Remote learning initiatives - Goa

E-content and Repository

Through DIKSHA portal, students studying in schools affiliated to Goa Board can access e-textbooks, video lessons, interactive materials and other educational content like practice sheets and worksheets relevant to their regular curriculum.

The VidyaDaan Portal for the state of Goa has been launched to encourage teachers and institutions to create different types of content such as explanation videos, teaching videos, practice questions, competency-based items, lesson plans etc. as per the guidelines provided for the purpose and upload the same. The content thus uploaded will pass through a quality control mechanism before making the same available to students and teachers.

The state has constituted the editorial panel consisting of several teachers of the primary classes, faculty members from DIET and faculty from TISS Mumbai. Presently, all subjects of various mediums at Primary stage are covered. In the coming days, all classes up to 12th in all subjects will be included. To ensure that the content is created regularly for the state, several schools have been designated as content creators for specific subjects. Their orientation about the platform has been done through an online meeting.

Initiative of the State to help students preparing for entrance examinations

The State government has found an innovative way to help its students with their preparations for Goa CET, JEE, and NEET examinations without attending lectures physically.

For this purpose, the Directorate of Education has partnered with Embibe, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered online platform for learning, practicing, and testing, for students in the State. This partnership began with the administering of a diagnostic test on Embibe’s Personalized Adaptive Learning platform for Grade 10 students across Goa in the month of January 2020. Through this test, approximately 22,000 students from government as well as government-aided schools received feedback on their unique areas for improvement, empowering them and their teachers to focus on these areas and improve their board examinations scores. In the month of April the students were given the facility of mock tests for math and science subjects because the board examinations couldn’t be held on time due to lockdown.

It has been observed that the platform helped students from government schools to increase their overall average score by 74%, while their perfect attempts increased by 57%. At the same time, it was found that students’ wasted attempts and over-time attempts went down by 49% and 65%, respectively.

The partnership has now been extended to engineering and medical aspirants across the State, who do not have access to their classes during the ongoing lockdown. For the preparation of the competitive exams, the students were given access to online lectures and mock tests on the platform. This helped them to brush up their weak concepts and gave them the simulation of actual exams.

Online Training Programs for Primary, Secondary and Hr. Sec School Teachers

The Directorate of Education, SCERT and Goa Samagra Shiksha, in association with Adhyayan Foundation, Tata Trusts and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai organized 4 days on-line training program on “Effective Planning for Achievement of Learning Outcomes” for all the Primary, Secondary and Higher Secondary school teachers of the State. In total more than 11,000 teachers were trained in various online teaching learning platforms, online open educational resources and assessment mechanisms.

The objectives of the program are as follows:

1. To enable school leaders and teachers to engage with virtual platforms and pedagogical processes they enable, for learners to learn synchronously and asynchronously from the material available online.
2. To enable teachers to plan their academic year, taking into account the number of teaching days, summative assessments, events and activities.
3. To enable teachers to plan the Units and Lessons based on the choice of Open Education Resources available and the mode of delivery of information.
4. To enable school leaders and teachers to track the learning of the students to ensure that learning outcomes are improving.

The program was conducted in three phases:

1. Initially, 406 Master Trainers comprising teachers and Heads of Schools (from Primary, Secondary & Hr. Secondary), faculty from DIET and BRCC were trained on-line by the experts from TISS and Adhyayan Foundation.
2. Subsequently, these Master Trainers trained the fellow teachers online for a period of 4 days with synchronous and asynchronous mode in three phases.
3. The first phase training was held from 13th to 16th May 2020, second phase from 20th to 23rd & 25th May 2020, and third phase training was held from 3rd to 6th June & 8th June 2020 covering 11,319 teachers from Primary to Higher Secondary Schools.
4. Now teachers have started online classes for higher classes by using the skills provided during the meeting.

Online Training Programs for Special Educators

The state is planning online training for resource room life skills teachers and special educators in the state to be held in the month of June 2020. The training curriculum has been devised in consultation with external partners wherein the special educators dealing with children with intellectual and behavioural disabilities will be trained to use technology to transact their instructions and they will also be trained in a number of assistive technologies.

Source : Remote learning initiatives across India