At a time when coronavirus pandemic has crippled normal life across the world, regular studies of school kids has become a concern amongst the parents globally. Digital or smart classes seem to be the only solution to this problem which helps students to remain engrossed in their studies.
With schools across the country are closed because of coronavirus outbreak which has forced 250 million students in the K-12 segment to remain indoors, Central Square Foundation (CSF), a non-profit organisation is trying to bridge the digital divide through contextual solutions for the low-income segment of the society.
It has created TicTacLearn ed-tech solution in partnership with Google.org for governments to address dearth of high-quality content in vernacular languages on March 26, 2020 that is not only pedagogically sound but it’s free of cost too.
In late 2018, CSF along with Google and YouTube, conducted a research and found that there is a lack of digital vernacular school content in India. Whatever is available is either not of good quality or is unaffordable for over 85 per cent of the around 250 million Indian students. It decided to create high quality, animated, pedagogically sound, curriculum aligned (NCERT) Maths and Science content in as many Indian languages as possible. After doing detailed homework on pedagogy, content creation processes, CSF started production and are today creating over 10,000 videos across five Indian languages.
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh were the first states to adopt TicTacLearn solution for school kids between April 12-15, 2020 amidst Covid-19 pandemic.
The said states had telecast these learning videos on Doordarshan and as per the data, around five crore enrolled students were reportedly benefitted in these three states. Besides, around 12 lakh students watched these TicTacLearn videos on YouTube in these states.
CSF claims that Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka have expressed their interest in translating content in the native languages spoken in their states while Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Manipur have shown interest in incorporating content in English language.
The TicTacLearn videos are also available on DIKSHA, the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (MHRD) primary initiative to make e-content available to school children. The Diksha platform has over 80,000 e-books, available in multiple languages for classes 1 to 12 created by CBSE, NCERT, and States/Union Territories. These e-books can also be accessed on the app via QR codes energised in the textbooks.
So far, the CSF has uploaded 3,000 videos on YouTube and they are available for free and have already witnessed over six million views in the last seven weeks (from March 26 to May 16).
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana have started linking the TicTacLearn content to the QR codes in the textbooks.
Notably, to ensure the children continue to learn at home during the pandemic, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan have used TicTacLearn videos on their YouTube channels DigiLEP, DigiSATH, and SMILE respectively for classes 1 to 5.
Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana have created microsites to make resources available digitally due to the lockdown. They have embedded TicTacLearn content on Har Ghar Pathshala, Mission Prerna, and Ghar se Padhao respectively. The content is being shared via WhatsApp on a daily basis with the students.
With 10,000 learning videos for Maths and Science in five different languages, TicTacLearn is one of the single largest such repository. These videos are available in Hindi, English, Telugu, Odia, and Marathi for students between classes 1 to 10. They are animated which makes the learning experience engaging for children.