Over the past 5 years, the number of internet users in India has grown exponentially. However, access to local language content for learning still remains a challenge.
Majority of the content available online is in English. Students and teachers find it very difficult to engage with the content when references and language used are not familiar to them. Attempts to professionally make content in local language often results in mere translation and does not account for the loss of context.
MITRA aims to empower the already growing number of tech-savvy teachers in the state of Maharashtra, India.
MITRA is piloting an innovation where content is created in the open source domain by tech-savvy public school teachers in the state with the support of subject experts. Content is created through workshops organized through the support of the state education department. Many of these teachers come from rural and tribal belts of the state which have a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts.
The long-term objective is to establish a community of content creators who will consistently create quality contextual content and set quality benchmarks for content through peer support and review.
By the end of 2018 teachers will have produced 5665 unique content pieces across Marathi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Hindi and English. Content created by the teachers will be linked to QR codes that have been printed in all state textbooks for grades 1 through 10.
