In many rural villages in India most children go to school but learn relatively little. Deep education inequalities persist, especially in the quality of
education. The 2014 Annual Status of Education
Report shows that almost a third of rural children aged six to eight in India
cannot even recognise letters yet.
The Hybrid Learning Program was developed by Madhav Chavan and Rukmini Banerji of Pratham, one of India's largest
non-profit organisations working in the education sector. Tablets without an internet connection were preloaded with a wide range of locally relevant content and given out in 400 villages with a reasonable number of pupils who could read. Village members were required to do two things - have children who
will organise themselves into groups of five, and have an adult
responsible for charging the tablet computers every night.
Worried that children would use the
tablets for playing and having fun rather than focusing on the preloaded
educational content, the team put passwords on the tablets that only allowed access to to the Pratham content. But the team soon discovered that playing and having fun was exactly the point.
The
children quickly found a way to hack the system and bypass the
passwords and in no time at all over 50% of all the tablets no longer
were password protected. Children were doing a wide range of things. They were very interested
in Pratham's educational content and they were also busy making their
own - videos, songs, downloads perhaps from visitors' phones or
computers via file sharing.
Closing the gap in essential academic skills is
important but to really leapfrog
forward, marginalised children need the opportunities to develop a much broader set of
skills, including "learning how to
learn". Digital fluency and academic mastery are important, but secondary to the ability to learn new things, use
strategies to tackle a new problem, seek help, find solutions. In traditional schools students
are so conditioned to have teachers give them the answer that it is a fundamental shift for them to approach learning in this
new way. The hardest part of implementing the programme has been training Pratham staff not to give children the
answers or fix problems, but to let children figure things out on their
own. A mindset shift not only for the children but also the adults.
In the first three months of playing with the tablets
there has been, according to the project's monitoring data, an 11%
increase in pupils' core academic skills such as reading in children's
mother tongue, reading and speaking in English, and science.
Source: Indian children invent their own lessons by Rebecca Winthrop, BBC News website, 16 Nov. 2016 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37618901].
