Abul Kalam Azad, Zakir Hossen said that the government has a plan to fill the vacant posts of headmaster and assistant teachers. Also Read: Assimilated govt. college teachers demand job security In reply to the lawmakers’ tabled question, the state minister said, 29,858 posts of headmaster and 8,068 posts of assistant teacher are vacant now. He said that a requisition was sent to the Bangladesh Public Service Commission on January 4 from the Ministry of Public Administration for the filling 1,955 vacancies of headmasters.  In reply to another query from Jatiya Party MP Pir Fazlur Rahman, the State Minister for Primary and Mass Education said that the total number of primary school teachers in the country is 4.27 lakh. Among them, 3.90 lakh are in service. Meanwhile, Education Minister Dipu Moni in reply to a query from reserved seat MP Khaleda Khanam, told parliament that there is a plan to establish a university in each district and a medical university in each division.  She informed the House that at present there are two women's universities in the country—one is a private university and the other is an international women's university. Also Read: 366 govt primary schools in Kurigram run without head teacher In response to a query from AL MP Nasimul Alam Chowdhury, the education minister said that work in going on to introduce automation software to stop the fraud of educational certificates at the higher education level.  “Once the software is launched, it will be possible to save all the information of university level students and the certificate can be verified online from anywhere in the world. It will be possible to stop certificate fraud,” she also said. ALso Read: HC questions legality of primary school teacher recruitment on quota basis She said that action has already been taken against 678 teachers/employees having fake certificates.    

The government has taken a plan to set up 1000 more primary schools in the char areas of the country, said State Minister for Primary and Mass Education Md Zakir Hossain on Thursday. “Already, the work to establish primary schools in 20 chars has started ,” he said while speaking at a programme on the occasion of 50th anniversary of Phulbari Degree College in the district. The state minister also urged the teachers, students, former students and guardians not to forget the roots, no matter whether they are living now. Read more: 366 govt primary schools in Kurigram run without head teacher Md Zakir Hossain inaugurated the golden jubilee ceremony of the college which was established on April 27, 1973. The college authorities have taken a two-day programme on the occasion.

