Home Based Self Learning methodologies deployed to engage Govt Residential Schools’ Children—TSWREIS, TTWREIS, ITDA-B, TMREIS and TREIS during the lockdown

Hyderabad:The whole world must have been under lockdown, but, there was no stop to learning for these government school students. The lockdown made their leaning as fruitful as regular school education would have done.

The 6thto 10th class students of Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society(TSWREIS); Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TTWREIS); Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA) Badharchalam; Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS) and & Telangana Residential Educational Institutions Soceity (TREIS) were smart enough to use Digital Learning Mobile App called OAKS(Online Adaptive Knowledge System) to self learn critical subjects like Science and Math’s staying at the comfort of their homes.

The Home-based self-learning educational App was specially developed to engage 250K+ students from marginalized section of 1000+ Residential Schools in 31 districts of Telangana. The students who are comprised of families of poor parents, who have meagre income and economically deprived communities have been given Digital Platform to learn on par with their peers in corporate schools.

Thanks to the initiative taken up by the Govt of Telangana, Sunitha Infovision Ltd, a pioneer in edtech market with over two decades experience has been given a mantle of running the program on a pilot basis during his lockdown. The Digital Content on Maths and Sciencewas developed as per Telangana State Syllabus and facilitating the students to access the online digital content through web and Android App which can be installed in any Smart Mobile Phone, Tab etc. OAKS is not limited to just video content, it has got practices, tests, adaptive learning paths, live classes and much more. The feedback from the teachers is quite encouraging as they are feeling OAKS as an assistant teacher for them. OAKS is helping teachers save lot of time with automated evaluation and granular analytics and many more. They also said its very easy to follow-up on the students’ progress and performance. A principal said that …now, he is able to concentrate more on the corrective measures to be taken to improve the learning outcomes of the students, with the help of compliance, usage and performance reports available in OAKS rather than compiling reports.

The byte sized videos in OAKS have been designed as per the attention spans of the current generation students. The videos are very engaging and interesting with the help of motion graphics.

It also facilitates teachers to generate question papers and assign the students for attending tests online. The teachers can also use the live classes option to record their lecturers and share with students.

The OAKS platform also facilitates view reports across the schools at various levels to identify top teacher, students in terms of its usage and understand to a particular topic/s, lesson/s. The platform also enables deployment of Academic Planner, Implementation and Tracking of the same.

The initial response was very encouraging. In the very first 45 days of the implementation of the pilot project, 150K students from over 700+ schools accessed the platform for Home Self Learning. 1 M practices have been attempted and 7 M questions have been practiced and little over 500K hours of videos have been watched.

The present crisis is unprecedented. And we have to live with it. Accordingly, we need to adapt our educational systems and teaching methodologies The Home Self Leaning through OAKS App is a modern way of engaging students constructively during the Lockdown. informs Dr. R.S. Praveen Kumar, Secretary, TSWREIS.

The current education must prepare students for the automation revolution. The whole world stands on the binge of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another. 800 million jobs are expected to be lost globally due to automation by 2030. 50% of knowledge taught in STEM subjects will be obsolete by the time of college graduation. More and more top employers are disregarding degrees and focusing on skills in their hiring processes.

The six most wanted skills that will be in demand in the 21stCentury include Creativity, Communication, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Technology & Media Literacy and Leadership. So the focus of education is shifting from Rote learning to conceptual to meaningful learning. This allows learning to be more active, constructive, long-lasting and most importantly, it must help students to be fully engaged in the learning process shared Mr Suman Matcha, Managing Director of Sunitha Vision that is implementing the project on a pilot basis.

The goal of the project is to cover knowledge gaps that government schools students have and offer them personalized and adaptive learning to develop skills fit for the real world on par with the best of the best corporate schools. Every student needs individual attention to recover knowledge gaps, discover interest and foster them, to find preferred learning style, to keep constantly engaged and be motivated to strive for excellence.

OAKS is like having a personalized tutor/mentor for every student. It facilitated Government School Students to learn anywhere, anytime, discovering strengths, repeated learning, came as a motivation to achieve excellence.