Role of ICT in Mitigating Social Problems

Abstract

As India destines to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of Universal Primary Education, by attending 96 per cent enrolment of children in primary schools, it was revealed that enrolment by itself is not a full-proof indicator of learning. It was found that due to poor school quality, a wide gap in learning continues to remain in spite of attending school. To overcome this problem of poor educational outcomes, in spite of enrolment in primary schools, the paper proposes remedial e-learning for the primary school children. It is further proposed to utilse the services of the elderly people to provide remedial teaching to the children remotely from their homes by utilising educational technology and ICT with necessary support and training. In addition to addressing the problem of poor educational outcomes in deficient primary schools, this would enable the elderly to contribute meaningfully to the education of the disadvantaged children and at the same time equip them to lead a better quality of life by utilisation of ICT to meet some of the needs of their day to day living. A quasi-experimental study in e-learning for the underprivileged children was undertaken for testing the validity of our above proposition. The paper presents the results of this experiment. Developing appropriate teaching materials and pedagogy for e-learning, identifying elderly people for teaching, developing training materials for the elderly teachers etc. have been initiated. We propose to develop a replicable model of providing e-learning to the underprivileged children in a self-sustaining manner following a ‘social business’ model.