The Proposed System:
The three basic components of any education system are:
a) the teacher
b) the content
c) the student
In the proposed system these components are defined as below:
The teacher, in our proposed system, is any reasonably educated male or female, who is willing to teach voluntarily to a small group of learners and is in possession of at least a Smartphone with an active SIM.
The contents of this system will be as derived from government approved curriculum. These contents will be digitized so as to make these suitable for delivery in offline, online or hybrid mode.
The students enrolled in this system will be in age group 5 to 16 who could not receive basic or primary education for whatever reason.
For children between age group 5 to 9, completion of the full Primary Education curriculum (class 1 to class 5) will hopefully provide eligibility for continuing education in regular educational institutions.
Unschooled adults, after completion of Grade 1 subjects shall count as literate as per literacy definition in Pakistan.
For children, who are currently studying in primary classes in conventional schools, this system may provide supplementary learning.
The Method:
- The school system will be run under a legal entity.
- The system will encompass the geographical jurisdiction of Pakistan in its entirety.
- A mobile App will be provided to all teachers.
- The Smartphone App for teachers will be freely available for installation from an SD card, for download from our Server or App Stores and even from another Smartphone with the App already installed.
- The App will have two services available.
- One for student enrollment, maintaining a log of student performance, evaluation and progress and
- The other for access to the stored content, teaching material, necessary training and guides and a library of audio, video, text and auxiliary reading material.
- Internet connectivity with 2G, 3G, 4G, Wifi etc. may be required but only for updating the stored content, as and when required.
- It will be possible to send student enrollment data and performance reports to the system’s Central Server through the Internet or SMS. In case of no connectivity with mobile phone operators, the data shall remain stored in the mobile phone storage medium and will be transferred to the Server whenever connectivity is made available. This will allow use of Smartphones in areas, where there is currently no service available but people can come over to areas with mobile operator services once a while.
- The teacher may use any premises for the purpose of imparting education to a single or a group of students in his/her subject of expertise. However, a group of students in one session may not exceed twenty five.
- Content shall be categorized in courses and lessons as per required pedagogy for Pre-School and Class 1 to 5.
- Each course may have about 40 lessons, with each lesson of 20 minutes duration.
- All content shall be exactly as per the approved curriculum of the government and digitally produced in our own studios by experts in the relevant subjects.
- The content shall be Open Source and freely available for downloading and sharing from our server under the Creative Common License.
- By default the medium of instructions shall be Urdu with Voice Over available in regional languages or English, wherever needed.
- Deficiencies in indigenous digital contents shall be compensated by procuring contents from local and international content providers.
- All contents shall also be made available on a Raspberry Pi Streaming Server for use by teachers wherever possible. The Raspberry Pi streaming server, in conjunction with a Monitor or TV Display unit, may be very effectively used for a group of students in a makeshift classroom environment.
- DoorDars will seek to receive scholarships, donations, grants, and other help in cash or kind from public and private sector organizations, development agencies and philanthropists to make this system run.
The ultimate goal will be to make education through this system free of cost for the children.