As part of Week 1 Activity 4 I’ve chosen to look at the Digital Study Hall (DSH) (2012) initiative, which uses video-sharing to provide education to students in poor rural and urban slum schools in India. The initiative uses a system of decentralised hubs and spokes. Each hub is a centre of education excellence and is responsible for content production (typically in the local language) and content distribution to its ‘poke schools. The hubs are also responsible for teacher training, monitoring and evaluating, and collaborating with other hubs. Teachers in the spoke schools use the videos to facilitate lessons, pausing periodically to engage students by asking questions or initiating group discussions.
As of 2012 DSH had developed over 2,000 videos covering subjects including English, mathematics and science, in a range of languages (e.g. Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and English). DSH has also recorded training sessions that seek to further gender equality, and social awareness of topics such as domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and child marriage.
An article by Hull et al. (2009) describes a local teacher who used the videos to facilitate learning from her two-room house while children “peered in and pushed for a prime spot at the door.” There appears to be a level of enthusiasm by both teachers and students, the likes of which is rarely seen in the UK, where compulsory education is regarded as both an entitlement and something to be endured.
My initial concern with this video-sharing method was the consistency of delivery at different locations. This is likely to be affected by the teachers’ own knowledge of the subject, where they choose to pause the video, the questions they ask etc. It then occurred to me that in this context a consistent delivery probably isn’t as important as it is in the UK, where students are subject to standardised testing.
The last blog post published by DSH was May 2015 and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of activity after this. However, the video-sharing approach is currently being used with other projects, including Digital Green (2013), a non-profit organisation using video-sharing to improve agriculture, health and nutrition; and Digital Polyclinic (2012), which disseminates health-related knowledge in rural India.
Reference:
Digital Green, 2013. Digital Green. [online] Available at: <http://www.digitalgreen.org/>; [Accessed 21 February 2016]
Digital Polyclinic, 2012. Digital Polyclinic. [online] Available at: <http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/info/dpc.html>; [Accessed 21 February 2016]
Digital Study Hall, 2012. Digital Study Hall. [online] Available at: <http://www.digitalstudyhall.in> [Accessed 21 February 2016]
Hull, G., Zacher, J. & Hibbert, L., 2009. Youth, Risk, and Equity in a Global World. Review of Research in Education, [online] March 2009 33: 117-159. Available through: Open University Library Services <http://rre.sagepub.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/content/33/1/117.full>; [Accessed 21 February 2016]
Seely Brown, J. & Adler, R. P., 2008. Minds on Fire: Open Education, the long Tail, and Learning 2.0. [online] Available at: <http://er.educause.edu/articles/2008/1/minds-on-fire-open-education-the-long-tail-and-learning-20>; [Accessed on 16 February 2016]