Education during Covid-19 in underprivileged communities

Inspiration

I spent some time in Brazil before I came back to a Covid-19 pandemic swept Europe. My son is "home-schooling" as it is now euphemistically called. He has a school that is prepared (...) and he has internet access in his house, but what about the millions of students all around the world who don't have internet access or computers, tablets or smartphones to work on?

What it does

This project aims to make class materials available to students at home, so they can study the materials on their own. The students would tune in to a specific (TV or radio) channel at a specific time, to receive the materials they need to master. Testing the student's knowledge could be done by using telephone or maybe an innovative TV or radio test can be devised, where cheating is minimized.

How I am going to build it

This means translating the existing curricula and testing materials for a TV or radio format. We need to work with local government and education services, as well as on a country wide level, to get buy-in for this project. Financing might be obtained through the ministries of education (government money) as well as through grants or funding internationally.

What's next for Education for poor communities during the Covid-19 pandemic

I want to implement this project in three stages; first I want to create a pilot project, using up to three schools in the North of Brazil, getting buy-in from local radio and TV stations. Staff for the local schools would turn the classroom material into videos or podcasts, which would then be scheduled on a separate channel on the stations. This stage needs buy-in from education institutions at a ground level. I believe I can convince a majority of some ten schools in the North of Brazil to work with me, and am sure at least three of them would be keen to participate in this pilot. Brazil has quite well-defined criteria for their classes, and we could convert those to videos, using the teachers. There are several teachers I know, who would be willing to do a class or subject for us. I would need an education expert to advise on the best way to make the materials available in this (non-interactive) format.

During the second stage, I would present the solution to the local government and education authorities, showing them what we did, and how we might multiply it on a state level. At this stage, financing would need to be organized. During this stage, it might be necessary to develop and produce some hardware solution for the distribution of the "classes" (i.e. the video and audio files) to the students. This might take the form of a hardware device, which output is connected to the station's hardware. This device would allow for the updating and changing of content and scheduling of the classes. This is the only possible IT related part of the project.

During the third stage, we would take the lessons learnt to the central government in Brasilia and present the solution, which would then be ready for a roll-out in all Brazilian states.

We would need to get buy-in from local radio and TV stations. I believe I would be able to get into these companies to talk to the people responsible and would find some volunteers for a pilot project, presuming this will somehow be paid for. Talking about funding, I believe the local government and local education authorities would eventually have to be involved, and so we might want to use the pilot project to talk to them, and see what they think of it. I currently don't have access to either local government officials in Brazil, but I might be able to get access to the responsible people at the local education authorities level.

Once a pilot project has been successful, we would be able to use the lessons learned from the project to roll a similar system out country-wide in Brazil, and we could use the same knowledge to advise or help other countries in South America (and the world) to do the same.

Thank you for reading this far! If you don't think I'm crazy and believe you could help me make this pilot and the other parts of this project happen, please contact me!