Video lectures for students in Maoist-hit areas

RAIPUR: In Maoist-hit areas of Chhattisgarh where teachers fear to tread, Kanker collector Shammi Abidi’s innovative approach to education: video lectures for students, has worked wonders.
Figures do their own talking, when it comes to change of scene in school education. There was time when students were forced to move out in search of better education. All that is changing now.
With help of video lectures prepared by recording classes of teachers in schools during summer vacations, Kanker registered 15% increase in class 12 passouts, result declared last week.While the district stood first in the state in class 10 results. Around 1,332 videos prepared in 45 days were showed to the students in 115 government schools, especially in remote areas, where students had no one to solve their queries.
Talking to TOI, Shammi said the district was facing shortage of science, mathematics and English teachers at the secondary and higher secondary level. Situation was bad in interior areas of the district. In 220 government schools in Kanker, 66 posts of physics teachers were lying vacant. In 52 schools, there were no teachers to teach chemistry. Around 70 posts of biology teachers were lying vacant. The scenario was worse in mathematics and English as there was shortage of 138 and 134 teachers, respectively.
“When we are not even able to fulfil minimum requirement of teachers, the question of assessing quality of education is beyond imagination,” said Shammi, who took over as the collector of Kanker in March 2015. Soon after her appointment, she mooted the idea of video lectures to tackle unavailability of teachers. “Initially we used lectures already available in market, but they failed to provide satisfactory solution as Youtube videos do not cover the syllabus of Chhattisgarh state and most of the videos were in English, which is not the local language,” she said. When existing alternatives failed, the IAS officer discovered an innovative concept, which she named “Pragya.” In it a database of 1,332 video lectures, each of 40-50 minute duration, was developed by the district administration in 45 days. The videos were prepared in mission mode during school vacations with the help of local teachers specialising in the subject in local lingo.
Video lectures contained exhaustive learning for subjects like English, maths and science for class 10. Videos of English, physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology were prepared for class 11 and 12. After the completion of videography, the entire lot of 1,332 plus videos were subjected to technical scrutiny by subject teams and errors committed by teachers during video lectures were identified and rectified. The administration didn’t use any money from government funds and purchased projectors and televisions from already provided funds.
“Our video database is first of its own kind in the country as it fully covers syllabus in Hindi medium using blackboard teacher combination as technique for delivery of content. It is currently running in 115 schools of Kanker. Of these, a large number of them are in Left-Wing-Effected (LWE) affected blocks, video lectures were passed on to other districts such as Balodabazaar, Bastar and Dantewada, which were grappling with staff crunch,” informed Siddhartha Pillai from Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship Scheme (PMRDF). The video lectures initiative showed most remarkable result in higher secondary school at Chotebethiya of Kanker. Situated in the dense forests, this school had no English teacher last year and only 16 out of 32 class 12 students passed in the subject. This year, 43 out of 44 students passed in English in class 12. In Murdongri high school of Kanker block, which had no chemistry teacher, students scored 82 marks out of 100.