The Postman Always Rings Twice

Our Digital StudyHall system is based on a unique approach leveraging the postal system, DVDs, robotically operated DVD publishers, long-distance ham radio transceivers, and short-range TV transmitters with radio controllers. We combine these components into a general-purpose and transparent communication system, providing pervasive, high-bandwidth, and low-cost connectivity. On top of this, we layer a web repository, called the "learning eBay" to enable a wide variety of digital education "workflows," such as lecture capture and replay, remote monitoring, student project collection and feedback, connecting learners and teaching staff across time and space, including volunteers from overseas. The system consists of a network of hubs and spokes, where the "hubs" are typically distributed in urban centers of excellence, which "radiate" contextually meaningful and coherent content and methodology into village and slum schools in their vicinity, which form the "spokes." An important goal of the system is to enable customized any-to-any communication and effective group learning, which may provide an ultimate solution to the scalability problem of the education system.

The pedagogy practiced in the system is based on the theory of "Tutored Video Instruction," where remote expertise is projected into a classroom, mediated by a local less well trained teacher. This approach goes way beyond passive TV watching; it requires the local teachers to perform a variety of activities to proactively engage their students while alternately playing and pausing the pre-recorded videos. In a sense, the video and the local teacher form a "team:" the video provides a framework, an agenda, and a content and methodology model; while the local teacher supplies the crucial interactive components. In addition to helping the students, the process provides excellent training to the less skilled local teachers. Unlike conventional training workshops that last only for a short period of time and can be too abstract, the kind of training a local teacher receives from the supplied videos is ongoing, continuous, and highly specific.

A live deployment of the DSH prototype has been in use by students and teachers in and around the Lucknow hub starting in July of 2005. Starting in the summer of 2006, we have launched two more hubs in Bangalore and in Pune. In the space of one and a half years, we have accumulated about 400 high-quality MPEG4 recordings of lessons staged by the best teachers at the hubs. The remaining 150 objects include science courseware, digital stories, and recordings of drama performances, all of which are produced by students and staff at the Lucknow hub school. The languages used in the content include Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and English. As the high-quality content is quickly and cheaply generated, it is being continuously pushed out to a variety of rural and urban slum pilot schools around the hubs. Preliminary results appear promising, and the system seems to be playing an effective but subtle role of blurring class differences in a highly stratified society. We hope to eventually scale up the system to cover a far greater number of villages and children, contributing toward the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education.