The Nalanda Project: Foundations Come Together To Help Students

In an initiative to boost virtual learning in schools across India, The Motivation For Excellence (MFE) Foundation, a philanthropic foundation has taken up around 50 schools in Mumbai to examine the impact created by teaching Mathematics on virtual platform.

The project, namely The Nalanda project, explores the potential of learning mathematics using a blend of teacher instruction and self-learning through the KA Lite (Offline Khan Academy) platform.

Results of a preliminary survey of teachers and school leaders who are implementing the Nalanda project have shown that 78 per cent of the teachers and 77 per cent of the school leaders believe that the project has benefited students.

In addition, 78 per cent of teachers believe that Nalanda has had a positive impact on learning while 82 per cent of the teachers think that students are more engaged and excited in the classroom. Other data that measured hours spent on instructional Khan Academy videos and exercises showed high levels of student engagement as students consistently watched all the videos and completed all the exercises expected of them.

“At Khan Academy, our vision is to provide free, world class education for anyone, anywhere. The Nalanda project, by Motivation for Excellence Foundation, is using an innovative pedagogical model where students practice concepts individually and see their progress on an offline tool that incorporates Khan Academy content. Simultaneously, teachers help struggling students by providing individualised assistance to them,” says Sandeep Bapna, India Country Manager, Khan Academy

Currently, in its 3rd year, the project is helping 2000 children in 57 classrooms across Akanksha Foundation and Teach For India schools in Mumbai and Pune, Maharashtra.

The program runs on an operating model in which students divide their time between videos and exercises. As students practice individually on tablets, teachers circle the room, monitor student activity and track their work through their coach login. Each student’s performance is colour-coded and categorised into one of three groups based on their progress (completed, in progress and struggling). The teacher assists struggling students with a differentiated sub-group lesson or by providing individual assistance on the concept during digital learning sessions.

MFE is focused on the implementation of the second phase, which covers 50 classrooms across 18 schools. For this purpose, they have created detailed teacher training manuals and curriculum plans. In the third phase, they plan to cover 300 classrooms.

“As we think of expanding Khan Academy’s access to more Indian students and teachers, we are focusing our efforts on localising our content to address their needs by mapping it to the Indian curriculum and translating it in local languages. Our first effort in this direction is our partnership with Central Square Foundation which is mapping our math content to NCERT curriculum, while simultaneously translating it in Hindi. Students and teachers can access grade-aligned math content on khanacademy.org and Hindi translated version on hi.khanacademy.org.” says Bapna.

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan with the aim of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere and currently attracts over 12 million users on its platform.