Keywords: Voluntary Teaching, Educational Technology, CSCW, Motivation, Uneducated Children
Guide : Keyur Sorathia, Asst. Professor
Guide : Keyur Sorathia, Asst. Professor
Team Member : Mehul Agrawal
Duration : Aug-Nov 2012
Duration : Aug-Nov 2012
Brief
To provide a platform for volunteer teachers which would be able to keep the teachers motivated, confident and also cater their different kind of problems occurring during teaching by providing them tools and resources like open source teaching material, discussion forums etc. To help teachers to initiate and continue voluntary teaching which would result in better life for underprivileged children.
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We started our user study with mess workers in our hostel and asked about their past education experience, their daily activities etc. Then we went to Shishugram, an orphanage home near IIT Guwahati campus. We interviewed the manager of Shishugram about education of the children. From there, we came to know about a group of girls teaching those children. We interviewed them about their motivation, their teaching experience and methods, problems they faced and innovation they had during teaching. We found some other voluntary teachers around campus and interviewed them similarly. We also interviewed some people not doing voluntary teaching and asked them about their any past voluntary actions and reasons behind not taking steps if they were concerned.
Simultaneously we went through some research papers on literacy, education in India and on voluntary teaching. Our purpose behind reading these papers was first, to find the current trends and their reasons in Indian education sector and second, to understand different paradigms and aspects of voluntary teaching. We also researched about other projects happened or happening around the world to educate economically backward people to know various dimensions of our projects.
Proposed Concept Explanation
From various design concepts, we decided to focus upon collaboration in voluntary teaching and design a collaborative teaching platform for teachers with integration of Gamification in same. After a lot of brain-storming we chose this concept we found out that this has potential to cater many of the problems like doubts, management, study material, confidence and it would also them keep motivated.
We came up with a concept of collaborative teaching. The major work in collaborative teaching is done to increase interdisciplinary learning in college and high school but its use in volunteerism is still a field that needs to be explored and nurtured. In collaborative teaching instead of single teacher taking class there could be multiple teachers taking class and thereby reducing dependency on a single person. The collaboration can be local or online based. The web app is made such that minimum effort is required to make notes and people can user other people notes and other teaching material to teach their class to minimize time lost in planning to make up for extra time for collaboration. Most of the people in the interview said that they had a slight hesitation in taking regular classes or that certain breaks in classes lead them to discontinue. So in this model since more than one teacher would be taking class, when one is not able to take class other teacher can replace him/ her.
Gamification for motivation during literature study we came to know that fulfillment forms as major motivation for volunteers. Thus by using Gamification in our solution we tried bring a sense of fulfillment to the voluntary teachers.