Free and Open Mobile School System

Dear Friends,

We are discussing the Mobile School Project in detail. There are 22.8 million out-of-school children in Pakistan. More than that, adult women and farmers are illiterate and underprivileged. And when we consider students in schools, the majority is not significantly different or better particularly in STEM subjects. Memorization of facts, figures, names, dates, places, etc takes maximum time which promotes only to rote memory and cramming. Everyone is capable of learning and teaching but not all people have the same memory. Two major reasons behind higher drop out rates are; one weak memory which leads to punishment and embarrassment, and second students who need to earn to support their families; they have not enough time to attend the 06 hours schools. We think that there are two basic subjects; literacy and numeracy. Literacy means someone knows any language that how to read, write, speak, and listen; no matter that language is Englis, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, or any other. It is a settled principle around the globe that pupils can learn faster and easier in their mother tongue and English is a universal language of knowledge. So, it is better to use the mother tongue as an instructional medium, and then English language acquisition is essential to compete with the contemporary world. Numeracy means mathematics and calculus which is the foundation of questioning and reasoning, it helps us in critical thinking, problem-solving, and resource optimization. We can say, there is no magic or miracle but the mathematics behind everything, it is a language of nature, logic, truth, and right. If any student knows how to read, write, speak and listen to any language with conceptual learning of numeracy, he will become a positive and productive participant of any society to claim all his rights with responsibilities. This 02-subject education will raise motivation, common sense, a sense of respect, and a sense of responsibility. It will be a significant step towards socio-economic equality and equity. We are just considering basics and then English language acquisition so any student can take any free Massive Open and Online Courses from the world-renowned academic institutes to learn, grow and excel without any discrimination, barrier, certificate, diploma, or degree. 

According to Professor E. D. Hirsch (Core Knowledge Foundation); all pre-school, kindergarten, primary, secondary and higher school curriculum can be taught within a few hundred hours. Knowledge-based mobile schooling opens doors to enabling playful and interactive learning in a practical environment, which in turn opens doors to productive and responsible citizenship. We endeavor to:

• Create literate citizens able to contribute to a democratic society.
• Empower each child to achieve his or her greatest academic potential.
• Shrink the excellence gap between the academic achievement of out-of-school children and that of their peers from high-performing countries.
• Shrink the fairness gap between the academic achievement of out-of-school children living in poverty and that of their economically advantaged peers.

Different points to develop the two-subject curriculum:

• Start from basic numeracy like “counting”, “addition”, “subtraction”, “multiplication”, and “division”.
• Creation of mathematics modules in GeoGebra for 6th-12th class  
• Localization and context-aware content.
• Sustainable and Systematic approach.
• Open, inclusive, and documented.

Adoption:

• Small private schools are facing real challenges to compete with the larger groups so we will offer them our content free-of-cost that will become their value-added service and competitive advantage.
• We will offer our volunteer services to public schools as well.
• Our content will be open and free with detailed documentation and tutorials so anyone can use, reuse, and contribute.  

We are looking forward to starting a healthy discussion and dialog.

Misuse of “Husan-e-Ihlaaq”: A Productive Tactic to Manipulate

We live in a country where people are less literate about psychology, sociology, media, and marketing. Here, anyone who is a polite, friendly and has a kind attitude can make any lie a truth by pseudo-science.

Earlier, in 2015, I was used to teaching Programming and Development in an academy particularly Android and Java. Many students were struggling with their final year projects, they were ready to buy FYPs. (Still, I meet with students who buy FYPs.)

My friends said you can develop and sell FYPs; I replied, it is plagiarism, intellectual dishonesty, and crime. The major sufferers of this will be the students who are stranded enough to pay instead of learning. Students want to learn but they cannot find teachers who are honest, have the talent to deliver skills.

My friends persuaded me if you will not do this, these students will get their projects from someone else because students know nothing how to design and develop so it’s better that you help them to develop FYPs while teaching and learning the process so they will learn something to do something. Students invested their scarce resources in their degrees, and they cannot afford failure, it will affect their mental health and confidence. Failure will embarrass them in front of their family and friends. This is not their mistake but their teachers’ fault.

I am a frank and friendly person so students were very comfortable with me to share a lot of matters, they were used to saying “Sir X” or “Madam Y” did this or that but these “Sir” and “Madam” words were offending me, I used to say to my students that please don’t give respect to those who are responsible to ruin your learnings and future, you paid them to learn and it’s their responsibility to teach you and if they were teaching you then you don’t need to buy FYPs or learn it outside from your university which cost you extra.

They were used to saying that “our teachers are very kind, polite and friendly” but my students were not aware of misuse of “Husan-e-Ihlaaq” to manipulate students so nobody even thinks to question their responsibility and incompetence.

What to do, when there are no one guilty, responsible, accountable and answerable but endless problems?

Allah Almighty Bless the Federation of Pakistan

Interactive Pedagogy and Gamification to educate under-privileged street children, child labor, women and farmers

There are no magic and miracles but there is mathematics behind everything. To compete and progress with contemporary world; critical thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning are core skills to have, which all are fundamentally based on education of mathematics. The major reason for dropouts in school is boring and lengthy course content and syllabus. The researcher of this paper is proposing a conceptual framework to educate street-child, child-labor, women, and farmers using two courses syllabus; one is literacy (local language, a national language, and/or foreign language) and the second mathematics (problem-solving, critical thinking and analytical reasoning).

The proposed methodology will be one hour per week mobile schools with ICT based interactive pedagogy and gamification. The students will take their lessons and evaluate their performance after biometric attendance backed by incentive(pay) to learn phenomena.

The researcher has a hypothesis that the teaching, learning and remembering of “names”, “places”, “dates”, “facts” and “figures” are useless and major motive to induce withdrawal of pupils particularly under-privileged masses. Most of the things are depending on rote memorization which is causing the behavior that promotes cramming and forgetting rather than life-long learning. If education is focused on literacy and mathematics only then the dropout ratio can be decay exponentially which will ultimately lead to social economic equality due awareness and education for all.

This research work is out of the box solution to eliminate extremism and ensure social economic equality by growing “common sense”, “sense of respect” and “sense of responsibility”. In macro scenario, the researcher is focused to create uniform qualification framework which will provide equivalence to vocational knowledge with academic knowledge. The ultimate goal is to develop mechanism for street children, child labor, women and farmers to get admissions in universities (probably true and pure open universities, where there is no one yet in Pakistan).