Our vision is to unlock 1000 hrs
of high quality content for teachers and connect this content with 1 million teachers in India.
We realized in order to achieve our vision we need to pull 5 critical levers together.
With our experience we realized that platform and production were two relatively easier levers. The challenge is to unlock content, distribute the content and measure impact of our work. For
the
next 5
years we will focus our strategy on learning how to make these levers efficient and simultaneously create a knowledge base for the ecosystem. We are influenced by Chris Anderson’s book titled “The Long Tail”. It shares a 98% rule –
which states that in almost every digital context(Amazon Kindle, iTunes, YouTube, Netflix) – 98% of the content available is purchased/consumed at least once in
one quarter.As long as one is democratizing content creation and
breaking barriers between content and users, a long tail will emerge. This knowledge shaped our thinking. In a market
where there is almost no content for teachers (on concepts, in vernacular language) we knew where to start.
Crowd sourced content (teacher creating content for teachers) is great for supporting the appetite of teacher community that wants to make and share but it doesn’t move the needle when it comes to
informing teacher practice with progressive concepts. Hence, we created a strategy to democratize the creation of exemplary content by rolling out the programs below:
Internal content engineOur internal team of expert academicians and production specialists would create close to 1000 hours of content by 2022, with a focus is grade 1 to 8, and on hard spots of maths
teaching, first language teaching, pedagogy and science.
Dream Team programThis program aims at creating a community of practice. We know there are over 20 not for profit organization which have high reputation and success of dealing with progressive concepts
for teachers. We want to influence these not-for-profit organizations with exemplar content to digitize the same using our sweet spot framework. Many such organizations are fence sitters with an
inherent desire to digitise in order to scale up. Dream team program is an accelerator which builds their capacity and accelerates their learning to do so. At present we are influencing 6 organizations – Ekalvya, Homi
Bhabha Centre for Science, India School Leadership Institute, Language Learning Foundation, Room to Read, Sols Arc. We aim to influence close to 15 organizations by 2022 and create a community of content creators for
the ecosystem.
State Content CellThe intent of the program is to build capacity at state level by training resources and creating a digital content-creation cell within the state education department. TheTeacherApp is keen to identify , train individuals and build processes for states to create in house digital-learning experiences for its teachers. These digital-experiences will not only will help teachers in the state but can also be offered to all teachers nationally. We will design customized programs for our state partners such that we can establish a strong foundation for content digitization in the state such that they are able to scale this knowledge and meet their specific digitization needs.
Author FellowshipThe fellowship was established with the aim of creating a platform where highly talented individuals can develop their expertise in creating engaging high quality, digital professional development content for teachers. We are committed to influencing 300 such individuals by 2022. We will adopt a focused approach and create tailor made programs for 3 different categories of academic experts, i.e., Senior Academics (with 20-30 years of experience), Academic experts (with 10-15 years of experience), and Future academicians (pursuing progressive pre-service teacher-education programme.
During the first two years of our work, we found that acquiring users is easy when the state informs teachers and mandates usage. However, in order to drive usage of digital content as opposed to physical
training, both teachers and the system requires new kind of behaviour. Since all our content is in Hindi, TheTeacherApp would focus on 13 Hindi speaking states with a goal to reach 1 million teachers. To achieve this, we
will run:
Digital Teacher Support ProgramOver four years, we will integrate our content within DIETs, in-service training curriculum and with the support work done by Cluster Resource Coordinators/ Block Resource Coordinators
(CRC/ BRC). This program works with SSA and SCERT with the objective of acquiring 30% active users over 4 years. At present, we work with – Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand.
Distribution LabEven though the senior leadership is pushing for content consumption, compliance by teachers is slow, communication channels are weak, ability of the support staff like BRC/CRC to look
at data and act is under-developed. Through the distribution lab, we will put our own staff to work directly with BRCs, DIETs, school leaders and teachers. Along with this we carry out regular campaigns and data-based
pull interventions to drive usage. This would help in codifying how to build digital learning behaviour among teachers.
Crowd sourced content (teacher creating content for teachers) is great for supporting the appetite of teacher community that wants to make and share but it doesn’t move the needle when it comes to informing
teacher practice
with progressive concepts. Hence, we created a strategy to democratize the creation of exemplary content by rolling out the programs below:
Internal Content EngineOur internal team of expert academicians and production specialists would create close to 1000 hours of content by 2022, with a focus is grade 1 to 8, and on hard spots of maths teaching,
first language teaching, pedagogy and science.
Dream Team programThis program aims at creating a community of practice. We know there are over 20 not for profit organization which have high reputation and success of dealing with progressive concepts for
teachers. We want to influence these not-for-profit organizations with exemplar content to digitize the same using our sweet spot framework. Many such organizations are fence sitters with an inherent
desire to digitise in order to scale up. Dream team program is an accelerator which builds their capacity and accelerates their learning to do so. At present we are influencing 6 organizations – Ekalvya, Homi Bhabha Centre
for Science, India School Leadership Institute, Language Learning Foundation, Room to Read, Sols Arc. We aim to influence close to 15 organizations by 2022 and create a community of content creators for the ecosystem.
PlaceholderOur internal team of expert academicians and production specialists would create close to 1000 hours of content by 2022, with a focus is grade 1 to 8, and on hard spots of maths teaching,
first language teaching, pedagogy and science.
PlaceholderOur internal team of expert academicians and production specialists would create close to 1000 hours of content by 2022, with a focus is grade 1 to 8, and on hard spots of maths teaching,
first language teaching, pedagogy and science.
During the first two years of our work, we found that acquiring users is easy when the state informs teachers and mandates usage. However, in order to drive usage of digital content as opposed to physical
training, both teachers and the system requires new kind of behaviour. Since all our content is in Hindi, TheTeacherApp would focus on 13 Hindi speaking states with a goal to reach 1 million teachers. To achieve this, we will
run:
Digital Teacher Support ProgramOver four years, we will integrate our content within DIETs, in-service training curriculum and with the support work done by Cluster Resource Coordinators/ Block Resource Coordinators
(CRC/ BRC). This program works with SSA and SCERT with the objective of acquiring 30% active users over 4 years. At present, we work with – Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand.
Distribution LabEven though the senior leadership is pushing for content consumption, compliance by teachers is slow, communication channels are weak, ability of the support staff like BRC/CRC to look at
data and act is under-developed. Through the distribution lab, we will put our own staff to work directly with BRCs, DIETs, school leaders and teachers. Along with this we carry out regular campaigns and data-based pull
interventions to drive usage. This would help in codifying how to build digital learning behaviour among teachers.
