Kolkata: Aiming to enhance the standard of rural education, Kolkata based Vikramshila Education Resource Society has launched the project ~ “Lifelines Education for the School Teachers” Of The State ~ in association with OneWorld South Asia. It’s a pilot project in West Bengal for helping rural teachers in addressing the needs of the children more effectively through information and communications technology tools.

Offered by OneWorld South Asia in collaboration with British Telecom and Cisco, the service will let teachers to seek answers to their queries. Working for poverty alleviation and promoting sustainable development, OneWorld South Asia is a non profit organization. BT and Cisco have provided the required technological support to the initiative.

Simply dialing up a help-line number and registering their doubts, Teachers will now be able to access answers within 48 hours. The service will allow teachers seeking information including making a particular topic interesting, tackling truant students and managing the class, will now be within the reach of the teachers.

The Rs 10-lakh pilot project has been presently launched in the Moteswar block of Burdawan district in West Bengal, but it will be expanded to other states as well, depending on its popularity. It presently covers 276 schools in 13 gram panchayats at Monteswar. It covers around 3,000 teachers and 18,000 students. It will benefit primary school children from class one to class 8. And, it will be completed by August this year.

Explaining the service, OneWorld South Asia Director Naimur Rehman said, “A teacher, whenever he requires a piece of knowledge, can make a call to a number and get his query registered. By making the call, he automatically gets registered in the IVRS system. An ID number is then given to the teacher.”

According to Rehman, “Such calls are monitored by knowledge workers at Vikramshila. They are skilled and understand the nuances of the problem. The queries can be from any subject and any level. For the simple queries, they immediately get back to the concerned teacher themselves. And the difficult queries are sent to the experts, who reply to the queries. The knowledge workers convert the answer clip into voice and send it to the teacher concerned. Simultaneously a knowledge database is created and questions and answers get added to the database. There are presently thirty members on the panel, but the number will grow. The members in the panel are teachers, teacher trainers and educationists.

Rehman said, “The teachers get trained, but do not get a mechanism for quality teaching. The initiative aims at improving the quality of learning.”

Arun Seth, chairman and managing director, BT India, said, “We have built the technology platform for OneWorld South Asia’s education initiatives, in partnership with our funding partner Cisco, which provides the voice mail service.”