Abstract:

Karnataka state has one of the biggest education systems in India, and over the past decade has been seen tremendous growth in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. The state, however, (a) lacks a clear policy for tapping the existing technology resources for improving human capabilities including basic education delivery (b) presents dismal record in education quality with increasing disparities across geographical region, urban-rural and across caste, class and gender. The significance of our study lies in addressing these two issues. First, the real-time classroom sharing application, a novel ICT intervention at school level, can make efficient use of existing resources like satellite communication and computing infrastructure at schools, and may inspire reforms in the education policy. Second, the option of urban schools sharing their teaching-learning environment may help some rural schools that lack sufficient resources (specialized teachers), provide different learning experience to the students, and different exposure to teachers. This work relies on the findings that the urban schools (private or government) have better teaching resources compared to rural schools.
Real-time classroom sharing (RCS) application aims to connect one school classroom (Provider School) to another school classroom (Receiver School) via wired-wireless networks and two-way video conferencing. The students at receiver school (rural) of a particular class join, over two-way video conferencing, the same class students of the provider school (urban). Only provider school teacher conducts the class, and students at the receiver school will see, hear and interact with the teacher and students of the provider school. In this work, we first assess the preparedness of the school system, both urban and rural, for such intervention, followed by an experiment with actual pilot deployment in 2 schools.
We conducted an exploratory survey to study mainly the schools’ willingness to participate in RCS, teachers’ and parents’ perceptions and inclination. Around 250 participants, including 25 urban and rural schools and 50 urban and rural teachers and parents, were selected randomly. Data was collected using checklist and questionnaire, and analysis was done using descriptive statistics. 92% of respondents agree with the quality disparity between urban and rural schooling, and rural respondents believe education in English can help in reducing the gap. 92% of rural schools and are willing to participate in RCS. 82% of the respondents believe RCS can be helpful to the rural students, if executed well.
We deployed the RCS system in two schools, connected via wireless network, and classrooms equipped with audio-video devices. The students of the receiver school act as the study group. 20 classes of English and Mathematics were run for 10 days for class-9. The objective was to explore the overall impact of this RCS experience, from the perspectives of both teaching-learning challenges faced by teachers and students, and the technology.
Pre-test, post-test non-equivalent control group design was used in this experiment. A control group, classroom from a different government school, was considered. Though the pre-test performance of study and control groups was similar, in the post-test, the study group out-performed the control group. The results show the possibility of co-relation between study group’s performance and the RCS lessons they experienced.

Keywords:

Real-time, Classroom Sharing, Virtual Learning, urban schools, rural schools.