Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)
Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has taken a stride forward to improve the quality of education in civic-run schools by giving a push to the digital education. According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, BMC in one of its latest schemes has proposed evaluating students on the lines of the audience poll shown on the popular quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati.
As reported by Mumbai Mirror, BMC is planning to equip one classroom, from next academic year, in each civic-run school with a large interactive screen and the students will be equipped with a remote-like gadget. At the end of the day, teachers will pose multiple-choice questions related to topics discussed during the day’s session, and these will be displayed on the screen.
By asking the students to press a button corresponding to the answer on the screen, BMC is eyeing to cover three major aspects of teaching in one shot - realtime evaluation of students, gauging teachers’ capability and it may even replace the age-old roll call method of attendance.
An 11-member committee, headed by education officer Mahesh Palkar, has been constituted to formulate the digital evaluation policy.
“We will also examine the e-learning hardware which students and teachers will be comfortable using and will also take into account the opinion of teachers,” Palkar told Mirror.
As per the recommendations of the committee, the corporation will decide to either go ahead with the use of projectors for the programme or replace them with savvier LED screens.
“At the end of the test, we will know how many students have answered correctly. Through this we will also know the learning outcomes of a class at the end of a school day,” said AL Jarhad, BMC’s Additional Municipal Commissioner in charge of education to the newspaper.
As part of its basic digitisation of classrooms, the BMC has already undertaken the work of fitting 1,244 projectors in schools.
“Once the policy is framed and budgetary allocation is made, we will have at least 1,400 digital screens – one per school – by next year. and those schools that fulfil all the 25 parameters laid down by the state government on grading schools (such as attendance, admissions, cleanliness, reading ability of students, their ability to form sentences, among others) will have all their classrooms digitised. Teachers will be trained to conduct these evaluation exercises. There will be multiple checks to ensure the quality of education,” Jarhad added.
