Digital Study Hall’s (DSH) approach to education has been described as “YouTube meets Netflix in a schoolhouse with a dirt floor.” 

The Digital Study Hall Online (DSHONLINE), an initiative of Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) was created 10 years ago with Mona Foundation’s support as a forward looking approach to overcoming the shortage of qualified teachers in poor and remote rural schools in India. DSH creates videos of the best teachers in actual classroom sessions teaching standard textbook materials, and then provides them free of charge to all teachers and students in poor public schools. Ongoing teacher training is offered to reinforce quality of teaching and learning.

DSH and COVID19

“The COVID-19 lockdown launched us into an unknown space – children weren’t accessible and the teachers who had lived their lives teaching in classrooms were locked at home. Perhaps the greatest learning from this crisis has been the realization that technology is a great tool which we have not leveraged enough.” – SHEF Team

With the country in lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID19, and all schools closed, thousands of teachers and students are now flocking to the DSHONLINE platform, allowing children to feel part of a social learning environment from the safety of their home. And it is working! When Mona started supporting this initiative 10 years ago, DSH was offered in 23 schools. Today, with 1,643 relevant instructional modules for grades 1-8, they are in 2,320 schools with 94,000 subscribers and 14.5M views. Other platforms like Shaladarpan and Diksha collectively reach out to over 20,000 government and private school teachers across India.

Studies have shown dramatic improvement of student performance and local teachers demonstrated significant improvement in their grasp of subject matter.Digital Study Hall also works at the forefront of women and girls empowerment programs by including gender education into the core of their academic curricula and community education campaigns. One teacher shared,   “I am a social studies teacher and I have a Bachelor’s in Education as well. I always watch your video lessons to learn how to teach mathematics and next day I teach children in my class. I feel indebted.” – Ranju Chaudhary commented on Class 6 – Algebra.

An impressive indication of progress which has brought national recognition from the Indian government for DSH video lessons, the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, in collaboration with the National Council for Teacher Education and other stakeholders, has developed the National Teacher Platform – Diksha – which has on board close to 300 Digital Study Hall (DSH) video lessons. These video lessons will be accessible to the teachers of government and private schools across India.

The process of publishing these video lessons is methodical and makes use of a comprehensive metadata framework that maps the video lessons to each state curriculum. Enabling the video lessons to reach a wider audience of children studying in various state boards. Diksha was launched on Teacher’s Day, September 5, 2017.

Teachers at the government schools face a huge challenge with the change in instruction language, now English. DSH video lessons have proved to be of great help in partner schools during this transition. Rajasthan Government Schools adopted DSH videos. In 2017, DSH started creating Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) prescribed curriculum video lessons in the English language. This curriculum has recently been adopted by the government schools in Rajasthan on their Shaladarpan platform.