It’s been a couple of months since I announced the launch of Shuddhi Vidhya. A few things have happened since then.
Our primary intention with Shuddhi Vidhya is to provide barrier-free access to relevant education to as many individuals as possible. We especially want to make it accessible to the vast number of highly talented but underprivileged children in our country, especially in the rural regions. In this regard we’re proud to announce that we’ve taken a few small but sure steps forward. In specific, we have two major updates to announce.
The first thing that we did was to partner up with some schools that are run by non-profits. Unfortunately, owing to the uncertainties regarding the pandemic, some of the schools opted to not pursue this partnership at the moment and hoped to pursue it at a later time. But fortunately, one of our partner set of schools have found this partnership to be quite a valuable proposition given the current circumstances. So we are proceeding with implementing our first attempt at remote learning through them. And this set of schools is none other than Isha Vidhya!
For those who may not be aware, Isha Vidhya is a unique set of schools whose agenda are very much in line with our own:-
Isha Vidhya is committed to raising the level of education and literacy in rural India and helping disadvantaged children realize their full potential. The project seeks to ensure quality education for children in rural areas, opening the door for them to participate in and benefit from India’s economic growth.
– Taken from their official website on 14th July 2020
Furthermore, their administration team is quite proactive, agile and responsive, as I’ve had the pleasure of observing first-hand while touring their school and interacting with them.
With Isha Vidhya we have partnered to introduce web development to students of classes 6 to 8 in three of their rural schools. This is roughly 250 to 270 students overall (CORRECTION: This number turns out to be closer to 500 actually!). The remote classes are underway and the goal is to get these students introduced to web development.
When we were discussing the partnership, we had discussed that the students will get dedicated time to spend in the computer labs which were equipped with internet enabled desktops. But this was before the pandemic and the lockdown had started.
By the time the academic year started there was a unique challenge, which is that all these students are stuck at home and almost none of them have a computer at home! So owing to this unusual circumstance, we now had to redesign the entire program to fit into their internet enabled smartphones. Of course this restricted the scope of what we could do, but fortunately barring a few compromises on what we could do, we have been able to redesign the content to be effective just through the students’ smartphones.
It’s just been a couple of weeks since we started with the students but the teachers and the administration have been quite active in this collaboration and our initial logistics are all setup and we’ve all been oriented on how this is going to go. So there will be further updates on how things are progressing down the line.
The second exciting update is that Shuddhi Vidhya now has its own YouTube channels and its own official website! We started two YouTube channels to create accessible course content to be used in our collaboration with schools. It’s the same content but in two languages — English and Tamil. We have this in two languages for two reasons — One, is that English is universal and we can reach a lot of users and second, it makes no sense to create educational content targeted at rural children if we cannot do it in regional languages. So for now we also have Tamil. But as we progress further, it would be ideal to have regional languages in most Indian languages. But this will take the support of volunteers who can dub content and is something that we may be able to pursue with time.
So these are the two updates at this moment. If you’re reading this and you know someone who can benefit from the free technical educational content posted on our YouTube channels, please share the videos on our YouTube channels.
Official Website — https://shuddhividhya.org
English YouTube channel — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3nvxhoTnloHet-kpF9Bdmw
Tamil YouTube Channel — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwIt2TumkA75UeuIrs3Ty9A
We really need all the support we can to make this successful, and would appreciate any support you can offer!