Equal, high quality education for every child in the world, through virtual 3D museums.
When a classroom becomes a 3D theatre and a lesson becomes a 3D film, children step into a different world without leaving their seats. The Virtual Museum School is built to take the highest quality education to every child, everywhere.
With every child getting a personal teacher and teaching aids that seem to pop off the screen, learning becomes exciting and memorable. Just as children recall every scene and dialogue of a film, they remember the concepts, history and applications taught this way. The ambition is simple and large: make school so attractive that children want to attend, and deliver equal, world class education to all children regardless of where they live.
ViMS is aimed at children in government and rural schools from Std 6 to Std 12, across all subjects, delivered through 3D video shot on location in museums, heritage sites and forests. It extends the idea behind the Museum School into a form that can reach far beyond any single city.
Twelve years of working with education taught us the sequence by which knowledge is actually acquired: exposure, then inquisitiveness, then experimentation, then questioning, then seeking answers, then conceptual understanding and assimilation, and finally compiling and presentation.
For rural children the very first step is a barrier, because their exposure is limited by their surroundings. They cannot be moved great distances physically. But virtually they can. Sitting in their own classroom they can step into a 3D world that takes them to a science museum to understand how an aeroplane flies or how a tornado forms, or to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and its history, or to a natural history museum to study evolution, all in their own language.
ViMS is designed to take the museum-based teaching approach to children in every corner of the world, out of dim, low-lit classrooms and into museums, heritage sites and nature, where they understand a subject by experiencing it.
Arun always took the seat by the window so he could see outside. He hated sitting in the classroom reading from a book and memorising things under threat. But he was the best in the lab, on museum visits, on study tours. His final result: top of the class in practical, failed in theory. Arun never went back.
Like every child, Arun loved films, and could recall the scenes and most of the dialogue years afterwards. Why can’t classes be like films, he thought. Everyone would enjoy them equally, and everyone would remember.
Since the Right to Education, schools have reached almost every rural area. Yet education has still not found its interest among children. Rural government schools lack teachers, and where teachers exist they often lack subject knowledge and teaching quality. India has 1,05,630 single-teacher schools, between them holding around five million students.
Pressed to finish the syllabus and loaded with other government duties, teachers prepare children for examinations by rote, with no conceptual understanding behind it. Some try, and are worn down by the system. Because quality depends on whichever teacher a child happens to get, children in different parts of the country receive very different educations, which defeats the whole point of SDG 4, inclusive and equitable quality education for all.
Why are children shut inside classrooms when the knowledge of the world is outside? Where in that arrangement are the real steps of learning, exposure, observation, inquisitiveness, inquiry, understanding, reasoning? Even a smart classroom does not take a child anywhere.
A lesson holds a child’s attention for perhaps thirty minutes. A film holds it for two hours, and beyond. So the question became: can a class be as interesting as a film, shot on location of its own topic? Science at a science museum, history at a heritage site, environmental science in a forest. And shot in 3D, so the child reaches that location virtually while sitting in their own classroom. Front bench and back bench stop mattering, because the exhibit pops off the screen in front of everyone equally.
The delivery model is built around a facilitator: an educated but unemployed young person from the same locality, trained by ViMS.
The Juke Box records the school’s GPS location and the start and end time of every video. Facilitator movement is tracked by GPS and attendance by the fingerprint needed to start a video, both checked against the calendar and timetable filed in advance. Surprise visits keep facilitation quality up and keep schools and parents confident.
Better-resourced schools can register their own teachers as facilitators and run ViMS on existing smart boards or projectors. Individual students and homeschoolers can subscribe directly. Students are also taught to make the 3D glasses themselves.
Both play without 3D glasses. With a red-blue anaglyph pair you will see them as the students do. To arrange a demonstration class at your school, write to oasisorg.india@gmail.com.
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Whether you bring funds, a fresh idea, or an unsolved problem from the community you serve, there is a way in.
