Enhancing Learning Quality in Pakistani Schools

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In 2012, I got together with a few other individuals to try and crack the problem of poor teacher quality and consequently, poor teaching quality and poor learning by students, especially in government schools in Pakistan.

A second objective was to provide engaging self learning materials to students who didn’t or couldn’t attend schools due to social, cultural, environmental or financial constraints.

Inspired by the success of The Khan Academy teaching videos and the hole in the wall experiment by Sujatra Misra, and several other educational studies and models, we hypothesised that if educational content and lessons could be delivered in a vibrant, exciting and fun way, we may find learning outcomes being achieved better than they are now, especially given the very poor teaching quality, in government schools, especially those in rural communities.

In addition to creating engaging animated learning content we hypothesised that this content could be most effectively delivered by highly engaging teachers, that “awesome teacher” we all remember from our school / college / university days, requiring minimum support from the actual teacher in the class.

Hence we decided to create high quality learning content available for FREE to the Universe, and delivered over the Internet or via a content loaded USB.

Online delivery would be a challenge as it required internet bandwidth as well as universal access to internet, especially for children / students in poor underprivileged environments, and a device (smart phone, tablet, computer, screen) to access it.

These were big challenges.

So we had to do two things.

Develop great content. Figure out how to deliver it to reach those who needed it.

So we commenced developing rich video based learning materials, all self funded, in 5 languages, English, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Baluchi, for Classes 1 to 5 and in English for 5 to 12 based on the primary and secondary school (up to intermediate) Pakistani curriculum. We were able to make about a 1,000 learning videos in 6 core subjects in the 5 languages for classes 1 to 5, before we ran out of money and changing priorities of some of those I was working with.

We tested these learning videos in several government schools in Karachi and Islamabad, one sponsored by a great philanthropist, Wahid Maskatiya. Everyone loved them, Teachers and students alike.

Internet access to students and high bandwidth was a major constraint, so we did two things.

Developed our own technology platform and LMS (learning management system) which could deliver content with reasonable audio video quality over as low as 80K bandwidth.

Secondly we also decided to deliver content preloaded on USB’s, by class, subject and session/period to schools to deliver to students via a computer attached to a TV screen.

This was the only investment required for a school. One computer and a TV or a projector per classroom.

Each learning session would then be supported/explained/facilitated by the in class teacher to clarify and answer learner questions. And to do this we planned to develop a simple “Teacher’s Module” for each session, with a lesson plan, typical questions which students would ask and the corresponding recommended answers, assessments etc.

The “Teachers Module” was essential, because even though we envisaged that the student video learning module would and should exhaustively cover the content/subject matter, but did understand that a facilitator teacher in the classroom may be required to answer learner questions and or facilitate content discussions.

Unfortunately we ran out of fuel before we could do that as well as source “those awesome teachers” and record them teaching their subject, lesson by lesson for the standard period of 30 or 40 minutes, for each subject to deliver the content.

There’s a huge opportunity in Pakistan to still implement this model, if we want to enhance teaching quality, deliver standardised quality learning and achieve desired learning outcomes.

Here’s a simple roadmap!

1. Identify the curriculum to be used to develop learning content based on learning outcomes certainly for classes 1 to 10 (up to Matric). This should be easy now with the NUC (National Unified Curriculum).

2. Create video based learning sessions delivered by highly engaging teachers of that subject in different languages. These lessons should be “Smart phone” friendly as well.

3. Create similar “Teacher Modules” for the in class Teacher/facilitator.

4. Deliver content to schools on USB’s or online where ever good quality internet is available. The content should also be available online for 24/7 access. Free!

This will Guarantee the death of over priced rapacious private school minting money off the poor. And in this I include the worst of the lot, the Beaconhouses, City Schools, Froebels, Roots, Headstarts, Bayviews and others of our country.

5. Recommend selecting a pilot group of government schools in different environments, both. Urban and Rural across all geographies in Pakistan and measure learning effectiveness with control groups. This is what we’d planned to do with 80 rural schools in Lodhran, entirely self funded by Jehangir Tareen, a little known fact. My respect and admiration for JKT rose immense when I discovered this fact, quite by accident. I’d never met him.

Unfortunately it was sadly shot down by the person who was administering the program, saying “this is not education” and talked about character building etc. All true, we said, but students primarily need to learn stuff as well. He was too arrogant to budge so we gave up.

Anyways, for anyone interested in developing this learning model here’s a high level list of resources required.

1. Engaging teachers

2. Learning specialists

3. E-learning specialists

4. E-learning content developers

5. Graphic designers, animators

6. Recording equipment

7. Recording studio

8. E-learning technology platform and LMS

9. Government championing, support and sponsorship

A computer & a TV or projector for each class

10. And of course the fuel to fund it. Government budgets. Donations. Private sector sponsorships.

Developing Financing Institutions.

My suggestions on an initial pilot implementation road map.

1. Pick up one class, preferably class 1.

2. All subjects.

3. Two languages, Urdu and English

4. Develop student and teacher modules.

5. Pilot test against similar control group.

Quite frankly, having looked at this issue in great detail 8 years ago, I know of no other way to rapidly deliver quality learning in Pakistani schools given the challenges of massive budgetary constraints, poor quality or non existent teachers and abysmally low teaching quality.

It can be done!!!

Our youth deserves this.

Good luck!

Why I still say this is our best fighting chance!

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