ELearn

Student-centric 21st Century Classrooms through teacher training & low-cost technology solutions

In an age where everyone is focused on providing technology to students, we equip teachers in public schools at minimal cost with engaging content, management, data analysis, assessment, simulations, parental communication, training, LMS, and other activities to help them improve learning outcomes and attendance. We have reached out to 100,000 students showing an improvement of 120% in scores.

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Overview

HundrED shortlisted this innovation

HundrED has shortlisted this innovation to one of its innovation collections. The information on this page has been checked by HundrED.

Web presence

2016

Established

100K

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Students upper

Updated

May 2023

The goal of the intervention is to achieve higher attendance, improved student performance, better grades, enhanced parental communication, higher teacher satisfaction, reduced workload for teachers, well-equipped classrooms, better-administered classrooms, and more frequent use of lesson plans and advanced pedagogical practices using low-cost IT-based solutions and to empower government depts.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

Pakistan's literacy rate stands at 60% & the gender gap is at 25%. 3m teachers are missing in schools with 23m kids out of school. Improvement of not only access to educational opportunities but also focus on improving learning outcomes is essential. Lack of sound pedagogical training & student engagement, absence of effective assessment, results in a high dropout rate & low student motivation.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

The solution addresses the challenges of access, quality, and equity in Pakistan. Specifically, it addresses the issues of Problems: Unengaging content in classroom, no teacher training using technology in classrooms, deficiencies in teacher learning, poor quality of education, and lack of teacher and student engagement.
The vision of this approach was to train teachers to use engaging video content, lesson plans, simulations, and classroom activities to improve learning and teaching in school, and an intelligent tutoring system, as well as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to promote student and parental engagement outside the classroom. The combination of enhanced opportunities for learning in school and out of school will lead to improved learning outcomes of students in public schools nationwide. MIT-funded research suggested that the students who used our intervention had a 120% improvement in their scores. There have been other publications on Elearn (Link is mentioned later)

How has it been spreading?

Yes

If I want to try it, what should I do?

The should contact the Department of Education, and the IT wing of the Punjab Government, who have taken ownership of the program now and have scaled it up even further to 1,000 schools.

Implementation steps

Content Composition

The teachers are selected on the basis of the performance of their students and the geographic location of the schools. The content is comprised of an LMS and the following: a. Short instructional video lectures of approximately 10-15 minutes by subject experts b. Interactive learning simulations and animations c. Formative assessment questions ar relevant to the topic that teachers can use after the video d. Activities designed for each topic that the teacher can conduct with the students

Teacher Training

Teachers are trained to use technology-enabled multimedia content, on the use of blended learning and pedagogy of specific topics in the classroom. Lesson plans and videos for teachers for all the lectures are created and shared using an SD card.

Classroom Execution

Classrooms are equipped with television sets and teachers are given tablets with instructional content and a learning management system for each class.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance and monitoring are done through multiple levels of student assessment and tracking teachers' data.

Reinforcement

Reinforcement of concepts outside the classroom is done through the SMS intelligent tutoring system. Parental involvement through mobile phones helps improve the attendance of students in school.

Parental Engagement

Using IVR Technology, parents are routinely engaged in school attendance. Parents receive an IVR informing them that their child missed school and they are asked about the reason for it. The response of the parent is tabulated and shared with the assessment team. To this end, several minutes are procured to make the incoming call free of cost.

Intelligent Tutoring

As a means for reinforcing concepts taught in the class, and assessing and engaging students, the project uses an SMS-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS. ITS includes a session of 3-4 questions over SMS. It operates by providing scaffolds for wrong answers and the questions progress on the basis of student responses. These SMS sessions are conducted a few times each month (using parents’ mobile phones), once the teacher has covered relevant topics in class.