The part of the developed world where I come from unfortunately is sitting on top of one of the crappiest education systems of the world, no words can describe how we desperately need revamping of that whole system.
Yet the lack of funds , and honestly a clear vision is a major block on the road . Solving this obstacle needs thinking out of the box on solutions that would help tackle both.
I constantly think about this , and cloud computing just jumped there to my head , and hey why not!! Idea is simple yet looks effective to me so here goes. We need to move in a couple of different directions :
1. Core of the cloud :
First we need to revisit the entire curriculum , making it more dynamic and presentable using all the new tools of presenting to students, the upside of this is that you will not need to produce this media in mass numbers all you need is one version and up to goes to the cloud. The media needs to be in different mediums, from writing, to interactive videos,audio lessons etc. now the trick with this is that it will be created centrally by professionals and will accessible to the entire population of the country so we are sure all get the same.
Second, the government needs to centrally buy rights to redistribute articles, books in the form of research material available for students to further look up information so they can prepare and write their assignments.
Third, is the grading system which allows for each student to have their own online profile , to transparently monitor their progress , watch their assignment list .
2. How will it work :
To understand how it will work you need to first understand where the main defects of the education system are :
– poor and old fashioned ciriculum ( we tackled this with building the core cloud)
– under staffed and untrained education providers
– poor paid staff
– over crowded class rooms
– private tuition replaces all classes at almost all levels of school education
– corrupt monitoring and control system (almost zero control)
There are several steps that need to be taken to tackle some of the above points at once . First,setting up a central core team of tutors to be tasked with grading assignments in a transparent way with no access to see student names, this way no corruption in the grading system , no value of taking a private lesson with the class teacher she/he has no influence on the grading.
This way we have added a lot of transparency into the system, it will enable adding more weight on the work and all year assignments rather than a single end of year exam, and in a system that will be trustable to parents.
Exercising a large pool of teacher resources available online to interact with students, answer questions, leveraging the availability of those resources everywhere around he country, and paying the tutors on an hourly scheme will help quell the low income issue.
With school classes now focusing on core curriculum , schooling hours can be extended to longer days , shorter classes with less number of people, as we are sure students are engaged even while at home with their assignments or else they will not pass .
Now the final part , comes the hardware needed by students in a country where 40% are living under the poverty line do not expect parents to take this cost , but with little investment into locally manufacturing net books,low cost tablets ( will blog later about an Indian vendor that produced a low cost version for students) the solution should not be impossible.
As the world discovers more and more the applications that could leverage cloud computing, lets hope those ideas can benefit this part of the world at some point.
