The spread of COVID-19 brought the entire nation to a halt. Only those facilities remained operational during the lockdown period, which came under the ambit of health services or essential commodities. The educational institutions also had to shut down. While students studying in private schools could attend online classes, students in government schools suffered as they had no access to the same kind of resources. During such tough times, the Ramgarh administration came up with the innovative idea of starting ‘E-Pathsala’, a no-cost initiative to ensure regular classrooms for the students enrolled in government schools across the district.
Approximately 2,06,113 students and 2,898 teachers are engaged with the government schools in Ramgarh. The initial idea was to conduct Facebook or YouTube live sessions with support from teachers across schools.
Experienced and self-motivated teachers across subjects were called from the Education Department and most of them proactively took part in this initiative. With their support and guidance, the Ramgarh Administration launched E-Pathshala programme. The system worked in such a way that teachers would record their lectures from the mobile phone camera and share it with the editing team.
The editing team would work in close coordination with the respective teacher to update the video content and share it on the YouTube channel of Lockdown E-Pathshala. The YouTube channel is now a go-to place for students from class 06 to 12. Today, the E-Pathshala YouTube channel has almost 18,000 subscribers with 376,192 views benefiting 94,000 students of 194 government schools of the district.
As part of the initiative, a dedicated students’ corner has been created where students can take part in an extracurricular activity of their choice and share their videos through the YouTube Channel. A dedicated Teacher’s diary section has also been created where different teachers come to share their teaching experience and talk about learning outcomes since the day they have taken part in the E-Pathshala programme.