Karnataka Education Department signs an MoU with ILP to take ILP’s digital lessons across all schools in Karnataka. This will reach 2000 High schools in the current year with a plan to cover all schools in Karnataka in the subsequent years.
One of the core goals of ILP’s learning initiatives in schools is to increase classroom engagement. Increasing classroom engagement means that teachers are engaged in the learning process, children are engaged in the learning process, teacher and children go beyond the routine and engage in questioning, hands on activities, applying what they learn and more. While increasing classroom engagement is a challenge on its own, doing it at scale just increases the complexity by several order.
With our experience in working with hundreds of schools over the last several years, here is what we have learnt about increasing classroom engagement
- Teachers must be the core of the learning facilitation particularly during early years of schooling.
- Teachers have different teaching styles and prefer tools and content that they can build on top of, customize or reuse as is, based on their teaching styles.
- Children prefer visually engaging classrooms. They learn better when activities and visual content is part of the teaching process.
- National curriculum framework, ICT policy, NEP 2019 and the government specify the exact same things listed above as guidelines and clearly specify the need for open source content for scale.
With this as the background, we set out to create digital lessons for 4th grade to 10th grade, math, science and social science, that are not just free, but editable, mapped to syllabus and confirmed to the 5Es model based on the constructivist approach to learning i.e. Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate. The content was created using Microsoft/ Open office tools and releases as open source under CC by SA 4.0 license. Over the last 3 years we have released 3 revisions of the digital lessons based on the feedback we received from teachers. Our content has been reviewed by hundreds of practicing teachers and several decision makers in the education department.
Based on a recent survey we conducted, where about 200+ teachers responded, 100% of the teachers said digital lessons by ILP helped children in understanding concepts better, 99.2% of the teachers said using our resources made them more productive and 100% of the teachers said that they would recommend this to other teachers. Learning level assessment administered by ILP for math and science in a sample set of schools also showed a 50% improvement in conceptual understanding.
With the overwhelming response from the teachers, increased classroom engagement from the students, digital lessons available as open source and digital lessons mapped to the syllabus the education department of Karnataka agreed to sign an MoU to take this content across the entire state in all the schools where the Government is setting up infrastructure for a digital classroom. In the current academic year, this would mean reaching about 2000 high schools through the Government with the entire state of Karnataka being covered over the next few years.
Beyond making the content available in schools, the education department is also making this content available as part of their TALP ( Technology assisted learning program) training to teachers, so that instead of every teacher creating their own content, they can build on or customize ILP’s digital lessons as needed. The Education department has also agreed to take ownership of the content and assign teachers to build and maintain the content.
With teachers having access to digital lessons, with digital lessons becoming part of the teacher training by the education department and with the education department owning the content, this initiative of ILP has truly become part of the system.