In a matter six days (from 27th April to 3rd May, 2015), the Maharashtra State Council for Educational Research and Training (MSCERT) under the Maharashtra Education Ministry used A-VIEW (Amrita Virtual Interactive E- Learning World) to train 35,000 school teachers at over 500 centers across Maharashtra. Shri N.K. Jarag, Director MSCERT, Pune, Maharashtra initiated this programme with the support of IIT-Bombay and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
The goal of this program was to orient 5th standard teachers from across Maharashtra state (government and aided schools) to the updated syllabus and offer training for the new areas as per the updates affected. One day was dedicated to each subject and the training was delivered by an expert in the subject area. This program harnessed the features of A-VIEW to transmit live online lectures and interactions to 500 centers. Apart from A-VIEW, EDU-SAT and VSAT technologies were also used during this training program and connected around 20 centers.
If this training session was rolled out using conventional means, the amount of time, money and resources required to train 35,000 teachers would be enormous. Scaling down the time and resources required, helped save lot of money and also resulted in maximizing the reach of training and eliminating the cascading model of training delivery. The effective collaboration between the A-VIEW team, IIT Bombay and MSCERT resulted in smooth planning and execution of this program. The A-VIEW software application was developed in-house by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and supported by the Ministry of HRD (NMEICT) program. Using A-view, IIT Bombay has been conducting several workshops and training programs including training 10,000 teachers simultaneously all over India.
Training 35,000 teachers in a week’s time, simultaneously, is likely to be a world record.The A-VEW team is currently verifying this with the concerned agencies. Irrespective of the records that happen or not, this is definitely a great first step towards modernizing teacher training and ensuring the training delivery process is all inclusive.
