School looks online for lessons

Updated on: Tuesday, November 08, 2011

In a role reversal of sorts, a city CBSE school is experimenting with the idea of inter-changing classroom and homework.

R N Podar School in Santa Cruz will facilitate online lectures to its students, which can be viewed at home. At the same time, teachers will use the online software to monitor the performance of students solving exercises. The concept called ‘slipping the classroom’ would satisfy individual needs of students and help them study and comprehend at their own pace.

The school has collaborated with an international online tutorial provider to launch their pilot project in class VII after the Diwali vacations. ‘‘Students often need help while solving exercises at home. If they have any queries while solving the problems in class, they can immediately seek our help. It is customised in a manner that students will learn at their own pace. A slow learner can take more time than his classmate and their performances will be monitored,’’ said Sunita George, who will work on the pilot project for physics. The school is initiating projects for subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics.

School principal, Avnita Bir, said, ‘‘When we had to miss lectures unexpectedly due to rains or for some untoward incidents, some of our teachers asked the students to refer to the online videos offered on this particular website. After a few sessions on a networking site with the organisers, we have finally decided to launch the project in our school this month.’’

The organisers call themselves a non-profitable organisation. The videos offered on the website are a free of cost and students can access it any time and anywhere. The founder of the website, Salman Khan, himself is an MBA graduate from Harvard and works with a team of experts.

The US-based website has in all 2,600 videos on different subjects and is a success in American schools.

‘‘The organisers have agreed to tweak their lecture videos to meet the requirement of Indian schools, where the textbook is content-heavy. It is their debut project in the country,” added Bir.

This is not the first time for Podar School to experiment with new ideas. After an economics teacher for class XI and XII had to move to Chennai, the school connected the entire class to Skype, a communication software on the internet, and the teacher takes lectures from there. The school is yet to find a good replacement. ‘‘We have to come up with innovative ideas to meet the dearth of teachers and technology is the best solution,’’ added Bir.

How it works

Students can view lectures on designated topics on the website. In classroom, they will work on exercises based on the lessons. They have to add teachers as coaches on the website. If the child is unable to complete an exercise, the teacher will see a red mark against the child’s name. The teacher can then help the student with the exercise. If the child has successfully completed the exercise, they will be highlighted with a blue mark. The child can then proceed to the next exercise.

School looks online for lessons

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