Technologies for Cooperative Learning in Rural India

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There is a great deal of interest in using new technologies to help developing nations improve the quality of lives of their citizens. Yet without a careful analysis of existing social and cultural norms and infrastructures, there is a great danger that technology-based "solutions" will fail. This grant will fund a collaboration between technologists, educators, and learning scientists in India and the US to design, implement and evaluate distance learning systems that help resource-starved village primary schools in rural villages to benefit from the better human and content resources available in urban environments. The basis of the project is a combination of YouTube, NetFlix, and file sharing: excellent teachers are videotaped in the classroom demonstrating good pedagogy teaching the same subject matter as is taught in village schools, these video clips will be automatically assembled and distributed using DVDs and the postal system to village schools, where the videos are used for on-site teacher training and mediated instruction by the local teacher.Over a billion people on the planet are illiterate, in large part due to the lack of trained teachers in rural villages where most children in poverty live. Finding trained teachers for primary school education is nearly impossible in rural areas, despite these skills being essential for upward mobility in today's economy. Of course, distance education is nowhere near as good as a qualified teacher at the primary school level, at least with current technologies, but many students don't have that luxury. The goal of this project to improve the existing educational baseline in a cost-effective way, using solutions that can be scaled to match the scope of the problem.