Towards Digital Multigrade One-room Schoolhouses for Underprivileged Communities in Rural Pakistan

Abstract

Context matters in the design and development of educational opportunities. Despite extensive global efforts to make education accessible for all, one out of every five children are outof-school. The situation demands re-thinking of learning strategies, particularly in underprivileged contexts. Continued advancements in learning technologies may offer novel solutions. The one-room schoolhouse is a centuries-old proven educational system, which has yielded promising results for rural areas. Using a multigrade teaching method, the one-room schoolhouse provides a resilient model for educating children where school administration faces typical issues of remote and rural areas such as lack of quality teachers, fewer children in each level, low socio-economic status of parents, lack of rooms in a school building, etc. This paper reports a case study of an integrated approach to teaching out-of-school children in rural Pakistan using education technology in a one-room schoolhouse environment using a multigrade teaching method. The paper (1) synthesizes the knowledge of practice and research on one-room schoolhouses, multigrade teaching, and education technology developments; (2) reports the on-ground practices of multigrade one-room schoolhouses in a real-life scenario in rural Pakistan and integrating digital capabilities into these schoolhouses; and (3) proposes the ways to implement and scale this method to educate out-of-school children in other underprivileged communities. Cite as Badar, F., Mason, J. (2020) Towards Digital Multigrade One-room Schoolhouses for Underprivileged Communities in Rural Pakistan. Computer-Based Learning in Context, 2(1), 21-39. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4057844

Digital Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

“…Prior to the pandemic several global initiatives had promised solutions, often led by innovations with technology. The evidence is, however, that while this divide has widened significantly due to the pandemic, many technology-led solutions to the problem have not yet proved to be sustainable due to overlooking the importance of local contexts (Badar & Mason, 2020). Moreover, in responding to this problem and ensuring that all individuals have access to the opportunities provided by digital technologies other dimensions to the »divide« have emerged.…”