Urvashi Sahni, co-founder of the Digital Study Hall (DSH) project, has pioneered the use of low-cost technology to service resource-poor rural schools around Lucknow. The DSH project which she got off the ground in 2005 with Randy Wang, an assistant professor of the computer science department of Princeton University (USA), fructified after initial experiments to harness solar energy to power computers in a village school in Rae Bareli district (120 km from Lucknow).However Sahni was quick to realise that while computers arouse pupils curiosity, they cant substitute the teacher. This awareness led to the production of classroom lessons in Hindi on DVDs and delivering them in rural classrooms, where the digital teacher became an almost-live assistant to conventional teachers. While initially these lessons would just be beamed into classrooms, we soon learned that merely watching a DVD would not improve learning outcomes. Hence, now lessons are paused and children in the classroom tested to gauge their understanding of DVD lessons. Not only does this help students, even the teachers capabilities are enhanced, she says.
While initially, Sahni trained teachers at Study Hall (the school she founded in Lucknow in 1986, which has since grown into a K-12 CBSE school with an enrollment of 1,500 students) to create these lessons, she now coaches rural teachers on how to develop content. Wang, described by Sahni as the technological arm of the project, quit his Princeton job to work in India full-time on the DSH project.
DSH has adopted a hub and spoke model in which lessons are developed at a centre of excellence (in this case Study Hall), and transmitted to schools. In addition to four schools around Lucknow, this technology is operational in hubs in Kolkata, Pune, and Dhaka, covering 30 schools. More than 1,000 lessons in English, maths and science, in Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and English have been recorded, and tailored to syllabuses of state examination boards.
In acknowledgement of her efforts to reach quality education to under-served schools, in 2000 Sahni received the Haas International Award of University College, Berkeley (USA). Moreover, Unicef wants to commission the DSH project in 50 schools across Uttar Pradesh.
Sahni hopes DSH will eventually morph into a peoples database — a network of hubs and spokes, mediation based pedagogy and technology for sharing community generated videos. Education is the great equaliser and I hope to get this message across to philanthropists and policy makers, says Sahni.
Power to your elbow!
Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)