The maker of ChatGPT is trying to curb its reputation as a freewheeling cheating machine with a new tool that can help teachers detect if a student or artificial intelligence wrote that homework. The new AI Text Classifier launched Tuesday (January 31, 2023) by OpenAI follows a weeks-long discussion at schools and colleges over fears that ChatGPT’s ability to write just about anything on command could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning. OpenAI cautions that its new tool – like others already available – is not foolproof. The method for detecting AI-written text “is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes,” said Jan Leike, head of OpenAI’s alignment team tasked to make its systems safer. Read More: What is ChatGPT, why are schools blocking it? “Because of that, it shouldn’t be solely relied upon when making decisions,” Leike said. Teenagers and college students were among the millions of people who began experimenting with ChatGPT after it launched Nov. 30 as a free application on OpenAI’s website. And while many found ways to use it creatively and harmlessly, the ease with which it could answer take-home test questions and assist with other assignments sparked a panic among some educators. By the time schools opened for the new year, New York City, Los Angeles and other big public school districts began to block its use in classrooms and on school devices. Read More: CES 2023: Walton's smart AI products get huge response The Seattle Public Schools district initially blocked ChatGPT on all school devices in December but then opened access to educators who want to use it as a teaching tool, said Tim Robinson, the district spokesman. “We can’t afford to ignore it,” Robinson said. The district is also discussing possibly expanding the use of ChatGPT into classrooms to let teachers use it to train students to be better critical thinkers and to let students use the application as a “personal tutor” or to help generate new ideas when working on an assignment, Robinson said. Read More: AI & Future of Jobs: Will Artificial Intelligence or Robots Take Your Job? School districts around the country say they are seeing the conversation around ChatGPT evolve quickly. “The initial reaction was ‘OMG, how are we going to stem the tide of all the cheating that will happen with ChatGPT,’” said Devin Page, a technology specialist with the Calvert County Public School District in Maryland. Now there is a growing realization that “this is the future” and blocking it is not the solution, he said. “I think we would be naïve if we were not aware of the dangers this tool poses, but we also would fail to serve our students if we ban them and us from using it for all its potential power,” said Page, who thinks districts like his own will eventually unblock ChatGPT, especially once the company’s detection service is in place. Read More: How Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Healthcare? OpenAI emphasized the limitations of its detection tool in a blog post Tuesday, but said that in addition to deterring plagiarism, it could help to detect automated disinformation campaigns and other misuse of AI to mimic humans. The longer a passage of text, the better the tool is at detecting if an AI or human wrote something. Type in any text -- a college admissions essay, or a literary analysis of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” --- and the tool will label it as either “very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely” AI-generated. But much like ChatGPT itself, which was trained on a huge trove of digitized books, newspapers and online writings but often confidently spits out falsehoods or nonsense, it’s not easy to interpret how it came up with a result. Read More: Ai and Future of Content Writing: Will Artificial Intelligence replace writers? “We don’t fundamentally know what kind of pattern it pays attention to, or how it works internally,” Leike said. “There’s really not much we could say at this point about how the classifier actually works.” Higher education institutions around the world also have begun debating responsible use of AI technology. Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities, prohibited its use last week and warned that anyone found surreptitiously using ChatGPT and other AI tools to produce written or oral work could be banned from Sciences Po and other institutions. In response to the backlash, OpenAI said it has been working for several weeks to craft new guidelines to help educators. Read More: Ameca: World’s Most Realistic Advanced Humanoid Robot AI Platform “Like many other technologies, it may be that one district decides that it’s inappropriate for use in their classrooms,” said OpenAI policy researcher Lama Ahmad. “We don’t really push them one way or another. We just want to give them the information that they need to be able to make the right decisions for them.” It’s an unusually public role for the research-oriented San Francisco startup, now backed by billions of dollars in investment from its partner Microsoft and facing growing interest from the public and governments. France’s digital economy minister Jean-Noël Barrot recently met in California with OpenAI executives, including CEO Sam Altman, and a week later told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he was optimistic about the technology. But the government minister — a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the French business school HEC in Paris — said there are also difficult ethical questions that will need to be addressed. Read More: ChatGPT by Open AI: All you need to know “So if you’re in the law faculty, there is room for concern because obviously ChatGPT, among other tools, will be able to deliver exams that are relatively impressive,” he said. “If you are in the economics faculty, then you’re fine because ChatGPT will have a hard time finding or delivering something that is expected when you are in a graduate-level economics faculty.” He said it will be increasingly important for users to understand the basics of how these systems work so they know what biases might exist.

Sixty former and current teachers of several universities on Thursday in a joint statement demanded the release of BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir who has been in jail since December 9. The statement signed by Dhaka University’s Physics department Professor ABM Obaidul Islam expressed concern over Fakhrul not being granted bail saying that they came to know from his family that he is sick and physicians consulted him to go abroad for better treatment. “We are concerned over his health as friends and well-wishers,” it read. The statement said Mirza Fakhrul has been practising politics to strengthen democratic structures of the country. Read more: Fakhrul renews demand for ailing Khaleda's unconditional release “We are demanding his release to make stronger and speed up the march of democracy in the country,” it said. Prof Sirajul Islam, Prof Anowar Ullah Chowdhury, Prof Abul Kashem Fazlul Hoque, Prof Mahbub Ullah, Prof Wahiduddin Mahmud, Prof Ahmed Kamal, Prof Saidur Rahman and Prof Anu Muhammad, among others, expressed solidarity with the demand. Read more: Fakhrul, Abbas, 5 other BNP leaders seek bail, hearing tomorrow

The High Court has declared the termination of three teachers of Khulna University (KU) illegal. The court also asked KU to reinstate the three teachers – Bangla discipline's Assistant Professor Abul Fazal, Bangla discipline's Lecturer Shakila Alam and History and Civilisation discipline's Lecturer Haimanti Shukla Kabery – in their jobs. The High Court bench of Justice Md Mozibur Rahman Miah and Justice Kazi Md Ejarul Haque Akondo came up with the order Thursday after hearing a rule issued earlier, writ petitioner's counsel Jyotirmoy Barua said. On February 9 in 2021, following a writ petition filed by the teachers, the court issued a status quo on their termination. It also issued a rule asking KU and the government to explain in four weeks why the termination should not be declared illegal. Read more: Khulna University: Students call off movement following assurance On January 28, KU decided to terminate the teachers for expressing solidarity with a student movement at the university in 2020, Barua said. On January 1, 2020, the KU students staged a protest on the campus to press home their demands, including the reduction of tuition fees and proper accommodation. Read more: Khulna University reschedules academic calendar

