IIT SEED

‘Stimulating Education & Enhancing Development’(SEED) has a 3-pronged approach to stimulate economic development – Basic literacy using partner NGOs, Basic education for parents in subjects like on Finance, Healthcare and Opportunity college for skill training of young adults, all supported by e-learning.

The Context

India needs a model that comprehensively lays foundation for education driven economic development. SEED addresses this need. Instead of reinventing the wheel SEED seeks to partner with appropriate NGOs to achieve this goal of comprehensive development. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) report was conducted by Pratham with 20,000 volunteers across 15,610 villages corroborates the lack of quality in education with appalling situation like over 50% of children in a given class cannot perform tasks of earlier classes. Like over 50% of Grade V children cannot read grade II text or solve division. Thus Pratham embared on read India campaign to get 40 mn kids over 600 districts to have basic skills like reading, writing, arthimetic by 2009. In addition to basic literacy, vocational education and family level education are vital.

The Proposition

• Basic Literacy - in partnership with Pratham. In areas where Pratham is absent, we would partner with other organizations such as Ekal, Vibha, Asha.
• Basic education for Parents/Adults - Training on Finance, Health care, Nutrition etc.
• Opportunity College - Skills training for young adults (including soft skills) to earn a living based on job. It will be a partnership with industry representatives for gaps study and placements.

Sustainability, Scalability & Impact

Use a system of Digital Study Hall to increase reach. Digital Study Hall digitally records live classes by the best grassroots teachers, and distributes them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts and teachers use the system to explore pedagogical approaches involving local teachers actively "mediating" the video lessons. By harvesting a "viral phenomenon" of community participation, DSH aims to help train teachers and deliver quality instruction to underprivileged children. The project is a collaboration between computer scientists and education experts. A live deployment of DSH has been operating in India since the summer of 2005. As of spring of 2007, DSH have accumulated about 550 recordings of lessons in English, math, and science, in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and English and works with minimum infrastructure like room and ac/dc power. The opportunity College can use the e-learning course work developed by Adayana. The Institute currently provides training in nine vocational areas: diesel mechanics, motorcycle repair, data processing, dressmaking, refrigeration and air conditioning repair, radio and television, satellite servicing, agriculture and animal husbandry, and primary and pre-primary teacher training. Thus technology usage will provide the scalability and impact.

Future Steps

The pilot will be done at IIT Roorkee and then extended to other IITs. Initial seed funding is already available and the learnings from IIT roorkee pilot will be adopted before replicating the models around other IITs.