On January 26, two retired military officers launched E-Vidyalaya, an online platform that can help school children to read and understand their lessons from different subjects and learn other skills that are necessary for Industry 4.0.
But what is different about this online platform when there are similar ones in the market? Major General (Retd) VN Prasad and Major DK Kumar are the brains behind this platform and their idea is to help children from low-income or poor families get a quality education. VN Prasad, says, "When the lockdown was announced due to the pandemic, normal classes and academics were disrupted. At the same time, people lost their jobs and they couldn't afford to pay school fees. Such children had to drop out from schools. At the same time, children who come from low-income groups or even poor families did not have platforms where they could access resource materials to study or develop their skills. That's when we decided to develop and launch an online platform called E-Vidyalaya."
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The platform provides materials and videos for children to learn skills like coding, coaching for various competitive exams, coaching for SSB, soft skills training, personality development, spoken English and so on. VN Prasad says, "We provide most of these courses just for Rs 3,000 to 4,500 which otherwise cost somewhere from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh on the online platforms as well as institutions. As a result, a lot of parents step back and children don't get to learn these skills until they are in class 12 or doing their UG."v
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Maj Gen VN Prasad (Retd) and Maj DK Kumar(Retd),
Meanwhile, the duo with the help of techies has designed this platform in a way that they facilitate self-learning rather than make children depend on students. He explains, "Every section in this platform has steps to follow so that children can read them and do the activities by themselves. For instance, if it is reading a lesson on Acids, Bases and Salts in Science, the students can take a test on it before they head to read the concepts. This will help them analyse their understanding of particular concepts. The next step is to read or watch to understand the concepts in Acids, Bases and Salts. Then, the students can summarise whatever they have studied. The final step is Test where children get to analyse whatever they have read by taking tests and scoring marks."
While all this is related to the regular lessons taught at schools, the platform has gamified the coding courses. There are different stages in these games and the children have to simply follow them. Once the task or game is completed, you can check if the coding done is correct or wrong. As the children move to the next stage in these games, it gets difficult to write or crack the code. Currently, VN Prasad and DK Kumar are looking for coders who have completed their graduation or even post-graduation and are interested to teach children. "This will help the freshers or students earn a decent income by teaching students through this online platform. At the same time, we care about their mental health hence our platform provides various psychometric assessment tests. While the counsellors or teachers can perform these psychometric assessment tests, there are counsellors on our platform who can provide these services virtually to the students. The children can choose the counsellor and fix an appointment and get to know the state of mental health."
You can click on this link evetsys.com to check out eVidyalaya platform
