Background

Building the Lesson Library

Digital Study Hall has been operating in India since the summer of 2005. As of spring of 2007, we run pilot "hubs" in three cities in India (Lucknow, Bangalore, and Pune), covering approximately 30 schools. And during this time, we have accumulated about 550 recordings of lessons in English, math, and science, in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and English. We have also started applying the same approach to agriculture extension work (Digital Green). Today, DSH is still a young research project, as we continue to work on rigorous evaluations and seek to understand many outstanding questions. We have, however, already seen initial promising signs, and we hope to eventually scale up the system to cover a far greater number of children, contributing toward the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education.

Who We Serve

The shortage of qualified teachers in rural and slum schools is one of the most challenging problems faced by over-burdened education systems such as the one in India. It is not unusual for a government village school housing 200-500 students to have fewer than half a dozen teachers, who are not well-qualified to teach many of the subjects that they are required to teach. And it is not unusual for quite a few of even these teachers to be absent due to various reasons on any given day. In the Digital StudyHall project, we are building a system that seeks to help kids and teachers from such schools.

To avoid retracing the missteps of earlier "wire-the-schools" projects, we follow two important principles: (1) cost realism, essential if we are to scale the system up to a significant number of schools and students; and (2) building systems that solve end-to-end education problems, so the twin pillars of technology and pedagogy must develop side by side, and content and people relationships must play leading roles.

A Network of Hubs and Spokes

DSH is not a physically centralized system. Instead, DSH is designed to work as a decentralized network of hubs and spokes. Each hub is a center of education excellence and the hubs themselves "talk" to each other. The spokes are typically the poor rural and urban slum schools that need help the most, schools that lack good teachers, good content, and other resources. Each hub works on content production (typically in a local language), content dissemination in its neighborhood, teacher training, monitoring, and evaluation, and interacting and sharing with other hubs.

Mediation-Based Pedagogy

The principal means of disseminating the content in the DSH database is shipping DVDs to spoke schools. Each spoke school is given at least a TV and a DVD player. Put simply, "mediation-based pedagogy" refers to the need of placing a teacher (or a "mediator") in between the students and the TV. The mediator periodically pauses the video and engages the students in various activities based on what has just occurred on TV. These activities may include asking questions, inviting kids to do board work, and organizing role-playing activities. The mediator's job is to make his or her class as lively, dynamic, and interactive as the one conducted by the model teacher on TV. In effect, the video and the mediator form a "team:" the video provides an example, a framework, a lesson plan, and a content and methodology model; while the mediator, who may not be highly skilled in some domain-specific knowledge, supplies the crucial interactive element.

Another variation of the theme is "peer-mediation," the approach of recruiting the brightest fellow students to serve as mediators during periods when the local teachers are absent, which are common occurrences in government schools in India. In our experience, the student mediators appear to universally display a high degree of responsibility and enthusiasm when they are put in charge.

The highly motivated teachers can also study the supplied videos on their own, ahead of the live classes. Without DSH, such motivated teachers do not have an effective means of self-improvement; with DSH, a path is open to them as long as they are willing to work hard. This path leads to a best-case scenario, when we end up "graduating" the teachers, who may indeed choose to cast aside the live mediation crutch and become more effective teachers in their own right. In traditional teacher training workshops that last just a few days, the short duration necessitates that the topics covered must be kept at an abstract level, and it is not always clear how such abstract principles should relate to many of the daily topics. In DSH, the videos carried home by the participating teachers provide an ongoing and highly specific training: the local teachers learn by observing the best model teachers in action day-in and day-out, and they learn by doing. So this mode of training has the potential of being much more effective.

In short, the focus of DSH is not to replace people; instead, it is about amplifying the reach and the power of the relatively small number of the skilled teachers, and to train and empower the less skilled teachers. In this sense, DSH is foremost a "people system," not just a computer- or network-system.