Reimaging Education Models

Context: With the extreme hardships that the pandemic has unleashed, there is a need to reimagine models of education to close the learning gaps.

Challenges to learning during pandemic: 

• Rural-Urban divide: Transition of school to digital platforms has been relatively smooth for Urban regions compared to rural areas.
  • The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) report shows that only about a third of all children in rural areas managed to receive any study material from their teachers.
• Digital divide: In vast rural India, only 4% of homes own a computer
• Infrastructure gaps leading to inadequate teacher training, low educational resources and a lack of digital access point.
• Reduced learning capacity: due to low enrolment, shift to government schools, dropouts, especially by young girls in rural areas

Way Forward: Measures to overcome challenges:

• Use Low-Tech mediums: Redesign curriculum for delivery at scale over low-end technologies like radio
  • Self-sustaining, hyper-local learning communities coalescing can be utilized for the purpose
• Sensitize parents to ‘learn through play’: Showing parents, especially those of rural areas who consider learning and playing separate entities. It will lead to:
  • Parent empowerment: for those ill-equipped to teach their children
  • Socio-emotional benefit: due to bonds built overplay, families and community gains
• Blended Learning: Embedding digital access into available material through picture recognition or QR codes will enable virtual learning and enhance outcomes for those without mentoring support.
• Teacher skilling and equipping: Partnerships between governments, education institutions and civil society to create mixed-media content that is easy to use and share, aids multi-sensory learning
  • Create feedback loops for assessment
  • Enabling teacher to stay in touch with students and ensure continuous learning despite interruptions in rural areas like migration for work etc.