For the last few
years, I have been increasingly interested in the area of Open
Education Resources (OERs). MIT's Open Course Ware was one of the
pioneers of OER and the manner in which it was used across the world
was truly fascinating. Khan Academy took the concept of OERs and made
it wildly popular – the 3000 videos on its web site have been
viewed more than 133 million times!
Why this
interests me is because I believe (as do many others) that education
is one of the most critical inputs for India's development. Well,
more than an input, I'd say this is the critical factor that decides
whether our country descends into chaos in the next few decades or
emerges out of poverty and takes a place of pride on the world state
as one of the developed nations. Think of it as that moment when an
aeroplane gathers speed on the runway and generates enough thrust to
break free from the gravitational pull of the earth and soar into the
sky. If we educate our youth and make them skilled and able citizens
of India, we will soar into the skies. If we don't, we will land with
a thud. As simple (and scary) as that.
Over the last few
months, I've been trying to understand the education space in India
and within that space, how OERs can help the Indian education system.
It is no secret that there is a huge demand supply gap with the need
for educational infrastructure and teachers not being matched by the
Indian education system. Even among teachers that I have spoken to,
there are huge gaps in the skills imparted to them. It is obvious
that, as a country we still have a tremendous amount of work in terms
of breadth and depth – breadth, in creating a network of teachers
that reaches the remote villages of India and depth, in terms of
ensuring that these teachers are equipped with sufficient skills and
knowledge to teach their students. To understand this, I have been
visiting educational institutions across India and I will be writing
and documenting these experiences as I go along.
One of the first
such educational institutions I visited as part of my quest was
appropriately named QUEST, which is short for “Quality Education
Support Trust.” QUEST is an NGO that works on enhancing quality of
education and has its office in Saloni Village in Wada District, an
underdeveloped tribal area of Maharashtra State in India. Some of the
teachers I met their had done their BEd from premier institutions in
India, but I was shocked when they told me that they had no training
in how to teach in real-life situations. QUEST has been working to
fill that gap.
Saloni village is
a two hour drive out of Mumbai and by the time we reached the QUEST
office around 9.30AM in the morning, the heat is above a blistering
40 degrees celsius. Accompanying me in the car are Nilesh Nimkar, an
educationist working for the last 15 years in tribal belts of Thane;
and Rammohan Khanapurkar, a young techie working with the ObserverResearch Foundation. Together, they have implemented Moodle, an open
source Learning Management System, which has been customized to
Marathi, for the benefits of the teachers who are being trained by
QUEST.
Some of the work
that QUEST has been doing to improve education quality has been so
simple that one wishes more people adopt it. For example, over
a hundred teachers affiliated to QUEST are now using the Moodle forum
in Marathi, to exchange ideas with each other on improving education
quality. I find about 25 of these teachers assembled at the QUEST
office in Saloni village for a workshop. When I quizzed these
teachers about the benefits of the Moodle forum, they said that many
teachers who were too shy to ask questions in a classroom would open
up and ask questions online. They found that the forum had an impact
on education quality because they could post problems and find
solutions quickly. One teacher said that he was struggling with slow
learners in his class and the ideas from other teachers in the forum
helped him bring the slower kids up to speed. The teachers were so
enthused by the online forum that many of them spent their own money
to buy netbooks and data cards to connect to the forum. One of the
key factors for the success of the forum was that the teachers were
given a 15 day training in using the Inscript keyboard in Marathi,
which helped them use the online forum more fluently. Khanapurkar
says that the usage of the forum shot up once the training was
completed. For the Indic computing community, this is a point worth
noting, for ensuring the success of Indic computing.
Another
intervention that QUEST has made for improving education quality is
the creation of videos that explain how teaching can be done in an
actual classroom. In one such video, a teacher is teaching the Marathi alphabet “Na” to a class of
kids who are around two-three years old. She uses more than 20 words with the alphabet “Na” in it,
emphasizing the “Na” and makes her students repeat the word. Then
she asks each of the students to give her one word with “Na” in
it and finally tears up a newspaper into pieces and asks the students
to underline every occurrence of “Na” in the piece handed over to
them. The video serves as a powerful example of how multiple methods
of learning (auditory, kinesthetic etc) can be combined to serve the
core concepts being taught. The video is barely ten minutes long, but
the teachers say that it has made a difference to the way they teach
alphabets in their classes. Nimkar tells me that QUEST sometimes uses
as many as eight cameras to make these videos, and pay particular
attention to capturing the reactions of the students. Such videos
can be a powerful means of upgrading the skills of teachers in India.
Most
readers will also agree with me that we need a fundamental rethinking
of the education system in India. Critics say that India's education
system was created by the British to fulfil their need for clerks who
could keep the colonial empire running. Be that as it may, our system
treats students as inert objects whose only task is to soak in the
information dished out to them, and regurgitate/ vomit it at exam
time. When I completed my graduation, I looked back on my five years
in college, and the ten years in school, and came to the sad
conclusion that those were my most wasted years of my life.
Therefore, when I saw Kiran Bir Sethi's video on TED, I looked
forward eagerly to meeting her and seeing the Riverside School that
she founded.
Kiran
got a standing ovation for her TED talk and a well deserved one too
because she is teaching her kids at Riverside to be doers instead of
being inert absorbers of knowledge. If India is to emerge out of this
immense morass of corruption and incompetence, we need more people
who believe that they can change the world for the better, and then
go out and do it. As Indians, we whine about corruption and wallow in
our miseries because our education system loads us with inert
information but teaches us nothing about what to do with it. At
Riverside, Kiran worked on a program called Design for Change that is
transforming kids into
individuals who say, ‘I
CAN’ instead of ‘Can I?’ Riverside kids have lobbied and
campaigned for child-safe zebra crossings and for parts of Ahmedabad
to be closed to traffic and dedicated exclusively for children.
I
believe this kind of education is the need of the hour for India. If
we as a nation do not believe that we can make change happen, we will
continue living in the mess we have created and that is a horrible
thought. If we teach our children how to make change happen, we can
emerge as a strong, powerful and well developed nation in the next
few decades and rout poverty from our country. Personally, Kiran's
work also appealed to me enormously because in the last seven-eight
years that I have worked in public policy and advocacy, I have seen
with my own eyes that making policy change is not a difficult as people imagine it to be. The Indian
government might be a byzantine and complex organism but there are
definite ways of making it work. The Design for Change program
started at Riverside has now become a global movement encompassing 35
countries of the world, which encourages children to work on
challenges like health, environment, education and others facing our
world. Search for “Riverside School Ahmedabad” on YouTube and you
see some amazing possibilities how our education system can create
better students and a better India. I hope these videos become more
popular, and more and more educators rethink how they teach their
kids.
The
good news is that QUEST and Riverside believe in OERs and are willing
to share their work with the rest of the world. In that, I see seeds
of hope for a better future for India's students, teachers, our
education system, and ultimately for India itself.
