Rajasthan government has successfully completed a pilot for Mission Buniyaad - an ambitious Personalised and Adaptive Learning (PAL) programme aiming to recoup learning level loss due to Covid-19 for one million adolescent girls and two million students in Rajasthan. The education minister of Rajasthan, Dr Bulaki Das Kalla, and Minister of State, Education, Zahida Khan announced the statewide scale-up of Mission Buniyaad at an event today to commemorate Teachers' Day.
The EdTech pilot was conducted among 35,000 girl students in six districts - Udaipur, Bhilwara, Sikar, Karauli, Dhaulpur, and Sirohi, with an average learning outcome improvement of 16 per cent between baseline and endline. The six-month pilot included grade 8-12 students spending two hours per week on digital devices for personalized and adaptive learning (PAL) and in-person school instruction.
Mission Buniyaad involved several key initiatives, including alignment of content with the State Board syllabus, getting approvals on content before starting the programme, onboarding the community by addressing their concerns, and creating ownership of the government as this initiative helps them achieve the goals laid out in National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) programme.
The programme also developed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and WhatsApp groups for teachers to address their issues. It live tracked the student usage and performance via impact dashboards which helped prioritise Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects to which students were not devoting enough time.
The roadmap for Mission Buniyaad targets improvements across all three pillars of digital education - access, equity, and quality. This year, the government will scale the programme by enabling Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Tablet labs across all 33 districts with the PAL platform to produce fruitful results.
The PAL platform backtracks on a student's progression to cover every possible gap in learning. Unlike a library, where you have to search every shelf for a book, the PAL platform automatically provides formative assessments, individual feedback, and content recommendations in the student's learning journey. It significantly reduces the disruptive effects that the pandemic has caused on their education.