Project at a Glance
Established in 2005, Digital Study Hall works to improve education for disadvantaged children and women in rural and slum schools in India. They use simple, appropriate technology and local resources to film the best local teachers and then distribute the recordings to schools.
IMPACT
In 2011
• 30 Schools were served in the Lucknow region
• 2500 plus recordings were produced
• 600 new students were reached by adding 6 new schools and one tuition center
• 3800 adolescent girls reached through an agreement with UNICEF India
• Won third place (out of 650 applicants) in the prestigious Peter F. Drucker Award for Non-Profit Innovation.
About the Project
The shortage of qualified teachers in rural and slum schools is one of the most challenging problems faced by overburdened education systems in India. It's 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. It is also not unusual for even these few teachers to be absent due to various reasons on any given day. Digital Study Hall is building a system to help students and teachers from these types of schools.
The Digital Study Hall project is working to create a digital database of curriculum currently sanctioned by the government for use by masses of students who do not have access to good schools. It video-tapes the instruction of the best teachers usually employed by private schools (Hub Schools) and then works with the local non-profits to train the best teachers in very poor public schools (Spoke Schools) to improve the quality of education for masses of children in these schools.
The process includes videotaping trained teachers in the Hub school, burning a DVD, and mailing these lectures to the rural schools. It also includes training the teachers of the rural schools how to use the DVD when they're delivering the same lecture .
Digital Study Hall’s aim is to deliver demonstrable results in nearly fifty more schools by 2012. In 2008, DSH published a six-month study of the performance of students and teachers at three DSH schools and one “control school”. In the summer of 2009, they began conducting a second study involving eleven government schools. DSH has accumulated thousands of recordings of lessons in English, math, and science, history, and more.
In 2007, The Association for Computing Machinery granted the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics to Randy Wang and his Digital Study Hall team for the innovative use of cost-effective digital technology that helps to improve the education of underserved children in South Asia.
In 2011 DSH won third place (out of 650 candidates) with the prestigious Peter F. Drucker Award for Non-Profit Innovation.
In addition to the Lawler Award, Digital Study Hall received a 2008 Microsoft Education Award from the "Tech Museum of Innovation." DSH was one of twenty-five Tech Awards Laureates (2008), along with innovators from around the world recognized for developing and applying technology to benefit humanity.
Background and History
Digital Study Hall has been operating in India since the summer of 2005. As of spring 2007, it has run pilot "hubs" in numerous cities in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, involving dozens of schools. During this time, DSH has accumulated thousands of recorded lessons in English, math, and science - in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and English. DSH also began to apply the same approach to agriculture extension work (Digital Green).
To avoid retracing the missteps of earlier "wire-the-schools" projects, Digital Study Hall follows two important principles: cost realism to provide for scaling, and 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 inter-personal 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 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 content in the DSH database is to ship DVDs to spoke schools. Each spoke school is given at least a TV and a DVD player. Simply put, "mediation-based pedagogy" refers to placing a teacher (or a "mediator") in between students and TV. The mediator periodically pauses the video and engages the students in various activities based on what has just occurred 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; in turn, the mediator supplies the crucial interactive element.
Another variation of this theme is "peer-mediation” - recruiting the brightest students to serve as mediators during periods when the local teachers are absent (common occurrences in government schools in India). Student mediators appear to universally display a high degree of responsibility and enthusiasm when they are put in charge.
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, as well as training and empowering less skilled teachers. In this sense, DSH is foremost a "people system," not just a computer or network system.
Programs
Digital Study Hall (DSH) is a research project that seeks to improve education for the poor children in slum and rural schools in India. DSH digitally record live classes by the best grassroots teachers, collects them in a large distributed database, and distributes them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools using the postal service.
The project is a collaboration between computer scientists and education experts. The main components of DSH are: A database of content (People’s Database of Everything), a network of hubs and spokes, mediation-based pedagogy, and use of technology for sharing community-generated video.
People's Database of Everything: The Google book scanning project is attempting to create a digital database of all books ever written. In a similar spirit, DSH is working on creating a digital video database of "everything." The DSH database, however, has some unique characteristics. First, the DSH database is video-centric. This is important for places like rural India, which, by optimistic estimates, has an adult literacy rate of about 60%. Second, at least at the beginning, the DSH database is being populated with systematic and coherent sequences of lessons based on curricula designed and sanctioned by state boards, so that they can be easily adopted by target schools. Third, the recordings in the DSH database are made by the best teachers at the grassroots level. These include the best teachers in middle-class urban schools, the best teachers in rural schools, and other idealistic and enthusiastic volunteers such as university professors, scientists, college students, and NGO staff members. In short, the database is created by the people, and for the people.
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.
One of the most important roles played by a hub is to ensure that the content generated at the hub is appropriate for the target audience of the underprivileged children to be served by the hub. Simply recording lessons in middle class schools and hope the resulting content can be meaningful for a rural audience is misdirected thinking. At the Lucknow hub, DSH enlists the best teachers from a middle class school, stage and record specially designed classes in front of an audience of children from the neighborhood slums who share similar backgrounds as other target audience. For a similar purpose, at the Pune hub, selected teachers from a middle class school are sent to teach and get recorded in government schools in the neighborhood.
Expanding DSH Voice System Deployment: In the last few months, DSH has been building and test-deploying a phone system that allows DSH teachers to share experiences, learn from each other, and participate in student and teacher activities. As an example, during a discussion thread that lasted from October to December of last year, teachers from across the different schools had a lively discussion on the issue of neglecting girls' education, an issue that is deeply rooted culturally and historically in India.
Stories
In India’s rural and slum schools most education is based on rote memorization. DSH’s training has improved students’ and teachers’ understanding, creative participation and performance at even the poorest schools. Following are some teachers’ comments:
Poonam Upadhyay, teacher at Sahara City Homes School in Lucknow:
“Earlier, children would just listen to what we were saying. We didn’t know we could get them to generate their own answers, but now when we ask them something they come up with answers themselves. They have even started asking more questions about things around them.”
Some of the children used to spend all of their time gambling on the streets. Sushma, the tutor at Mavaiya Tuition Centre in Lucknow has managed to convince them to come to school and kept them engaged through activities inspired by the DSH lessons.
“These children are very interested in playing marbles, so I collect those marbles and teach them tables, multiplication and division. I also play games to teach them numbers or even words. I write the numbers on the ground in a hop scotch square, say a number, and they have to jump to that number.”
