My experience with using the internet to teach

In January of 2013 I took up a challenge to educate four students as part of an ‘education charity’ project–SVA–and prepare them to sit for the IGCSE ‘O’ levels exam. Pressured by necessary cost cutting measures in our donations-funded project meant we (my friends and I who started this pilot effort) couldn’t hire full-time professional teachers; they were just too expensive to maintain on donations alone. I knew the syllabus and since I had a good hold on maths and science from my school days, though almost no experience teaching them, I volunteered to teach the boys 10th grade mathematics, biology, physics and chemistry. The boys sat for their exam in the summer of 2014.

I had 16 months to prepare them and since they were living with me I took care of their welfare as well. The students were all 16 years old, with basic education in Tamil language. As an organisation caring for the well being of these kids and helping to develop their potential as career professionals we jumped head long into using the internet as an important self-study tool. If our plan worked it would mean that we would have the experience and model necessary to promote self-study as an option for other students who want to achieve this benchmark academic qualification. Parents, students and teachers could gain from our experience.

In August 2014 the results of our students came through, here is a simple breakdown of the results of ‘The Boys,’ as we called them:

For four ‘O’ Level Subjects (Mathematics A, Biology, Physics and Chemistry)

Mr. Yuges: 4A

Mr. Ganesh: 2A, 2B

Mr. Moshi: 1A, 3B

Mr. Dines: 1A, 1B, 2C

The Boys, passed all their subjects and our success rate for the target that we set, which was A or B grade for all subjects was 87.5%. We were pleased with the results especially since this was the first attempt for the boys and our preparation period was one and one half years instead of the usual two years. In the next post I will share with you a collection of resources we used for study and prep.

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