EDU: You don’t agree with them?
Stephan Thieringer: No. If you ask me where I would educate my child today, I would say that I will send my child to India for the first 12 years, because they learn the rigour and how to study in discipline; undergraduate probably Europe; and graduate probably in the US. They are good with graduate degrees in the US because they apply critical thinking. What students learn in 11th and 12th grade here is what US kids learn in the IInd and IIIrd years of college.
When you look at the quality and reputation of teachers in India, I think what teachers deserve is better empowerment. At a national level, there’s nothing much being done to support teachers to be better prepared for the classroom.
EDU: Is there an opportunity in this challenge?
Stephan Thieringer: Yes we are looking at the community teaching model to help apply better teaching and learning resources for the teacher. We are working, for example, with the California State University and conceptualising projects at the University of Lucknow. Quality of teaching — how can we affect it? That’s the latest question.
According to a UNESCO report, globally eight million teachers are needed. While the attrition of teachers is six million over the next five years. So you technically need 14 million teachers, while India alone will require one million. So teachers’ training will be imperative.
Recently, AcrossWorld went to a school in rural India. I was carrying my iPad and the school principal felt that he needed a 100 of those. It led us to put our heads together and come up with an Android app which helps a teacher upload content onto our platform and then, at the same time, open educational resources and search what we have on our system (more than 20,000 assets) and also any of the repositories (MERLOT, Rice University, UK Open, the Netherlands, University of Delft, MIT). The Android apps allows one to choose, pick, drag and drop information, put it in buckets or playlists, and find interest-based recommendations. A teacher can take these items to a classroom or print them out or assign it to students on to a Tablet.
EDU: What are the partnerships that AcrossWorld has recently built?
Stephan Thieringer: We have partnerships with six companies who manufacture Tablets. We are working with universities such as NIIT University. Dr Shorey of NIIT is looking at ways we work and giving us his feedback. Like open source, the more people participate the more powerful it becomes. In a country the size of India, there’s a need to work locally. Even if AcrossWorld creates content in Delhi it needs to be created in 30 languages, because that knowledge has to be relevant across the country: in every region, state or city. Today we only do English, but just last week I was in Chennai where there’s a foundation that has 40,000 schools and a million students and follows Rabindranath Tagore’s methodology of teaching.What these teachers need is local support. So what we are now talking about is 400 centres of excellence all over the country, supplying content from a central point in Chennai into those centres where teachers once every month come together and get the information and go back to use it. Then in the centre we need people to translate all that into local languages and make it relevant across every area where we are supplying it — that’s what infrastructure delivery platform is all about.
EDU: How do you validate content?
Stephan Thieringer: There are a couple of ways of doing it. Firstly we look into repositories which have a period of usage system in place already, say MERLOT of California State University. We also use technology which allows rating, recommendation and review. And every transaction shows the user affiliated results. We have an algorithm underneath every content programme and the ‘most crowdsourced’ content shows up in a rating. People using it rate it, so you have access to all the user experiences.
EDU: Do you have to train the faculty to adopt the system?
Stephan Thieringer: The biggest challenge is indeed the adoption strategy. An example I often quote is that in India, parking garages have attendants and valets to facilitate parking, and who hand parking tickets to you. In the US and Europe and elsewhere, you not only park your car but also take the parking ticket yourself. An education leader wishing to be a catalyst for change must find the right person to train people to adopt the system. We have the right guys — our learning (helps put the procedure, systems in place), and academic leaders (who regulate the content), to help us train people. And it’s always important for us to establish that we are, at the end of the day, an Indian entity. That helps people trust us better.
Q: You don’t agree with them?
A: No. If you ask me where I would educate my child today, I would say that I will send my child to India for the first 12 years, because they learn the rigour and how to study in discipline; undergraduate probably Europe; and graduate probably in the US. They are good with graduate degrees in the US because they apply critical thinking. What students learn in 11th and 12th grade here is what US kids learn in the IInd and IIIrd years of college.
When you look at the quality and reputation of teachers in India, I think what teachers deserve is better empowerment. At a national level, there’s nothing much being done to support teachers to be better prepared for the classroom.
Q: Is there an opportunity in this challenge?
A: Yes we are looking at the community teaching model to help apply better teaching and learning resources for the teacher. We are working, for example, with the California State University and conceptualising projects at the University of Lucknow. Quality of teaching — how can we affect it? That’s the latest question.
According to a UNESCO report, globally eight million teachers are needed. While the attrition of teachers is six million over the next five years. So you technically need 14 million teachers, while India alone will require one million. So teachers’ training will be imperative.
Recently, AcrossWorld went to a school in rural India. I was carrying my iPad and the school principal felt that he needed a 100 of those. It led us to put our heads together and come up with an Android app which helps a teacher upload content onto our platform and then, at the same time, open educational resources and search what we have on our system (more than 20,000 assets) and also any of the repositories (MERLOT, Rice University, UK Open, the Netherlands, University of Delft, MIT). The Android apps allows one to choose, pick, drag and drop information, put it in buckets or playlists, and find interest-based recommendations. A teacher can take these items to a classroom or print them out or assign it to students on to a Tablet.
Q: What are the partnerships that AcrossWorld has recently built?
A: We have partnerships with six companies who manufacture Tablets. We are working with universities such as NIIT University. Dr Shorey of NIIT is looking at ways we work and giving us his feedback. Like open source, the more people participate the more powerful it becomes. In a country the size of India, there’s a need to work locally. Even if AcrossWorld creates content in Delhi it needs to be created in 30 languages, because that knowledge has to be relevant across the country: in every region, state or city. Today we only do English, but just last week I was in Chennai where there’s a foundation that has 40,000 schools and a million students and follows Rabindranath Tagore’s methodology of teaching.What these teachers need is local support. So what we are now talking about is 400 centres of excellence all over the country, supplying content from a central point in Chennai into those centres where teachers once every month come together and get the information and go back to use it. Then in the centre we need people to translate all that into local languages and make it relevant across every area where we are supplying it — that’s what infrastructure delivery platform is all about.
Q: How do you validate content?
A: There are a couple of ways of doing it. Firstly we look into repositories which have a period of usage system in place already, say MERLOT of California State University. We also use technology which allows rating, recommendation and review. And every transaction shows the user affiliated results. We have an algorithm underneath every content programme and the ‘most crowdsourced’ content shows up in a rating. People using it rate it, so you have access to all the user experiences.
Q: Do you have to train the faculty to adopt the system?
A: The biggest challenge is indeed the adoption strategy. An example I often quote is that in India, parking garages have attendants and valets to facilitate parking, and who hand parking tickets to you. In the US and Europe and elsewhere, you not only park your car but also take the parking ticket yourself. An education leader wishing to be a catalyst for change must find the right person to train people to adopt the system. We have the right guys — our learning (helps put the procedure, systems in place), and academic leaders (who regulate the content), to help us train people. And it’s always important for us to establish that we are, at the end of the day, an Indian entity. That helps people trust us better.
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