Making Education Available En Masse
Ensuring that nobody is left behind
My father has always wanted to establish a residential English medium school near the city where children from the villages could come, stay and learn. I have been thinking about the same, however with changing times, emergence of the coronavirus and digitisation of education; I believe that a much more prudent approach to education would be through online digital media
Human beings have a great quality of adapting to the ever-changing situations. Just like we have had amazing teachers captivating and motivating the classrooms full of students, I am optimistic that a new batch of teachers will emerge out of these circumstances who will be tech savvy and equally capable of inspiring the students and teaching them how to dream
In this context, we are planning to create small pockets of virtual classrooms. Each village for instance has many Mohallas and there might be clubs in each Mohalla. If we can identify such club like congregational places, allowing adequate number of students with proper social distancing norms we can transform them into learning hubs.
But how, you ask?
For each of these potential learning hubs we need a Raspberry Pi and a projector. A Raspberry Pi is a computer with minimized features and costs less than 3000 INR. We can find second-hand projectors (due to lockdown, lot of facilities with projectors are simply unused they would be glad to do away with their equipment) and install them in these education hubs
Benefits:
Firstly, in this way, we can circumvent the need of many students having to buy mobiles or laptops
Secondly — reach. One of the major problem of classrooms are their size constraints. Our classrooms need not have a limit in size
Thirdly, good teachers deserve to be paid well. In this case even if the students pay much less per head, if our audience size is large, we can pay the teachers up to their expectations. We can keep things competitive by allowing new teachers to start with small audience size and with improved performance they can be promoted to larger audiences resulting in an increased remuneration. It is a win-win for both the students as well as the teachers.
Constraints:
It is possible that this method has drawbacks. Some of them would be, communication from the students’ side and evaluation of the students’ performance. Perhaps we need to brainstorm a little more and come up with solutions to these. For example. when it comes to evaluation of annual or half yearly exams, we could have a scanning machine covering multiple villages and an employee whose full day job would be to scan and upload the answer sheets that would then be evaluated by our trainers. This may seem outlandish but teaching students online also used to be a bizarre idea once upon a time.
At a glance, the pros of this mode of teaching seems to far outweigh the negatives and I believe it’s worth a shot. What do you think?
We need help to ideate and formulate plans for food, education and health. If you are willing to help us in this journey in any way, feel free do drop me a message at ashhadulislam@gmail.com
