ECONOMICAL QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN SCHOOLS

Bikash Choudhury



Low Cost Quality Improvement Program:

Problem:

1. Paucity of Highly Competent and Motivated Subject Teachers in the Govt. School system in our State of Odisa.
2. Difficulty of Govt. to provide for such teachers in all Schools for a long time due to issues related to finance, Infrastructural bottlenecks and complex societal factors.

Solution:

1. Mass Education Dept. can address this challenge by “Help develop audio-visual content” for each class & each subject of [K1-10] by Identifying most competent teachers for each subject and class curriculum and producing audio-visual contents and distribute such contents in all five thousand plus schools in the State.
2. Further, all schools can be allotted just required funds to either purchase or hire audio visual equipments at the level of respective schools to screen class room contents to reinforce the class room interaction of subject teachers.
3. The Teachers deployed for producing digital contents can be compensated suitably in addition to their respective emoluments on the basis of class feed backs.

Benefits:

1. This should initially and temporarily solve the shortage of subject teachers in schools and improve the “Quality of Class Room Learning” hopefully.
2. This may help develop a healthy competion among teachers pool and create a “meritocracy among subject teachers”.
3. This model could also help develop small entrepreneurs in rural areas. Who will supply Audio-Visual equipments to school on rent.
4. This ‘QIP’ model is less capital intensive and scaleable in very short time.


Successful Precedent:

1. A company named “Educomp” has been offering digital contents to 23,000 Schools and 1.2 crore students and teachers for last ten years at a cost of Rs. 75-150 per student which could be an expensive proposition for the Mass Education Dept.; therefore, Dept. can develop a unique model within the system to provide digital contents to schools at fraction of such cost.

2. Greycells18 Media is another organization which provides interactive educational services on television.