National lockdown for Coronavirus pandemic has affected educational activities all across but the Urdu Schools remain one of the worst hit.
“While we see there is an upsurge of digital educational content and resources in English and few other Indian languages, Urdu language remains visibly neglected and inadequately supported,” said Khurshid Alam, Chief of Teach in Urdu (http://teachinurdu.org/).
Khurshid is the brain behind the online resource Teach in Urdu (TIU), an initiative of Springboard Foundation which is a not-for-profit organization established to promote and encourage Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship at the grass root. Established in 2015, the unit initially ran with 3 volunteers that grew to 11 permanent members with several part-time translators and content curators.
“Although its rich literary heritage needs no introduction, unfortunately, it has very few pedagogical and learning resources available on the digital platform,” opines Khurshid. He explains the motive behind this unique endeavour highlighting that there are about 20 crore people in the subcontinent whose mother tongue is Urdu and although poems and literature in Urdu abound the internet, there is an unprecedented lack of educational resources for students.
According to a 2015 study, there are a total of 28,276 Urdu schools (including private schools) in 26 states of India and apart from NCERT, only six state education boards are providing textbooks on the Internet for Urdu speakers. With over tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students that fall under this category, the need to Urdu educational content is huge. To address this, TIU members of including Abdul Mumin, Mujahidul Islam, Salman Waheed and other full-time professional teachers, digital teaching specialists and teaching assistants are currently involved in developing not only translated material but also resources for empowering Urdu medium instructors.
“While there is a lot of buzz about technology enabling e-learning, meaningful technology integration in education requires concerted efforts to combine high-quality educational resources with teacher capacity building,” explains Khurshid. In this context, his team is concerned with the preparation of educational resources, teaching guides, educational material translation from other languages, and publication of materials in audio/video and other formats. The website also publishes pedagogical content for teachers, guides for various scientific and other educational experiments for children, and interactive simulations among other resources.
In light of the COVID-19 lockdown and huge dearth of digital literacy in the field, a survey of Urdu medium schools is being conducted by TIU to find out how Urdu medium schools are dealing with teaching problems. The survey can be filled by school administration or headmaster or principal (https://cutt.ly/iyWMKSN).
“We are now planning to conduct webinars for teachers to cope up with the educational needs during the lockdown period,” he said. As schools remain closed because of the deadly spread of Corona, TIU is planning on utilizing this time to build direct connectivity with both teachers and students through social media platforms.
Speaking about the reception of website resources among the Urdu speaking students, Khurshid shared that TIU receives an average 3000 visits per month with an active WhatsApp group of teachers from across the country that has full accessibility to content and interaction regarding empowering of Urdu teachers.
courtesy: TwoCircles.net