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MITRA

place India + 1 more

How can we empower teachers and students through localized and contextual teaching- learning resources?

MITRA is a techology intervention that aims to provide students and teachers in the state of Maharashtra access to contextual and localized teaching learning resources and foster a culture of independent and self paced learning

Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2017

Established

-

Children

1

Countries
Updated
June 2018
There is a paucity of local language content in Maharashtra. Providing access to high quality digital teaching learning resources in local language can increase learner engagement significantly. Teachers engaging in the process of content creation can add tremendous value to the relevance of content.

About the innovation

MITRA, a friend to teachers and students!

Over the past 5 years, the number of internet users in India has grown exponentially. However, access to local language content for learning still remains a challenge.

Majority of the content available online is in English. Students and teachers find it very difficult to engage with the content when references and language used are not familiar to them. Attempts to professionally make content in local language often results in mere translation and does not account for the loss of context. 

MITRA aims to empower the already growing number of tech-savvy teachers in the state of Maharashtra, India. 

MITRA is piloting an innovation where content is created in the open source domain by tech-savvy public school teachers in the state with the support of subject experts. Content is created through workshops organized through the support of the state education department. Many of these teachers come from rural and tribal belts of the state which have a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts.

The long-term objective is to establish a community of content creators who will consistently create quality contextual content and set quality benchmarks for content through peer support and review. 

By the end of 2018 teachers will have produced 5665 unique content pieces across Marathi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Hindi and English. Content created by the teachers will be linked to QR codes that have been printed in all state textbooks for grades 1 through 10. 

Media

Content Creation workshops are held under the State Council for Educational Research and Training, Maharashtra which is the apex government body in the state for teacher education.Every Content Creation Workshop consists of teachers who have been selected by SCERT IT dept as tech-savvy and verified by Subject departments of SCERT as having requisite knowledge on the subject for which content is being made. Subject experts are chosen by SCERT subject departments who act as mentors, advisors and manage the content review.Content Workshop Workflow:Templatization of Concepts by Subject Experts: Subject Experts discuss the various elements that need to go into a learning lesson and enter these in templatized formats. Storyboarding: Tech Savvy Teachers and subject experts sit together and translate the templatized lesson into a storyboard which will define the flow of the learning lesson.Storyboard Review: Each teacher Presents their storyboard and feedback is given to them on the same by the subject experts to make the required corrections.Content Creation on Digital Platform: After the storyboards have been finalized teachers begin the process of digital content creation on a digital platform- this may be the DIKSHA platform, Powerpoint or other open source platforms.Digital Content Review: After the content is drafted by teachers it is reviewed online. Teachers are expected to make the necessary changes in the content based on Content Published: Once all the corrections are made based on the reviewer's comments, the content is published and linked to textbooks through QR codes.
MITRA Yatra is an initiative to reach out to various stakeholders in the education domain across all 36 districts in Maharashtra, India. It is a 3 day visit by the MITRA team to a selected district. The team interacts with students, academic and administrative officials who work closely with schools.Apart from resolving queries and collecting feedback regarding MITRA, this visit also provides MITRA team with an opportunity to learn about ground realities in schools, collect feedback from a larger audience regarding ICT implementations. We invite you to join us in our journey towards ensuring equal access to Ed-tech for all of Maharashtra's students. 

Implementation steps

FGDs with innovators and influencers

MITRA was kickstarted due to the active participation of 12 highly motivated and influential and tech-savvy teachers each of who were innovators in their own unique ways. Some had created websites, others were experts at making video and audio content, a few of them had even made their own apps. 

These the very first content creators for MITRA. Their insight also led to the creation of the very first MITRA prototype. The most significant input provided by this group was the lack of preparedness in the system towards taking full-fledged online courses. This helped the MITRA team to focus more on classroom content and resources that teachers could implement immediate into their instruction. 


Prototyping

After extensive interviews and FGDs, the MITRA team went about building a basic prototype App to test the use case of teacher created classroom content and its demand on the ground.

You can download the prototype here  

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mavericklabs.mitra&hl=en_US


Outreach - MITRA Yatra

The word 'Yatra' means a journey with a purpose. MITRA Yatra was conducted across 5 districts of Maharashtra with a mission to collect key insights on technology adoption is tech-enabled schools across Maharashtra.

The team spent over 2 months, after the release of MITRA, traveling across urban, rural and tribal belts of the state of Maharashtra speaking and interacting with teachers and students to get a better understanding of its effectiveness in the teaching-learning process. 


Content Creation Workshops

Feedback from teachers through MITRA Yatra surveys clearly showed demand for local language digital content in the teaching-learning process.

To ensure the creation of quality content at scale through teachers in local language had not been attempted before. After thorough planning, 15 content creation workshops were organized that trained over 280 teachers on digital content creation through an open source content creation platform EkStep.

Teachers were paired with subject experts. Together they brainstormed, storyboarded and created over 1446 digital content pieces in the languages of Marathi and Urdu.

Focus Group Discussions were conducted with teachers to get feedback on the content made.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1knQ0rVTzwync1yfufjuuX79GHjq4UmMGvIVYGe90QXM/edit

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