We want to marry the entrepreneurial spirit which tuition teachers bring with technology, to provide low-income kids with the best educational experience possible.
Many low-income parents already send their kids to private, affordable , after-school hours tuition classes in their neighborhood, because they are so unhappy with the quality of teaching provided in Govt schools. However, these tuition teachers are strapped for funds, which means they are forced to resort to using old-fashioned pen and paper and traditional lectures to teach. This is why they are losing students to expensive commercial coaching classes, which use digital technology to teach, and spend millions on advertising their brand. However, this traps students in educational debt.
By providing Selligion ( www.selligion.com ) PCs to these tuition class teachers, we want to enable them to provide a premium experience to their students.
This model combines technology, affordability, and micro-entrepreneurship , to make high quality educational resources accessible to poor kids.
We are running many experiments all over the country , to find out whether this is a model which can scale up . By partnering with existing tuition class teachers who are already established in the community, the entry barriers will be minimal. These teachers are already trusted in the community, and will provide the safe space, the adult supervision, and the students . This is a bottom-up model, and while we can provide teaching materials, the teachers are free to adapt these to suit the needs of their students. The PCs will be used for 3 purposes – flipped classroom teaching , doubt solving and exam preparation, so that students will score higher marks. This will be an easy way of tracking tangible learning outcomes.
These classes encourage peer to peer learning, because of their small size. In any group, there will always be some bright kids , who are natural teachers, and do a far better job than regular school teachers, because they are much more patient and empathetic when teaching their friends.
Also, because our pods are in the community and not in the school, kids aren’t restricted to studying only what’s in the curriculum, and are free to explore their additional interests. While it’s true that most kids will not bother, some will inspire others to learn music , or pick up a game like chess or Sudoku, while some will improve the way they play cricket by watching matches on YouTube!
We are actively looking for successful tuition class teachers who run tuition classes in low-income areas such as urban slums , to partner with us. We want young ambitious computer-savvy teachers, who want to grow , and are willing to invest Rs 50000 to partner with us. This will ensure they have skin in the game !
Read more about this at https://apnipathshala.org/teach-to-earn/