Remote learning model for students from low-income families a success

KOCHI: Thiruvananthapuram native Anand Gopakumar’s zeal to empower students belonging to low-income families and inculcate life skills in them led to The Apprentice Project (TAP). The programme had been functioning successfully in over 20 schools in Mumbai and Pune when the pandemic struck. TAP has now developed and implemented the ‘Remote Learning Model’ across 15 cities in the country, with an offline support network.

According to a survey conducted by TAP, a majority of the students from low-income backgrounds felt bored, anxious, sad and frustrated during the lockdown period. “Over 300 million learners in India have been affected by school closures due to Covid-19. They lacked access to online courses and were devoid of learning support.While children from higher socio-economic backgrounds receive better guidance from their parents, most children in lower-income families lack this.

TAP works majorly with children of daily-wage earners (`8,000 to `15,000 monthly income) who are the worst affected due to the pandemic,” says Anand, co-founder, TAP. The course is hosted on an Edmodo/Google classroom and the children are supported via WhatsApp groups with the help of volunteer mentors.

“Volunteers will support the child in completing the coursework and improve their learning level based on curriculum standards. During the lockdown, we supported over 300 children directly via our volunteer mentor-led model and more than 10 organisations with curriculum and activity videos who in turn mentored more than 10,000,” adds Anand.

The content is distributed via WhatsApp and hosted on Edmodo for easy access. Courses range from Technical Arts (like game coding, website building), Performance Arts (ballet, film appreciation or stand-up), and Visual Arts (art exploration courses and developing self-expression). “The mentors explain the weeks’ activities, engage the students, track their progress, clear their doubts and motivate them to innovate,” says Anand. The volunteers are selected by TAP from organisations like Adobe, Salesforce, CitiBank, BNP Paribas, to name a few.

However, Anand affirms that it was challenging to implement the remote model due to internet bandwidth issues. “We could not conduct live classes with the children as we would have liked. However, we sent them activity plans like data packets that required the least possible mobile data. Another important challenge was to make the students self-learn the content, which is not always practical,” he says.

Anand adds that online learning is to be taken seriously. “If we develop standardised tech structures, we might even have the concept of a ‘virtual school’ in the coming years.We aim to create a pan-India impact to reach as many children as possible. From September, we plan to scale up the remote model working with over 2,500 children and more than 10 organisations. We are planning to launch our programmes in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, and Kozhikode by 2021,” says Anand.