In Karnataka, School Students to Learn From IIM Teachers Through Virtual Classrooms

After the visuals of mass copying and money taped to an answer sheet in Bihar made headlines, an ongoing project in Karnataka offers more positive news.

A satellite-based educational programme has started bringing the educational expertise of the IIM or Indian Institute of Management to classrooms across the state.

The programme, called Satellite and Advanced Multimedia Education or SAME, covers classes 5 to 10 and focuses on subjects like Math, Science and English.

Through a virtual classroom set up on a screen, students will get lessons straight from teachers at a studio in IIM.

The programme is led by a consortium headed by the IIM's Centre for Public Policy in Bengaluru along with content and technology developers.

In a pilot project, IIM and its partner, the state government, tested the satellite learning programme on some rural schools and found a marked improvement in Class 10 results. The state government was impressed enough to take up the project's funding and now wants it to cover 1000 schools.

Professor Gopal Naik of the IIM told NDTV, "We have put our own effort to show that this technology can actually deliver good educational input to rural students... and the teachers would be able to use this to teach their own classes better."

NDTV visited the government primary school in Karahalli in Karnataka's Devanahalli taluk, where students get educational inputs from a studio set up in IIM Bangalore.

"They show us pictures in tele-education so we can remember lifelong," said one student, Divya Spandana. Even teachers have overcome their initial resistance to the idea. Mamatha BN, a teacher in the Karahalli school said, "In rural areas, they haven't used or seen this kind of technology. It provides extra knowledge."

The project aims to bridge the gap in quality of education between rural and urban students in Karnataka, said Professor Naik.