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Khan Academy of India, a not-for-profit learning content and products organisation, has entered into an MoU with the Kerala government to bring the advantage of e-learning to the state.
The partnership aims to empower teachers and enhance learning outcomes of students over a five-year-period, and was signed into effect by top officials in the presence of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
Beginning this year, it will cover 4,775 government and aided schools involving close to a lakh of teachers and over 20 lakh students in science and maths enrolled in classes 8 to 12.
IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK
Khan Academy content enables each student to progress through unlimited quizzes and questions at the right level for them, an official spokesman said. They get immediate feedback as they learn and, when appropriate, learning interventions are provided.
Teachers can track progress, identify gaps in learning, and use data to help individual students as well as shape classroom discussion. Learnings from this intervention will be aggregated to inform the rollout across the rest of the schools.
The partnership comes in the backdrop of Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) having deployed laptops, projectors and other ICT equipment and broadband connectivity to schools as part of its hi-tech school project.
Simultaneously, KITE is developing a resource portal called Samagra, with online educational content and resources for teachers. Khan Academy’s resources would be linked to the portal.
TEACHERS’ TRAINING
In 2018-19, KITE will impart subject-specific training to all one lakh-plus teachers to use resources available on Samagra and on Khan Academy. For the first year, KITE will enhance the ICT infrastructure in 20 schools to support personalised learning.
Sandeep Bapna, India Managing Director, Khan Academy of India, told BusinessLine that the goal is to help students build strong foundation in these areas and move away form rote learning.
“There are instructional videos as also practice problems where they can hone skills. Our belief is that if we do it right that would really unlock a huge potential in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) areas.”
BUILDING CONTENT
Specifically, Khan Academy is doing a few things here, says he. One, it is building more and more content and aligning that to the national CBSE curriculum. It is also adding quite a lot to the practice content.
Second, it is going to make available content in multiple languages, or, in as many languages as possible. Here it works with partners. For instance, for Kannada, it has a partnership with the Karnataka government where its teachers are building content.
“We provide the knowhow, support and mentoring to creators for building this content. Other than this, we’ve a project going in Tamil, Hindi, Hinglish, Gujarati, and Bangla,”, Bapna said.
Third, Khan Academy is looking to bring the content in classrooms and schools. In this context, the partnership with the Kerala government is a momentous one. A teacher can use the Khan Academy resources in a classroom setting.
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