Please share some of the initiatives EDC has implemented in the primary education sector in India?
We are very good at reaching to the disadvantaged population, particularly in the government schools and specially to the girls. We try to reach to different class levels and lower castes, trying to bring equity between them in the classrooms. We work within the government school system using the existing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme to help implement our programme, conduct teacher training and also using ICTs as a way to reach more people and scale up specifically interactive radio instruction and addresses math science and English in the lower primary from class I to V.
Would you like to throw more light on Interactive Radio Instruction? What is the idea behind it. Why did you choose radio as the medium for instruction and not other more commonly used communication channels, such as web, television or any of the currently existing moods of delivery?
IRI is an activity based instruction that guides the teachers and the students in the classroom. It provides basically in-service training to the teachers and on how to conduct good activity based learning.
We are present in every primary school in the entire state of Karnataka with IRI. Whether or not every school turns on the radio is questionable, but millions and millions of children in primary schools across the state are participating in the programme. We are able to scale up and able to keep quality intact by using this rather inexpensive technology called interactive radio instruction.
We have other models like the video based instruction thats also uses a very good interactive pedagogy as well as group teaching learning software, which is one computer classroom software. This is also an efficient use of resource, because it only requires one computer and address a large group of students, about 20
