Khan Academy-the useful stuff
Salman Khan's labelled as Bill Gates' favourite teacher in a recent article by Fortune magazine. This Khan is not the Hindi movie actor. He's an Indian-American Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate who quit his job as a hedge fund manager with Wohl Capital Management to found a non-profit education initiative in 2009.
Khan become an online sensation after his virtual school khanacademy.org — a collection of free self-narrated video-lectures on YouTube —caught on.
Khan got the idea in 2004 when he helped a cousin with a math problem over the telephone while using Yahoo Doodle as a virtual, real-time notepad.
He says he has at least 300,000 followers a month for his mini-lectures, including Gates' children. The aim is to "provide education to anyone, anywhere," including children who have to work for a living.
The 33-year-old teacher plans to take his tutorials to iTunes as well. "Also, over the next two years, the tutorials will be translated into Hindi, Urdu and Bengali," says Khan, whose mother hails from Kolkata and father from Bangladesh. "It's motivating for me when people tell me they didn't fail after using these tutorials."
Achievement: Khan's 1,800+ tutorials on YouTube are viewed about 100,000 times a day on an average. He says his virtual academy, being developed as an open source project, reaches at least 300,000 students a month in the US, Canada, Australia and India. "Over 10% of our viewers are from India," he says
Room To Read (RTR) was launched globally in 2000 by John Wood, who after trekking through schools in Nepal was shocked by their lack of resources and inspired enough to quit as Microsoft Corp’s director of business development for China to begin his non-profit venture.
RTR came to India in 2003, making the country its fourth home after Nepal, Vietnam and Cambodia. It aimed to partner with local communities and foster reading as a habit, especially where government efforts were inadequate.
Today, RTR India's interventions have reached at least 3,500 schools.
"The Right To Education, in laying out basic parameters, said that schools must have libraries. So we began with giving books to schools and training teachers for day-to-day transactions," said Sunisha Ahuja, RTR's India country director.
"In 2006, Pratham's Aser (annual state of education report) confirmed that children (53 per cent of those surveyed) didn't have basic reading skills. So in 2007, we started developing textbook for teachers to train children. There were picture cards, word cards, local rhymes… the idea was to develop a reading habit so that they become independent readers."
Reading, says RTR India's global chief officer Dhir Jhingan, is a foundation skill. "It helps other skills."
Achievement: RTR expects to establish 4,000 libraries in India by the end of 2010 and add another 850 by the end of next year. Worldwide, it says at least four million children have benefited from its programmes, and in India, about 825,000.
Pratham, one of the largest non-profit organisations in the country, was established in 1994 in five Mumbai slums. It aimed to identify gaps in education in terms of dropouts and teaching techniques.
Its annual status of education report, or Aser, is the largest household survey on elementary education in India. The survey was first carried out in 2005 and is used in policy formulation by the Union and state governments, including for SSA.
Pratham launched its flagship programme — Read India (RI) — in 2007. The idea was to improve reading, writing and basic arithmetic in children aged 6-14.
Today, taxpayers pay an additional two per cent education cess to support elementary education and at least 90 per cent of all children in the 6-14 age group are enrolled in schools, according to the Aser report. Still, by many counts, basic learning levels are far from satisfactory.
"SSA's projected impact by 2010 hasn't taken place as expected but somehow the new RTE Act will help fill this gap," says Himanshu Giri, chief operating officer of Pratham Books, the publishing arm of the non-profit body.
Achievement: In 2008-09, RI reached 33 million children in 19 states; 400,529 books were read by children and 600,000 teachers and govt workers were trained under RI.
source-Hindustan Times
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