The Ministry of Primary and Mass Education has resumed the online transfer system of the assistant teachers of the government primary schools after closure for long days. State Minister for Primary and Mass Education Md Zakir Hossain resumed the online transfer system at an event at his ministry on Wednesday. Primary and Mass Education Ministry Senior secretary Aminul Islam Khan and Directorate General of Primary Education Mohibur Rahman, among others, spoke. On the first day, online transfers were made at 18 primary schools in Kaliakair of Gazipur on pilot basis.  The transfer system will be completed through software developed by the ministry.   The online transfer system was introduced to make the transfer of primary school teachers easy and hassle-free. However, the implementation of the programme  was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. On June 30 this year, Liberation War Affairs Minister AKM Mozammel Haque inaugurated the pilot programme of the system in Gazipur. Teachers who have applied till July 15, 2022 will be included under the pilot programme. After completion of the pilot programme, online transfer of primary teachers will be started across the country. Read also: Primary teacher recruitment: 40, 862 qualified for viva-voce in first phase exam

Two factions of Bangabandhu Parishad -- the ruling Awami League-backed teachers' alliance -- of Islamic University apparently clashed with each other on the campus in Kushtia on Saturday morning. Witnesses said that there had been a longstanding dispute between the two factions -- Bangabandhu Parishad and Bangabandhu Parishad Teachers' Unit -- over formation of their committees. As a sequel to the dispute, a group of Bangabandhu Parishad teachers, including Prof M Anowar Hossain, Prof M Mahbubul Arfin and assistant proctor Shofiqul Islam, prevented another group from placing wreaths at the university's central monument to mark Independence Day. This led to an apparent clash between the two groups, and members of Bangabandhu Parishad Teachers' Unit were subsequently forced to leave the place. Later, Bangabandhu Parishad Teachers' Unit members formed a human chain in front of the university's Mrittunjoyee Mujib Mural, demanding action against "those involved in the attack". READ: Ex-BCL men threaten to shut IU campus "The attack on our members was pre-planned. We demand action against the perpetrators of the attack. We'll go for stricter movement if the university administration doesn't act," IU Bangabandhu Parishad Teachers' Unit general secretary Prof Tapon Kumar Godder said. Denying the allegation, Prof M Anowar of the other group said that the complainants had actually misbehaved with them. IU proctor Professor M Jahangir Hossain said that they were looking into the matter.

Authorities indefinitely shut down a government primary school in Laksam upazila of Cumilla district on Tuesday after its all eight teachers tested Covid-19 positive. The teachers, including the headmaster, were from Paschimgaon Government Model Primary School in Laksam municipality. Abdullah Al Mamun, upazila education officer told UNB the school was ordered to close at 12 pm on Tuesday after being informed by the teachers. “It will remain shut until further notice,” he said. Also read: Classes to go online if Covid spreads to educational institutions: Minister The Covid infected teachers are headmaster Shampa Rani Saha, assistant teacher Md Shah Alam, Md Ekramul Haque Khondoker, Montu Chandra Cghosh, Umme Kulsum, Bilkis Nsarin, Kamrunnahar and Rubina Islam. Shampa Rani said she and another teacher were on leave Saturday due to fever while on Sunday two more teachers reported being sick. On Tuesday my husband and my samples came out Covid-19 positive. Later samples of the other teachers in the school were sent to the upazila health complex. After all of them tested Covid-19 positive, the upazila education officer was informed about the matter. Also read: 80% Covid patients in Bangladesh of Delta variant: BSMMU survey Around 600 students are currently enrolled in the Paschimgaon Government Model Primary School. It was not immediately known if any of the students has been affected.