The ABCD of Primary Education
According to a Child Rights Information Network report, an estimated eight million children aged between six and 14 do not currently attend school in India. And these children are the ones the Right to Education (RTE) Act now promises to reach out.
ACCORDING TO a Child Rights Information Network report, an estimated eight million children aged between six and Fourneen do not currently attend school in India. And these children are the ones the Right to Education (RTE) Act now promises to reach out and provide education to.
Debates will continue for a while on how this money will be raised, as also on various other aspects to the law, including the provision of 25% reservation in private schools for disadvantaged students. We expect the states and the centre to come to some consensus over the coming years, as well as the schools and teachers, and the society, to gear up for the change in mindset that this law envisions. This article intends to explore how we can leverage information and communication technologies to make the children of our country literate. In fact, technology might provide us the key with taking this effort well beyond just literacy to the realms of real education and empowerment of our future generations. Why technology, when the RTE has bigger hurdles ahead? Because technology is the most likely answer for some of the big issues at hand. Cost, for one. Using ICTs in the right manner, India could come up with a model that could be replicated across the country in such a way that costs are contained. Secondly, we could have the same set of learning and teaching tools, and curriculum being delivered across the country. This means that the government can ensure a basic quality standard being adhered to, no matter which area of the country is targeted. This will be quite unlike the current education system where the entire onus is on the availability, quality and commitment of teachers. This brings us to the issue of accountability and transparency, which again, can be enforced only through the use of ICTs. What do we need to get this vision working? ABCDEF could get us going: Architecture, Base, Content, Delivery tools, and Energy and Facilitation. Getting the Architecture We need the plan on how a project so large can really work at the grassroots level. What will the pilot model be like? How many primary schools should be in the pilot? What about places where there are no schools? How will it work if there is no electricity? How will it be made scalable? What will the basic cost to replicate it at any point? How will the cost be met? Can Public Private Partnerships be explored? With these answers in place, we could look at the next key element to the jigsaw. Setting up the Base High speed networks will form the core of the delivery platform. We have high-speed networks criss-crossing the country which conduct the day to day businesses of banks, telecom operators and many other businesses that now provide us with many services. In a similar fashion, we need networks that will connect all the districts in India. Gradually these networks have to grow to be able to reach the farthest, remotest corners where even roads do not exist today. What will these networks do? They will have the capacity to conduct audio and video in real-time. Much of the teaching will centre on this, and we need networks which would be ready to handle them, and are robust enough to withstand the load and power issues. Of course they have to be scalable as well. Creating the Content The key idea is not to base the RTE on books, slates, and other conventional modes of learning. A different pedagogical approach can be used for this. Students don’t need to have a slate and pencil to help them learn concepts like counting, addition, etc. There are enough practical exercises that can be enacted in classes for this. And we really don’t need to look far for all this. Scores of such content for primary education already exists. Videos of such content can be created and delivered through high speed networks into the schools in the country, irrespective of where they are. Video repositories that are made accessible to all schools will facilitate teachers in their work. We earlier spoke of cost being contained. The same videos can be used with different language voiceovers so that the same content reaches all states. Each state government then does not have to reinvent the content. Delivering the Content We have to explore the various ways in which this content can be delivered. The most obvious way would be computers. But mobiles and slightly bigger, handheld devices could be considered as well. We already have such innovations in India, which support many regional languages. We just need to identify those that can be used for this purpose. This can also have the potential to keep costs under check. The networks ferry the content, no doubt. They could also run ERP applications that track how each learning module is being used, accessed by the various authorized schools and teachers. A minimum use of each module could be prescribed for a certain number of students which would enforce that students have access go the content. Finding the Energy One of the key issues that will make or break all education delivery efforts is that of power. No power to run networks, no power to run PCs—this is the reality in most smaller towns and villages in India today. The idea is not to count on the grid delivery of power that runs on carbon-intensive processes like coal. Now is the time to focus on how we can leverage wind and solar power to enable the delivery of education. Deploying standalone power plants in villages for their own use might have a better and easier answer than ferrying power from thousands of kilometres away. Facilitating Delivery We would still need primary school teachers who can leverage the use of new ways of teaching. They would need to be trained and oriented to the new education environment. This also involves huge costs. However, costs can be restrained by the use of video conferencing facilities. Teachers can travel to a central location in the district or even zone and get trained by trainers who conduct the sessions remotely. This ensures that many teachers in several zones can be trained simultaneously through the use of real-time conferencing facilities. With these elements in place, India can embark on its vision to provide free education to children between the age of six and 14. No doubt, it requires thinking which has been hitherto limited to the most upmarket schools and universities in the world. But if the same technologies can be used and adapted to suit Indian conditions, we could be well on our way to empower our children. And once these elements fall into place, the same approach can be scaled to include pre-primary education as well as secondary education.
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