Powering school education & bridging the gaps

Covid pandemic has done a lot of harm to the school education in India and other nations of the world. When things are normalizing, innovators are coming up with bright ideas to bridge the gaps created by the lockdowns in the last two years, when educational institutions remained closed and students missed the classroom experience. One such initiative is Neeve – Powering India’s Education app, which powers new age online learning for students; engages parents and simplifies teacher’s tasks. Ms Rimjhim Ray, co-founder of Spotle.ai and board member, Wise Owl, says, “My portfolio company has just launched an India exam portal where all state governments will conduct their school tests online. Over 25000 students across Sikkim have enrolled to take their secondary school tests on Neeve app. This is a revolution as now secondary school students can be assessed through adaptive tests online delivering real-time analytics to state, centre and local administration, schools and teachers helping roll out remedial learning. Imagine what this can do to address learning gaps and elevate the level of education across India.” With Beas Bhowmik and Joyati B the vision is just beginning as Neeve readies to be the school education portal made for India. With strong tech and low cost product innovations, this dream can become a reality.
 
Another visionary educationist Dr Sunita Gandhi from Lucknow, UP, has introduced a new ‘pedagogy' to bridge kids’ learning loss of two pandemic years. She has developed a Global Dream Toolkit to help the children learn faster and to cover their learning loss of two pandemic years. The toolkit incorporates the Accelerating Learning for All (ALfA) pedagogy. A demonstration of the ALfA system was done by a group of kids who travelled from Lucknow to the Press Club of India in Delhi. The kids read out the day’s newspapers fluently. They also demonstrated their one grade up mathematical skills. These skills were learned by these children in just 30 hours over three months. In this system, the kids are asked to read words and sentences directly instead of wasting their time on learning letters or numbers. They decode the letters by themselves.
 
Dr Gandhi, a PhD in Physics from Cambridge University, UK; and a former Economist at the World Bank, says, “The classic problem in education has been that of speed. Our system counters the notion that it takes three years to make a child capable of reading words and learning basic numeracy. When children learn rapidly, it expands capacities, and creates new possibilities. The world can now become literate in months, not years. Education is a global emergency and urgent action is required.” She wants policy-makers to ensure foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) for all children, and do it within this year using disruptive methods to learn quickly. Each study module of ALfA follows the do it yourself method, where children learn on their own and teachers do not really teach, but prompt the children to their tasks. Universal literacy and numeracy is a sustainable development goal. According to UNICEF, education loss is nearly unsurmountable. In low and middle income countries, learning losses due to school closures have left up to 70% of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand simple text, up from 53% pre-pandemic.

(Writer is a senior journalist & columnist)