In 2013 TeleTaleem keeping its ideology in view set out to develop a question creation and sharing platform. The idea behind such a system was to assist all teachers of Pakistan by providing them with a platform where they could collaborate and help each other in developing questions. Teachers can sign up on the portal and contribute a question targeting a specific student learning outcome. A team of experts evaluates the contributed questions and approves them if they meet a certain criteria.Approved they are added in the question bank,any teacher can request an exam for his/her class by selecting the learning outcomes and difficulty level of questions he/she wants in the exam. This would save a major portion of teachers’ time which can be used for teachers’ own capacity building or increase teacher-student contact time. Moreover this will improve teacher motivation and self-esteem as they will be helping their lesser trained colleagues in assessing students. No student will suffer because his/her teacher was not skilled enough to properly judge student’s weakness or because the teacher could not find enough time to properly prepare an exam with questions testing the right concepts.
The second phase of the project was evaluating adoption of such a system in Pakistan. One day workshops were held for teachers from public and private schools of different parts of Pakistan, where they were trained on how to use the system. At the end of each a survey was conducted to know their opinion about such a system. Contribution/adoption of teachers was monitored and at the end of the project teachers were telephoned to conduct a small survey based on their adoption trends. This project was funded by ICT R&D Fund www.ictrdf.org.pk/from Ministry of Information Technology.
Full scale adoption of this system is now consideration by Department of Staff Development which comes under Government of Punjab. Similar efforts are being made to introduce this system at assessment division of Punjab Education Foundation, an organization that works to provide free education to children in under privileged areas.
TeleTaleem hopes to bring Project Highlights
• An online question bank, which can be used to maintain questions for generating exams.
• Training of 1600 teachers on how benefit from technology in betterment of their pedagogy.
• Directorate of Staff Development Punjab’s inclination towards system adoption
• Service acquisition consideration by Punjab Education Fund.
• A comprehensive question bank with approx. 4000 fit questions based on Grade 5 Mathematics Curriculum. Benefits:
• A teacher can generate exam for his class in no time.
• The quality of questions will be according to standard and will judge students’ understanding.
• Teachers who are not well trained to create questions will benefit from the work of their fellow teachers.
• Students will not suffer just because the teacher was over burdened by other tasks and had lack of time to create a quality exam
• Cheating can be controlled by giving different exams to students.
• It not only enhances the technological skills of teachers but also has enhanced the pedagogical skills of the teachers.
• The system can contain questions from any subject/grade/language.
• SMS based exam request.
Beneficiaries
Approximately 1600 teachers benefited from this project which was implemented in almost 60 cities of Pakistan. Once adopted by Directorate of Staff Development the number of beneficiaries will drastically increase to more than 100 thousand primary teachers in Punjab and about 4 million primary school students as indirect beneficiaries of this system.
Funded by: National ICT R&D www.ictrdf.org.pk/
Team Members:
Principal Investigator: Asad Karim
Technical Consultant: Dr. Imran Zulkernain
