Scaling up to Small Schools to a Million Students
By Girish Bhandari, Co-founder, Mosaic Network (India) Pvt Ltd
What would it take to change the lives of children in India…not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide!
It is becoming increasingly clear that student performance can be improved if evaluation aims to assess individual students learning with the goal to inform teachers on how to individualise their interactions with each student. The challenge however is twofold. First, it is resource intensive to design and/or select appropriate assessments that not only highlight differences in learning needs and achievements of students, but are also sensitive to the context of diverse learning goals. Second, it is not always straightforward to provide results from evaluations through these assessments to the teachers in a timely manner such that the teachers can use these results to have informed decisions at individual student basis. Several models have been developed and implemented that address these challenges, especially for the high risk students.
As a global company with Indian roots we would like to contribute towards making a positive change for the Indian youth. Having 12 years of experience in America’s, Europe and in some underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia in applying technology towards evaluating and enhancing the impact of services in the fields of education, social science research and implementation of education based community collaborative, we are strongly committed to an all-around “social change” in India towards global environment, stronger communities and evidence-based social programmes. And for this goal, we, in partnership with other companies working in future technologies; investors that are supporting e-learning, as well as both private and educational research institutes, are interested in making a positive contribution to the development of effective Assessment platform, Employment Skills and English language in various regions across the country.
Our 4Q Learning framework is being used in with a goal to use evaluation as a scale up tool to improve learning outcomes of a million students and beyond. Through various pilots, lessons learned in the past three years in India, and our plans to implement this model will highlight how timely access of targeted evaluation results in the hands of teachers can significantly improve individual student performance. With our evaluation platform embedded in day to day practice, teachers can customize their lessons to each student on a day-to-day basis with an end goal of better learning outcomes. Our pilot efforts in India highlight the effectiveness of the 4Q approach across multiple cultural and linguistic contexts.
Our project delivers multiple levels of bi-lingual lessons based on standard language learning frameworks, with contents customized to adapt to local needs. The unique element of this project is that it relies on technology to deliver training content and real-time evaluation results to ensure quality outcomes for individual students. Our project integrates technology and evaluation to positively impact the language and communication skills of more than one million students over the next two years.
We at Mosaic believe that using technology and very simple personalised services will help in closing the knowledge and opportunity gap between rural and urban India and change the lives of our children.
