Research Orientation in Raipur, Chhattisgarh

CLIx in Chhattisgarh is due to be rolled out from academic year 2016. With this in mind, TISS-Eklavya conducted a two-day orientation-cum-research workshop for newly recruited members at Raipur’s Eklavya office in late June. Members from Eklavya also attended. Also present was Dr Ted Moallem from MIT, who will be working closely in Dhamtari District on the hands-on aspects of CLIx Science. The orientation was conducted by Dr Archana Mehendale and Mr Ajay Singh, who introduced the project and its underlying philosophy, as well as the aim of offering CLIx on scale – with 1200 teachers and 45000 students in Chhattisgarh alone. Participants learned about the larger team from TISS and MIT, the states in which the CLIx intervention will occur, and partner organisations.

The TISS-Eklavya team met Mr Sanjay Ojha, Director of SCERT Raipur, to discuss aspects of the upcoming project, in particular Teacher Educator training and its timeline. An important decision taken was that all teachers’ trainings would be held at the SCERT Computer Lab – as the district has no other full-fledged computer lab that could accommodate 30-40 teachers.

The team spent the second day of its visit wholly engaged in research- and baseline-related discussions. All Field Support Persons and Field Technologists took part in these discussions about: the questionnaires for students, and for teachers, including domain-related questions; classroom observation; interacting with school Principals and other officials. Research ethics and the quality of data collection were also discussed. All team members downloaded and tested the baseline questionnaire using the Android devices given to them, as the data is being collected using ODK (Open source tool).

By the end of the day, the Chhattisgarh team had formulated a work plan for the two upcoming months.