The HRD ministry has provided an outlay of more than ₹42k crore for the education of 250 M students going to school in the year 2015-16. With its focus on using technology for promoting inclusivity in education, it looks to reduce dropout rate so that more skilled workforce is created.
According to the schooling segment report by Technopak, “The Enrolment ratio drops to 81% after primary schooling and to 31% in grades 9 to 12.” The reasons cited for low enrolment and high dropout rates are low availability of schools in rural areas, low awareness, and prevalence of child labour amongst lower income strata.
With a considerable time required for infrastructure to meet these demands, technology today can serve as the best tool to democratize education. So, using technology for creating opportunities that makes learning more engaging and community driven could go a long way in creating inclusivity in education. Education in community environment not only creates better engagement for students but it also helps to generate better ideas as the problems are being crowdsourced.
Here are a few tools that are making education engaging and inclusive by leveraging the strength of learning in community environment.
Quizlet app makes learning engaging by allowing users to create a set of terms that can be studied in different modes.Students can create or choose a set of flashcards already created by the community. In the play mode, they can choose between the games that help to complete the desired task in a game format.
The world’s largest social learning community, which serves more than 50 M students with 12 different language versions. With Brainly, you can ask a question about an assignment or already discover if it already exists in its Knowledge Base. It drives engagement by means of rank and point system along with the community of users that provide solutions to those questions. With their newly designed app, they claim to make the service more intuitive and speed up support for the community. The new search tools in its new app allow quick and efficient research for essays, projects and studying.
Showme is another global learning community where students can learn or teach anything using whiteboard animations.Though currently available only for Ipad, it claims to have millions of whiteboard animations created by community on different school subjects.
Hstry is web based community that aims to drive engagement by utilizing timelines for demonstrating an event or a concept. Students can add elements like text,video,multiple choice questions to create these timelines. Also there is forum where students can start discussions regarding their doubts.
Thanks to program like Digital India, with the greater number of students connecting to Internet, these tools are empowering communities that fosters learning in engaged and effective manner.
For instance Quizlet app can better help to learn topics that involves more memorization. Brainly is all round online community platform for any of learning needs. Showme can better help to understand a concept by means of whiteboard animations & Hstry can help you to organize what you have learnt by means of timelines. These tools (technology) combined with the social aspects of community are creating instances that is making learning and education engaging at mass scale.
