A smart way to bridge rural-urban divide

The gap between internet access and use between rural and urban India continues to persist despite significant progress made in the expansion of telecommunications and broadband services to uncovered rural areas. Income inequality is a key factor in the persistence of the rural-urban divide in internet access. The National Education Policy 2020 envisages inclusive and equitable quality education, and this requires bridging the digital divide between students in rural and urban areas. Optimal utilisation of financial assistance under Samagra Siksha by the states for creating digital infrastructure in schools plays a crucial role in bridging this divide. This assistance is provided for setting up classrooms for the use of computers and the internet for improved teaching and learning experiences. The smart classroom enhances learning for students as it provides them experience of multimedia learning tools. It also allows teachers to innovate new teaching tools with the help of digital technology to make the lesson much more interesting than traditional classroom teaching. For students in rural areas who do not have internet access at their households, the smart classroom in their school is a great enabler as it provides them opportunities for group activities using digital tools and resources and motivates them to be imaginative and organic in their thoughts. Access to the same digital infrastructure and internet in smart classrooms bridges the learning gap among students in rural and urban areas, due to which it is important for the states to prioritise it for rural schools towards achieving the NEP goal of inclusive and equitable education. As a smart classroom component of Samagra Siksha, which covers government and aided schools having classes VI to Class XII, it also plays a crucial role in bridging the learning gap between government and private schools with similar infrastructure. Assam currently has about 1,200 government schools with smart classrooms. While this accounts for about 13% of upper primary and secondary schools in the state, there are about 7,000 schools with information and communication technology labs, which can be leveraged for providing smart classroom environments with internet access. Apart from financial assistance from the central government, the state government too is providing financial assistance for setting up classrooms, which is essential to ensure that students in the state, more particularly in rural areas, do not lag compared to the students in advanced states. The central government provides a non-recurring grant for the establishment of two smart classrooms in each school and a recurring grant for developing e-content and digital resources and meeting charges for electricity. Teachers play the most crucial role in a smart classroom to make it dynamic and interactive to break the monotony of traditional classroom teaching. They can use the smart boards in the room to show a wide variety of digital content, but the challenge is to prevent learning from remaining a passive activity as in most traditional classrooms. The objective of a smart classroom is to make teaching and learning interesting and interactive for students as well as teachers. Therefore, wise planning for developing the right digital content and teachers adopting innovative techniques to encourage every student to participate in the classroom activity is critical to ensure optimal utilisation of the digital equipment and tools. The teachers must be trained to smartly handle hardware and preinstalled educational software to boost confidence in students about the use of digital technology to improve their learning and enrich their knowledge. Safe use of digital devices and the internet by students and teachers is crucial for the digital safety of students. The guidelines on safe usage of digital devices by students and teachers issued by the Ministry of Education recommend screen time for different categories of students. Strict adherence to these guidelines can also help teachers to leverage classrooms to build awareness among students about the vulnerability of mental and physical health from long-time use of digital screens and how to stay protected from cyber criminals. A key recommendation included in the guidelines for school heads and teachers is not to make adoption of digital learning burdensome for students and their parents and to avoid setting unrealistic goals for students as well as for themselves. Professional content developers provide readymade digital classroom teaching-learning materials based on school syllabi for different classes. Instead of making schools or teachers entirely dependent on such preinstalled content, the access to the internet and hardware in classrooms also needs to be leveraged to motivate schools to develop organic teaching learning material to bring more dynamism into the classroom. Training of teachers for making smart classrooms better spaces for teaching and learning needs to be a continuous exercise. The emergence of artificial technology tools has started pushing the boundaries of smart classrooms in schools in India. Policymakers need to take note of it and ensure that it does not widen the digital divide for students in rural and urban India and standardise smart classrooms in all schools to ensure level playing fields for every student.