Aiming at improving the quality of rural education, OneWorld South Asia, in collaboration with British Telecom and Cisco, has launched a pilot project in West Bengal last week for assisting rural teachers in addressing the needs of the children more effectively through information and communications technology tools.
OneWorld South Asia is a non profit organisation that works for poverty alleviation and promoting sustainable development. It has launched the pilot project in the Moteswar block of Burdawan district in West Bengal, and partnered with Vikramshila Education Resources Society, which is based in Kolkata, to look into the operational aspect of the project.
The project covers 276 schools in thirteen gram panchayats at Monteswar. It covers around 3,000 teachers and 18,000 students. The Rs 10-lakh pilot project, which will cover primary school children from class one to class 8, will be over by August this year.
Explaining the mechanism, OneWorld South Asia Director Naimur Rehman said a teacher, whenever he requires a piece of knowledge, can make a call to a number and get his query registered. "By making the call, he automatically gets registered in the IVRS system. An ID number is then given to the teacher," he said.
"Such calls are monitored by knowledge workers at Vikramshila. They are skilled and understand the nuances of the problem. For the simple queries, they immediately get back to the concerned teacher themselves. And the difficult queries are sent to the experts," he added.
He said when the experts reply to the queries, the knowledge workers convert the answer clip into voice and send it to the teacher concerned. "Simultaneously a knowledge database is created and questions and answers get added to the database," he added.
There are, at the moment, thirty members on the panel. "The number of panelists will grow. The members in the panel are teachers, teacher trainers and educationists. The queries can be from any subject," said Rehman.
Speaking on the rationale of the initiative, Rehman said that the teachers are appointed, but do not get academic support for qualitative education. "The teachers get trained, but do not get a mechanism for quality teaching. The initiative aims at improving the quality of learning," he added.
BT and Cisco have provided the required technological support to the initiative. "We have built the technology platform for OneWorld South Asia's education initiatives, in partnership with our funding partner Cisco, which provides the voice mail service," said Arun Seth, chairman and managing director, BT India.
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