1800 Videos to be made available in Urdu, Kashmiri and Dogri: Experts
Farooq Shah
SRINAGAR: Aiming to make digital educational content available to the
students of Jammu and Kashmir in vernacular languages—Urdu, Kashmiri and
Dogri—the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), J&K,
is organising a three-day workshop from September 27-29 at its divisional
office in Bemina here today.
Some half a dozen educational and IT experts are in the process of
translating at least 10 videos to be presented before the NCERT and Team
Dikhsha, Ministry of Education, Government of India for assessing their
quality. This will invariably pave the way for translating some 1800 videos
produced by TicTacLearn—an initiative supported by Central Square Foundation
(CSF) and Google.org.
Director SCERT, J&K, Prof Veena Pandita, said that lack of digital vernacular school content affected tens of thousands of students across Jammu and Kashmir.
“Whatever is available is either
not of good quality or is unaffordable to our students,” she said. “We’ve
decided to translate high quality, animated, pedagogically sound, curriculum
aligned (NCERT) Maths and Science content in three languages viz. Urdu,
Kashmiri and Dogri.”
Technical expert with Dikhsha, Riyaz Ahmad Reshi, said the tool
available on Dikhsha platform enables registered users to upload videos online
to be translated into any target language.
“The videos, once translated,
will be hosted on Dikhsha portal where from they will be accessible to a
student after scanning a QR Code energised in their textbooks,” Reshi said.
“Students belonging to Grades 1-5 will benefit from the learning material
available in the languages they know and understand better.”
Pertinently, the newly launched education policy aka NEP 2020 prioritises universal foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) in primary school and beyond by 2027.
“The availability of digital
content in vernacular languages will aid the basic learning, namely reading,
writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level,” Reshi said.
A participant described the content available as of now as ‘haphazard’
and ‘fortuitous’. “Translating professional content will certainly make things
easy not only for a teacher but for a student as well,” Roohi Sultana, a middle
school teacher said.
Another teacher, Anjali Raina, while echoing Sultana’s views said the
availability of high quality digital content in vernacular languages will
lighten the burden of teachers in many respects. “Sometimes, it’s exceedingly
difficult for a teacher to get to the level of a child,” Raina said. “Because
most the content to be translated is animation based, it will help do away with
the monotony and instil student participation with interest.”
The workshop will go on for another two days wherein the participants
would scan as many videos as possible for translation into vernacular
languages.
Pertinently, TicTacLearn has created one of the largest open-source
repositories of high-quality curriculum aligned digital learning resources
comprising some 12,000 videos available free of cost for everyone.
Media Links:
1. https://kashmirobserver.net/2021/09/27/scerts-video-translation-workshop-aims-at-producing-vernacular-content/
2. https://kashmir.pz10.com/2021/09/scerts-video-translation-workshop-aims.html
3. https://www.risingkashmir.com/-3-day-video-translation-workshop-concludes-at-SCERT-92687
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