The RUMI Digital Skills Program – Creating Vocations For The Affordable Segment

Details of the Applicant (filing the nomination) - Gautham More

Details of Project/Initiative Implementing Agency - RUMI Education Pvt Ltd

Details of the Programme/Project/Initiative - RUMI Digital Skills Program

Brief description of the programme/project/initiative

Rumi is an education systems service provider that partners with affordable private
schools to dramatically improve the quality of mass-market education in India. It
provides a comprehensive education solution for Pre-Primary through Class X.

Quality education is one that prepares today’s children for tomorrow’s world – a
world where creative thinking, clear communication and digital savvy are
prerequisites. With this in mind, RUMI focuses on the holistic development needs of
the students and seeks to deliver an education for life. This approach will lead to
greater employability, higher incomes and ultimately, a more creative, healthy and
prosperous society.
The affordable school segment has many challenges, one of them being the lack of
exposure to ICT skills. There is also no support at home for acquiring such skills.
Given that ICT literacy is one of the prerequisites for being successful in tomorrow’s
workplace, it is all the more important that students from the affordable segment
are provided such skills. The RUMI Digital Skills Programme is aimed at providing
ICT skills with a vocational bent to children from the affordable school segment and
thus creating various avenues of employability.

Why was the project started

A study of affordable schools revealed that students normally end up as manual

labourers, taxi drivers, mechanics, housemaids, etc. The dominant aspiration of the
parent in enrolling his ward in such a school is to ensure that the child gets
education enough to be better employed than him. Today, in an increasingly
technology driven world, there are umpteen opportunities for gainful employment.
For instance, secretarial skills, audio editing/mixing, image editing, Desk top
publishing, website creation, computer repairs, etc, are skills that are widely in
demand. Instead of landing up in a menial job, students from these schools stand a
chance of getting more gainfully employed if they have such technology based
skills. Even school dropouts stand a better chance of employability with such ICT
skills. While there are numerous offerings for imparting IT Literacy, none of them
are focussed on providing skills that lead to meaningful vocations. Vocational
programs that try to address this gap invariably turn out to be outside the school
academic framework. The RUMI Digital Skills program was designed to address
these lacunae. It focuses on imparting ICT skills with a vocational leaning and within
the academic framework of the school curriculum. It is thus the first program of its
kind.

Objective

In tomorrow’s workplace, technology literacy is as important a skill as Reading,

Writing and Arithmetic. How to use technology intelligently in ways that impact is a
skill that is not taught formally. It is also necessary to demystify technology and
make it fun to learn. ICT tools, when used appropriately, can help to encourage the
creativity of children. And most importantly, such skills are clearly the key for
better employability. The RUMI Digital Skills Program was started with all these
objectives in mind.

Target group

While the current target group is students from the affordable schools, this is a
program that can be used in other schools as well. It can even be used to impart
ICT skills to school drop-outs so that they can be gainfully employed.

Geographical reach

The program can be implemented across all affordable schools and is currently
being implemented in 77 schools in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

10 points that make the programme/project innovative

• The RUMI Digital Skills programme is the first of its kind in the affordable school
space which seeks to impart ICT based vocational skills within the academic
framework of the school timetable.
• The program focuses on application of technology skills in everyday life in
contrast to plain concepts.
• The program ensures clear and progressive exit profiles at the end of each year
which leads to employable skills.
• The RUMI Digital Skills Programme helps students to learn to use technology to
effectively gather knowledge, communicate, collaborate and compete in
tomorrow’s workplace.
• Unlike traditional approaches to imparting ICT skills, it de-mystifies technology
and makes learning technology interesting.
• No matter what level of skill development a school is in, the program offers a
simple and customized deployment plan that helps to implement it easily.
• The program has a unique entry and exit level assessment mechanism which
helps to evaluate the impact of the program at the end of each skill-set.

• The quality of the program is ensured by rigorous trainings for teachers

including assessment and certification. A comprehensive online training kit
supports the faculty to implement the curriculum.
• The program also includes a bridge course that helps to address the
skill/knowledge gap of individual students.
• It has a simple methodology that provides the opportunity to learn and explore
technology by extensive practical lab sessions.

List the 5 achievements of the programme/project

• The RUMI Digital Skills Program has been implemented across 57 plus affordable
schools in the very first year thus addressing more than 100 teachers and close
to 15000 students.

• The program has shown an impressive 65% improvement in technology skills of

students.

• 106 regular subject teachers have been trained on ICT based vocational skills
along with certification.

• Given the lack of infrastructure and resources that the affordable schools are
plagued with, online training and certification has surprisingly taken root well.

• Teachers have been trained online across multiple locations by affordable web
and audio conferencing tools.

List the 5 key challenges faced while implementing the

programme/project/initiative and how they were overcome

• The inadequacy of the labs in the form of hardware and software has been one
of the most challenging situations. Many of the schools had
no/obsolete/inadequate hardware which was handled by providing infrastructure
consultancy in the form of desktop virtualization and support from affordable
service providers/vendors.

• The level of teacher attrition in affordable schools is very high. This was
addressed by training multiple faculty from the same school so that the students
were not affected.

• The quality of faculty skills was another challenge. This was handled by having
multiple trainings across the year and making certification a prerequisite for the
subsequent trainings.

• Given the remoteness of the schools, getting teachers certified turned out to be
a challenge. This was addressed by making the test available online to the
faculty. The faculty is provided the content to revise and takes up the
certification at a later date within a specified time-frame.
• Scaling up the faculty training was yet another hurdle since trainers could not be
sent to all locations. This was addressed by having clusters of training venues
and training conducted online with web and audio conferencing facilities.

List the 5 points how can the programme serve as a model that can be
replicated or adapted by others

• The whole approach to teaching technology leading to vocational skills within

the school framework can definitely be emulated.

• The creative approach to the instructional design as well as the attractiveness of

the text book is another way in which students can be induced to take up
learning. The teaching of ICT skills in a fun manner which encourages students’
creativity is also replicable.

• The intensive training mechanism for teachers who moved from zero technology
skills to levels of certification is something that can be replicated.

• Making ICT based vocational skills certifiable in the affordable segment with the
help of online teacher training mechanisms can also be replicated with great
benefit.

• The processes for cost-effective and timely support mechanisms provided to

teachers and students for implementing the program is also noteworthy.
List 5 points to elaborate on the scalability of the
programme/project/initiative

• The activity of assessing entry and exit technology level skills can be very
cumbersome when done manually. This has been scaled up by an automated
skill level capturing mechanism which the teachers and students fill up and send
online.

• The intensive teacher training mechanisms are made scalable with the help of
audio and web conferencing facilities. This is low cost and can handle any
number of teachers across the country.

• The certification of teachers which is such a critical element has also been made
very scalable by using an LMS for both the training as well as the certification.
Teachers are able to revise the content and take up the certification at their own
pace, across the country, with the help of online tools.

• A cost-effective online technical support mechanism that has been provided to

schools to implement the programme can serve hundreds of schools.