Gurumurthy Kasinathan

'Shiksha Vimarsh’ is a bimonthly Hindi magazine published by Digantar. It seeks to inform and engage its reader in discourse on a wide spectrum of issues related to contemporary educational thought and practice, policies, problems, case studies, researches and book reviews. Over the last 15 years, Shiksha Vimarsh has brought out a range of…

The pandemic has exposed India’s ambivalence about scientific knowledge. While masking and distancing constitute scientific wisdom, we see mass disregard of these in festivals and polls. The pandemic has exposed another ambivalence — about beliefs on the purpose and processes of education. Education experts’ views have sharply contrasted with…

School closures since March 2020 have allowed students limited opportunities for structured learning, causing learning loss, and aggravating malnutrition, child abuse, child labour, school dropout and early marriage.

Online education is seen as a solution to the education emergency. A survey conducted by Karnataka Education Department…

The government is fiddling, as children are losing foundational literacy and numeracy. The Karnataka government has opened schools fully for grades 9-12 and partly for 6-8. However, lower primary schools (LPS) consisting of grades 1-5 remain closed and may have a zero year (a year of no school). Most states seem to favor keeping LPS closed.…

Visual Coding camp

One highlight of our work in the “Teachers Communities of Learning” program during 2019-20 was the camps conducted on visual programming at St Euphrasias Girls High School during January 2020. The objective was to strengthen STEM capabilities in the students, and we…

Translation is seen as a high-skilled professional activity, which restricts its reach. Three members of an NGO, that works with government schools, attempted to translate text from English to Kannada, using easily accessible digital tools; the NGO also supported teams of student-teachers and teachers to use these tools for translating…

Schools and educational institutions have tended to use proprietary software applications: software that is not sold, but ‘licensed’, by the vendor. Here, the institution is only a ‘user’, and neither owns the software nor has any control over it. Over the last decade, however, the Indian public school and higher education systems have made…

A virus may be apolitical but our response to it reveals biases and inequities in our systems. As we all adapt to the new “normal”, it is critical that we look at the stated and unstated assumptions, and implicit and explicit changes being made to our social welfare systems, which impact people differently.

Millions of children have been…

In the past, Open and Distance Learning (ODL)  was primarily conducted through snail mail where institutions sent reading and other materials to learners. With the advent of Internet and related digital technologies, this has gradually changed. This paper explores how a free and open digital technology like MediaWiki, and Wikimedia open…

IT for Change, in collaboration with Foundation for Education, Ecology and Livelihoods (FEEL) has designed an e-learning course for Mathematics teachers which is currently being offered for Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghathan (KVS) teachers. KVS is the Central Government institution that runs schools for…