Earshot India

AUDIO/PODCASTS FOR SCHOOL LESSONS

Teaching equitably in a pandemic-hit world is ensuring equal access to class materials. Synchronous online classes require access to high-speed internet and smart devices. With video streams requiring high bandwidth, how can you provide media-rich lessons? Podcasts/Audio lessons in a non-English, native language is the answer.

 Earshot (www.earshot.in), with local community and education partners in India, will create, produce, and give students free digital access to these lessons. These will also be delivered as audio files on SMS, giving offline access to those students without smart phones. Students can learn on the go. They can be doing household work, in transit, or on the farms and still learn. These lessons can also be aired on local community radio stations that are accessible through basic feature phones. Those with basic smart phones will be able to access these audio lessons through an app or Whatsapp audio messages.

A mobile phone or a computer is today’s necessity. Yet, a range of statistics pry open India’s digital divide and its consequences for students, particularly girls, in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to a Harvard Kennedy School (2018) study, in India only 33 percent urban, and 28 per cent of rural women have access to the internet.

The government’s official statistics fewer than one in seven (15 per cent) rural households have access to Internet, compared to 42 per cent among their urban counterparts.

UNESCO data shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected over 1.2 billion students worldwide. About 320 million of these are in India.

The pandemic as had a grave impact on students in India whose families cannot afford multiple phones high bandwidth for their children to attend classes and access lessons.

How can you provide media-rich lessons to such students? Podcasts/Audio lessons in a non-English, native language is the answer.

Earshot will create, produce, and give free access to these audio lessons. These will be delivered on SMS giving access without smart phones. Local community radio stations accessible through basic phones can also air these lessons. Those with smart phones can access these through an app. 

Earshot (www.earshot.in), with local community and education partners in India, will create, produce, and give students free digital access to these lessons. These will also be delivered as audio files on SMS, giving offline access to those students without smart phones. Students can learn on the go. They can be doing household work, in transit, or on the farms and still learn. These lessons can also be aired on local community radio stations that are accessible through basic feature phones. Those with basic smart phones will be able to access these audio lessons through an app or Whatsapp audio messages

The solution is aimed at providing affordable access to millions of school students, particularly girls, of under-privileged families in India’s cities and villages.

According to a Harvard Kennedy School (2018) study, in India, only 33 percent urban, and 28 per cent of rural women have access to the internet.

The government’s official statistics also broadly corroborates these findings. According to the Key Indicators of Household Social Consumption on Education in India report, based on the 2017-18 data, fewer than one in seven (15 per cent) rural households have access to Internet, compared to 42 per cent among their urban counterparts.

The picture gets even worse among women. Only 8.5 percent of women surveyed (aged above five) in rural areas have access to Internet.

A study by Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam over 15 years, mirrors that same disturbing gender dimension to digital access in India.

According to the study “boys in India are much more likely than their female peers to use a computer and the internet (as well as other forms of technology, such as a smartphone) regularly”.

Of India’s workforce, 90 percent is in the informal sector, millions of whom have migrated from their villages in search of a better living. In terms of sheer numbers, these inter-state migrants make up for a colossal magnitude, underlining their importance in India’s economic structure.

Children of domestic helps, carpenters, electricians, AC and car mechanics and all such self-employed service providers working in the informal sector have been the worst affected because of lack of physical schools.

Worse, many of them are battling to access school lessons because of lack of access to devices and high internet bandwidth as synchronous online classes require access to high-speed internet and smart devices.

With video streams requiring high bandwidth, how can you provide media-rich lessons? Podcasts/Audio lessons in a non-English, native language is the answer.

Earshot (www.earshot.in), with local community and education partners in India, will create, produce, and give students free digital access to these lessons. These will also be delivered as audio files on SMS, giving offline access to those students without smart phones. Students can learn on the go. They can be doing household work, in transit, or on the farms and still learn. These lessons can also be aired on local community radio stations that are accessible through basic feature phones. Those with basic smart phones will be able to access these audio lessons through an app or Whatsapp audio messages. 

The solution is aimed at providing affordable access to millions of school students, particularly girls, of under-privileged families in India’s cities and villages.

Many of them are battling to access school lessons because of lack of access to devices and high internet bandwidth.

With video streams requiring high bandwidth, how can you provide media-rich lessons? Podcasts/Audio lessons in a non-English, native language is the answer.

Earshot (www.earshot.in), with local partners in India, will create, produce, and give students free digital access to these lessons. These will be delivered as audio files on SMS, giving access to those without smart phones. 

We want to demonstrate that audio lessons that require low bandwidth will help fill a big gap in making school classes equitably accessible to the under-privileged in an affordable way.

These lessons will provide insights and information in a convenient, portable format in local languages as well as English and Hindi. We, along with local community partners, shall conceptualise, create, produce, host, and distribute these school audio lesson packages.

The pilot will demonstrate how audio lessons enable students to learn on the go. They can be doing household work, in transit, or on the farms and still learn. These lessons can also be aired on local community radio stations that are accessible through basic feature phones.

We shall also make these available across platforms including Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and our own platform Earshot.in.

We shall carry out this pilot in the areas of Delhi, Bihar, Assam, and Bengal.