A principal’s plea proves to be the inspiration for Shikkhok.com, which
crowdsources lessons for the underprivileged
New
Delhi: MOOCs, or
massive open online courses, became a buzzword in 2012. Platforms such as
Coursera, edX and Udacity tied up with top universities, including the Ivy
League, to offer courses on every possible subject to anyone with access to
Internet across the world.
Professors
from top universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton became
available for students in places like Burkina Faso, a small landlocked country
in West Africa.
Around
the same time, August 2012 to be precise, another MOOC platform was launched,
albeit with a difference. Ragib Hasan, assistant professor and computer
scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, launched a
Bengali-language MOOC platform called Shikkhok.com.
“The
key innovation is the crowdsourcing of MOOCs. So far, big MOOCs like Coursera
or edX have all been created through partnership with established universities.
In Shikkhok, I took a different approach by crowdsourcing the development of
the educational materials, and looking at innovative localized context when
creating courses,” said Hasan. To be sure, there are some platforms that simply
translate content of English MOOCs into Bengali.
Hasan
believes that lectures that are developed for a student in, say, the US, are
not suitable for a student in a village in Bangladesh. “The examples and
cultural contexts simply don’t match. If you illustrate a physics problem by
using a rocket as the example, then a village student will not understand
anything at all as he probably has never seen a rocket. Rather, we need to make
local examples that are known to the student,” he said.
At
Shikkhok, which means teacher in Bengali, a localized approach was adopted to
create content for website and a mobile app, which the students have
appreciated. At present, the platform has about 700,000 student users and about
55 teachers with 40,000-60,000 visitors per day.
In
the past three years, Shikkhok has delivered 9.5 million video lectures. Of the
total visitors, about 10-15% are from West Bengal, while expatriate Bengalis
living in Europe and the US visit the site as well.
“Overall,
we got visitors from at least 73 countries. I hope that Shikkhok will get more
coverage and students from West Bengal,” said Hasan. There are 800-plus lessons
from at least 75 courses; the platform offers free courses from Class V to PhD
level.
To
get content, Hasan went to social media and asked for volunteers. “I just told
them that I am starting this educational site in Bengali for rural students.
Can you just use your webcam or phone to create a few short videos based on
your knowledge and subject areas?” said Hasan.
The
response was phenomenal. Within a few hours of posting the message on Facebook
and Twitter, Hasan was flooded with messages from interested people. A chemical
engineer started sending videos, a professional chef gave lessons on French
cooking and an information technology executive started creating math lectures
for Classes V and VI. “Within a few days, I had dozens of courses running on
Shikkhok.com,” said Hasan.
In
addition to the online delivery method, Shikkhok aims to reach rural and
underprivileged students in Bangladesh and India who do not have Internet
access. The platform brings together educators and researchers from all over
the world to create free-of-cost content on both basic and advanced topics. The
videos are uploaded to YouTube and courses are posted on the Wordpress-hosted
website. “We use all the free tools that we can get. Students can get the
videos through the site, or through the village mobile shops,” said Hasan.
Bharat
Gulia, CEO of Metis Learnings, an education solutions provider, said: “The
concept seems very good and if executed properly, it will help those students
who need these kind of resources the most”. He added that Bengali being one the
most widely spoken languages, such content will be of immense advantage as
connectivity moves down the socio-economic strata.
The
idea came to Hasan when he got a letter from a school principal in the remote
Sundarban area near the India-Bangladesh border. “He wrote to me that students
in his school are dirt-poor, and his school does not have any teachers to teach
science, math or English. Note that he didn’t complain about the lack of good
teachers. His school was so distant and rural and his students were so poor
that he had no teachers to cover these subjects,” he said.
As
a result, his students failed the exams and ended up as poor and uneducated as
their parents. The main factor was the huge cost of training and paying for
good teachers and the government simply could not afford to spend so much on
education, the principal wrote.
“As
a scientist, I knew that we could easily create reusable content, come up with
innovative distribution channels using mobile phone technology, and thus reach
even the students at the farthest corners of Bangladesh and India. Thus, Shikkhok
project was started,” Hasan said.
The
entire project was launched for $15—the cost of three hamburgers in the US. “My
cost per student is $0.0000214285714,” he said.
Shikkhok
is now partnering with cable operators in Bangladesh to give them the educational
content for free so that they can create a TV channel with it, benefiting those
students who don’t have computers.
Hasan
says that he expects to get more teachers from India, especially West Bengal,
to create courses. “So far, we got one course from a teacher in West Bengal. My
door is always open to anyone proposing a course, on any topic,” he added.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 5 October 2015
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