Bridging the Education Divide through ICT Enabled Institutional Entrepreneurship

Owlish Oracle: An Online Teaching-Learning Platform to Educate Underprivileged Children by Educated Senior Citizens
India is facing a huge rural-urban divide with regard to poor learning achievement at the school level in remote rural areas, which are engulfed with problems such as the unavailability of good teachers and effective teaching-learning materials. In this context, our project seeks to utilize a social knowledge management platform named OwlishOracle to impart universal education online to the rural children using structured course materials and an online delivery mechanism that uses educated senior citizens from the urban area as teachers. Social knowledge management is a framework to manage social knowledge capital and it allows its users to create and modify content collaboratively. The major outcome of the project is to create an integrated rural-urban community, bridging educated senior citizens from urban area with underserved children from rural area. Our idea is to provide a holistic approach to learning through live interactions and digital content support.
Thus, this project wishes to impart online education using Internet to children in rural areas leading to livelihood enhancement and holistic development by

• utilizing the vast pool of knowledge resource of the educated senior citizens including retired teachers, who are capable but otherwise not involved in any mainstream productive activities
• creating Internet kiosks / study centers in selected villages where school children will use Tablets (for one-to-one teaching) or computers with internet and projector (for classroom-oriented teaching) to interact with their remote teachers and learn from them
• tying up with local NGOs who will assist in setting up an internet kiosk in remote villages and also be infrastructure partner in the intervention.

We have intervened in Krishnanagar, South 24 Parganas, Burdwan, Kolkata and Howrah districts in West Bengal. There were 10 elderly teachers involved and 219 students we taught via the online live virtual teachers. It was observed that all the interventions were grossly successful and not only did it benefit the students but also enthused the teachers to participate further. The reciprocity and warmth of the students were not barred at all by the fact that the classes were conducted remotely.
From Februarty 2017, the project OwlishOracle has transformed itself into a start-up company, incubated under IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, named NexConnect Ventures Pvt Ltd. is a social business venture seeking to address issues of social exclusion by empowering communities and connecting them digitally. It is an Online Live teaching -learning platform that connects quality teachers with all kinds of learners from urban, semi-urban and rural areas through inter¬active on-line LIVE teaching and training sessions using audio-visual content following board/course specific curriculum.

Publications:

Book: Social Knowledge Management For Rural Empowerment: Bridging The Knowledge Divide Using Social Technologies

This book develops and examines the concepts and strategies for rural empowerment through the formation of a community-driven social knowledge management (SKM) framework aided by social technology. The framework is aimed at mobilizing knowledge resources to bridge the rural–urban knowledge divide while securing rural empowerment using digital connections and social collaborations built on strategies of self-sustenance and self-development. With key empirical findings supplemented by relevant theoretical structures, case studies, illustrative figures and a lucid style, the book combines social technologies and social development to derive a social knowledge management platform. It shows how the proposed SKM framework can enhance knowledge capabilities of rural actors by facilitating connection among rural–urban entities through formation of purposive virtual communities, which allow social agents to create, modify and share content collaboratively.

View on Springer

Journals and Conferences

• Parthiban, R., Qureshi, I., Bandyopadhyay, S. et al. Leveraging ICT to Overcome Complementary Institutional Voids: Insights from Institutional Work by a Social Enterprise to Help Marginalized. Inf Syst Front 22, 633–653 (2020).
• Bardhan, A. & Bandyopadhyay, S. (2019) Productive Ageing: Insights from an Action Research dealing with Senior Citizens’ engagement with an E-Learning Platform to Educate Underprivileged Children. Indian Journal of Gerontology. Vol.33, No.2.
• Priyadarshini Dey and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay (2018), “Blended learning to improve quality of primary education among underprivileged school children in India”, Education and Information Technologies, Springer , November 2018. (DOI: 10.1007/s10639-018-9832-1)
• Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, ArinaBardhan, Priyadarshini Dey, Shrabastee Banerjee, Srimoyee Das and Kalyan S. Mandal, “A Social Knowledge Management Platform for Universal Primary Education Online“, in “Harnessing Social Media as a Knowledge Management Tool”, Ed. RiteshChugh, IGI Global, June 2016, ISBN13: 9781522504955.
• Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, Priyadarshini Dey, ArinaBardhan, Shrabastee Banerjee and Srimoyee Das, “OwlishOracle: Architecting a Social Media based e-Learning Platform for Primary Education of Underprivileged Children by Senior Citizens of India”, Int. J. of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments, Inderscience Publishers, Vol.3, No.4, pp.322 - 339, December 2015.
• Parthiban R., Qureshi I., Bhatt B. and Bandyopadhyay S. (2019) “Leveraging Bricolage to Mainstream the Marginalized: An Inquiry into a Social Enterprise in India” (presented at the International Conference on Business Management, December 2019, Melbourne, Australia)
• Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, Priyadarshini Dey, ArinaBardhan and Srimoyee Das “Education for All” in a connected world: a social technology-driven framework for e mobilizing dormant knowledge capital through sharism and mass collaboration Procedia Engineering, Elsevier, Proc. of the Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems and Global Impact 2016, Volume 159, Pages 284-291 (SEP 2016).
• Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, Shrabastee Banerjee, ArinaBardhan, Priyadarshini Dey and Srimoyee Das, “A Social Knowledge Management Framework for Harnessing Collective Knowledge Capital of Senior Citizens” Proc of the 12th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning (ICICKM 2015), Bangkok, Thailand 5 – 6 November 2015.
• Priyadarshini Dey, ArinaBardhan and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, “Architecting a Social Media based e-Learning Environment for Primary Education of Underprivileged Children by Senior Citizens of India”, Presented at the Social Media 2014: 19th Int’l Education and Technology Conference, Hong Kong. 15 -17th April, 2014.
• Kalyan S Mandal, Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, Shrabastee Banerjee, and Priyadarshini De, “Role of ICT In Mitigating Social Problems”, Presented in XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology on Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for Global Sociology, Yokohama, July 13-19, 2014, Japan.
• ArinaBardhan , Priyadarshini Dey ,and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, “ Connecting Generations: Creation of Web based Virtual Communities for Imparting Formal and Informal Education to the Underprivileged Children by Elderly Community,” Presentated in IFA 12th Global Conference on Ageing, Hyderabad, India, June, 2014.