Educate 25000 Children through Volunteers in India

The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 forced school closures in 188 countries, heavily disrupting the learning process of more than 1.7 billion children and youth. This paved an opportunity for remote online learning/digital classrooms. According to research by “WeForum.Org”, on average, students retain 25-60% more material when learning online compared to only 8-10% in a classroom. This is mostly due to the students being able to learn at their own pace, re-reading, skipping, or accelerating through concepts as they chose. E-learning requires 40-60% less time to learn than in a traditional classroom setting.

However, the pandemic showed us just how unequal the opportunities in education are, across various social classes in India. While a small percentage of children continued learning using computers and devices, others were rationed out access to a smartphone from parents who could barely afford the mobile plans, and even more languished at home, unable to continue their education in any shape or form due to the lack of resources.

At Bhumi, we worked hard to enable students from underserved communities to continue their education. In the year 2021-2022, 1,234 children across 171 Shelter homes in India were equipped with Desktop Systems and Laptops to enable online learning. Being digitally equipped helped children attend 2,140 classes for the year, helping them continue learning Maths, Computers, Science, English, and other topics. This also helped volunteers conduct assessments in these projects where the impact was found to be as follows: 

• In Mathematics, Grade 2, 3 and 4 children performed well and mastered skills such as Money Value, Word Problems, Fractions, Perimeter, Division, Symmetry, Data Handling etc.
• In Computer Science, Out of 96 children, the highest number of children (30 and 28 respectively) performed independently at Introduction to Computers and Paint without the help of a teaching-volunteer
• In English, Children of Grade 4 and 5 were able to perform well across skills such Reading, Writing and Comprehension

Equipping Shelter Homes with devices also helped in establishing classroom rubrics i.e, capturing behavior of children in online sessions such as interest levels, involvement, adaptability etc.

Links:

• Beneficiary of Petra Trust, Bangalore sharing his experience