Student watching Khan Academy videos in Dhaka
Written by Dilruba “Sheila” Chowdhury, Director of Projects (San Jose, CA)
Bringing the latest innovations in education technology to the underprivileged children in Bangladesh: From Mountain View, California to Koyra, Khulna
The journey started in late 2010 – Agami invited Salman Khan from Khan Academy at Mountain View to share with us his work, which led to collaboration to translate in Bangla 883 Math videos from Khan Academy. By the end of 2011, all of these videos were made available on Agami’s learning channel for Bangla speaking students from around the world.
We did not want to stop there. We wanted to bring these videos to the children who did not have access to the internet. We also recognized the need to make this resource more meaningful in the context of Bangladesh. Several weeks of careful content matching work both in Dhaka, Bangladesh and in San Jose, California resulted in a short list of about 100 videos appropriate for selected grades in Bangladesh. The short listed videos were loaded onto portable/hand held mobile devices. As part of a 6 month long pilot study, these were distributed to 188 students from grades 5 and 7 in 4 schools in Bangladesh. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Agami team from USA and Bangladesh, students from urban slums in Dhaka to remote villages in Koyra can now turn to the same videos that students from a Los Altos school, in one of richest Zip codes in the USA, turn to when confronted with a Math problem.
As pleased as we are with the progress we have made so far, this is just the beginning. We are working closely with the students and teachers in these schools. We are learning along with them how to effectively utilize these video lessons in and out of class rooms. We look forward to reaching more students in the coming months.
Written by Dilruba “Sheila” Chowdhury, Director of Projects (San Jose, CA)
Teachers training in Khulna
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