Upskilling Teachers With Digital Badges

Are you reading this article on a digital device? If you are, when was the last time you got a software update on this device? Has it ever happened that a tool or application stopped working and forced you to update its software to run again? That is exactly what Covid-19 has done to education systems around the world. It is a forced update. The forced update has pushed most educators towards adopting technology and opening up to the idea of online education. It’s a big change for most educators and like every forced change in human life, it has been messy for educators; and will take its due course to settle down. In India, while some educators have adjusted to the new reality and have taken measures to excel right from the first day, for most others it’s been a nightmare. And this nightmare has real-world consequences. A dark shadow often looms large on the way to attaining quality education for the children of our country. It is the lack of well-trained quality teachers.

Indian schools often fail to invest enough on the development of teachers, which is the very pillar of an educational institution. Moreover, India has a shortage of about 9 LAKH teachers and qualified head teachers who can pilot a school.

The quality of an education system relies substantially on the quality of the teachers and the principals. Merely sending our children to schools will not ensure quality learning for them.

The acute shortage of qualified and trained teachers, and consequently, the poor learning levels at schools is an issue that we wanted to address. In our objective to make quality education accessible to every child in the country, we embarked on a mission to Teach The Teachers. This initiative was taken under Tata Trust’s programme Integrated Approach to Technology in Education(ITE). The project is supported by Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

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