Overcoming the geographical barriers, the poor, marginalized and underprivileged children living in remote rural and hilly areas are getting quality education using multimedia system similarly with the children of metropolis.
Taking the bliss of technology, the idea of virtual school in a remote village of Teknaf under Cox’s Bazar district, 500km from the capital city Dhaka, aims to enlighten the children with modern education.
Now, the parents of Khonkarpar in Teknaf upazila have started dreaming to make their children doctor, engineer and high official, which they never imagined.
The mechanism behind the online school is fairly simple, as the classroom is connected to a teacher in Dhaka via internet-based video conferencing technology, and the classes are run in the physical presence of local moderators.
The school, situated at Khonkarpara on the Teknaf beach road, started operation from December 2014 where two local moderators support the online teachers during the class.
Sazia Afrin, a moderator of the school, told a group of visiting journalists that 39 children aged 4-6 years are reading in the school and they are mostly from nearby fishing villages. “I helped the children to understand the lesson during the classes,” she added.
Country’s leading cellular phone operator GrameenPhone in partnership with JAGOO Foundation and Agni System has established the online school. The first Online School started in August 2011 with 80 Students.
At the end of the first academic year, a comparison of performance was done among similar types of schools (Banani School and Rayerbazaar School) and Online School.
On a GPA scale of 4, the Online School had a year-end average GPA of 3.3725 while Banani School and Rayerbazar School 2.8675 and 3.08 respectively.
Now, there are 693 students in 10 schools located in Gazipur, Gaibandha, Rajshahi, Madaripur Bandarban, Teknaf, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Hobiganj and Laxmipur.
Talking to BSS, Debashis Roy, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility of Grameenphone, said, “We’ve taken the initiative of online school to cut the gap between rural and urban in terms of providing quality education using technology.”
The online teachers deliver the lecture followed by an interactive session with the students for every class. The moderators at the receiving end assists the children during class work and help to maintain a disciplined classroom environment.
The modern software used for this form of schooling is WebEx which is an interactive and professional video conferencing software aimed at making the learning process communicative and interactive even with the virtual presence of its remote learners.
The programme contains interactive whiteboard, slide-sharing and video-sharing features and combines a sketch-board to acquaint the students with alphabets through just a stroke from its virtual tutor.
In order to host the classes from Dhaka in a disciplined manner, a studio has also been established named “Teachers Center” at Rayerbazaar. Online School Teacher’s Center is capable of conducting 10 classes (each of ¾ hours duration) simultaneously and it has the capacity of conducting 20 such classes every day.
