1800 Videos to be made available in Urdu, Kashmiri and Dogri: Experts
By Farooq Shah
SRINAGAR: Aiming to make digital educational content available to the students of Jammu and Kashmir in vernacular languages—Urdu, Kashmiri and Dogri—the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), J&K, is organising a three-day workshop from September 27-29 at its divisional office in Bemina here today.
Some half a dozen educational and IT experts are in the process of translating at least 10 videos to be presented before the NCERT and Team Dikhsha, Ministry of Education, Government of India for assessing their quality. This will invariably pave the way for translating some 1800 videos produced by TicTacLearn—an initiative supported by Central Square Foundation (CSF) and Google.org.
Director SCERT, J&K, Prof Veena Pandita, said that lack of digital vernacular school content affected tens of thousands of students across Jammu and Kashmir.
“Whatever is available is either not of good quality or is unaffordable to our students,” she said. “We’ve decided to translate high quality, animated, pedagogically sound, curriculum aligned (NCERT) Maths and Science content in three languages viz. Urdu, Kashmiri and Dogri.”
Technical expert with Dikhsha, Riyaz Ahmad Reshi, said the tool available on Dikhsha platform enables registered users to upload videos online to be translated into any target language.
“The videos, once translated, will be hosted on Dikhsha portal where from they will be accessible to a student after scanning a QR Code energised in their textbooks,” Reshi said. “Students belonging to Grades 1-5 will benefit from the learning material available in the languages they know and understand better.”
Pertinently, the newly launched education policy aka NEP 2020 prioritises universal foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) in primary school and beyond by 2027.
“The availability of digital content in vernacular languages will aid the basic learning, namely reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level,” Reshi said.
A participant described the content available as of now as ‘haphazard’ and ‘fortuitous’. “Translating professional content will certainly make things easy not only for a teacher but for a student as well,” Roohi Sultana, a middle school teacher said.
Another teacher, Anjali Raina, while echoing Sultana’s views said the availability of high quality digital content in vernacular languages will lighten the burden of teachers in many respects. “Sometimes, it’s exceedingly difficult for a teacher to get to the level of a child,” Raina said. “Because most the content to be translated is animation based, it will help do away with the monotony and instil student participation with interest.”
The workshop will go on for another two days wherein the participants would scan as many videos as possible for translation into vernacular languages.
Pertinently, TicTacLearn has created one of the largest open-source repositories of high-quality curriculum aligned digital learning resources comprising some 12,000 videos available free of cost for everyone.
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