Bangladesh e-Education, Bmooc

e-Education:
Bangladesh is an Asian nation with great potential, however, wide disparities between rural and urban educational opportunities hamper the nation from harnessing its full potential. Therefore, BacBon’s e-Education project seeks to provide quality education for rural areas through distance-learning innovations.
Having noticed a huge shortage of qualified teachers for the rural areas of Bangladesh,where 80% of Bangladesh’s total population lives, BacBon’s e-Education project is providing the best teaching materials in DVD form torural- area students who otherwise would have few opportunities for educational advancement.e-Education gives these rural students a chance to be admittedto higher secondary and tertiary-level educational institutions, targeting especially matriculation into universities. Our e-Education team is now providing educational-content DVDs and lecture handouts for underprivileged students who are living in rural areas of Bangladesh. In 2010, we started our journey by opening one school in Haimchor Village to provide e-Education, and in 2012-2013, we established another four schools in response to rising demand for e-Education products. Starting in 2010, we provided teaching and materials in only three subject areas: English, the Bangali language, and Social Studies to some 200 potential college students of Haimchor Village. The total time spent on this project was about sixty hours. Between 2011-2013 we have provided approximately 150-hours of teaching and educational-content DVDs to some 550 students in seven subjects.While a very low proportion of rural women in Bangladesh are educated, an astonishing fifty percent of our e-Education clientele in these areas are women.Moreover, with rice and jute being the primary crops in Bangladesh’s rural areas, during both the harvesting and planting seasons most students have to help their parents in the fields, soBacBon’s e-Education ICT innovation platforms conveniently allow students to participate in distant-learning classes when time permits.In addition, concurrently, most Bangladeshi rural students and their parents have less motivation and zeal fordefined, better futures than their northern, more urban counterparts. To address de-motivational issues, e-Education provided educational-content DVDs and also arranged motivational sessions for students and the people of Bangladesh’s rural areas.

In 2012, University of Tokyo in Japan conducted impact research on “e-Education”, and Kyoto University in Japan has also just completed another impact assessment of e-Education’s viability during 2013 and 2014. Since 2013, when BacBon initiated its e-Education distance-learning for eighty-five students living in rural villages, some 70% of the students passed 2010 and 2011 university entrance exams. Recently, targeting minority communities in rural areas, we have also been providing educational-content DVDs for both high school students and to train potential e-Teachers.

A recent study conducted by Kyoto University and Tokyo University-Japan in Bangladesh shows that offline e-learning platform increase probability of passing top public university enrolment test by 16-17 per cent and any other public university by 26 per cent in Bangladesh (Kono H., Sawada Y. and Shonchoy S. A. 2015).

We believe, if given the chance to take on the challenge of studying to be admitted to top universities,a rural student will, at least, be able to break their family’s cycle-of-poverty and reach for a better life. That’s why we believe BacBon’s e-Education initiative represents a sustainable pre-investment towards enhancing a human, rural resource, whose future dividends will yield sensible and sustainable development throughout the rural countryside in Bangladesh for generations to come.People have often said to us: “It’s just impossible for poor people in the rural areas, through e-Learning innovation, to aspire to higher educational levels.” But we said, “We will prove that there is no such thing as ‘impossible’.”