Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx)

With a purpose of providing quality education to the high school students in under-resourced government schools, project by the name of Connected Learning Initiatives (CLIx) is born. CLIx is a collaboration between Tata Trusts (India), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS, Mumbai), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

The major objective of the project is to make education more relevant to the students by making it engaging, interesting and giving sufficient opportunities to students to experience learning by working on hands-on activities. Experts in the field of Science, Mathematics, and Communicative English are brought together under this project to develop subject-specific modules that will help students to connect their textbook learning and the experiences they have outside the classroom. To ensure that the students acquire skills to become competent for the 21^st century, education is being offered through a meaningful integration of technology in each of these modules.

In the pilot phase, the modules are offered to students of government schools in the four Indian States- Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, and Telangana in their respective languages reaching approximately 1,000 schools and 1,50,000 students during the period 2015-2018.

As teachers are the most critical stakeholders in the education system, an in-service training modules for them are also a crucial component of CLIx. To make the teachers more confident, Teacher Professional Development courses for approximately 2,700 teachers are also being developed.

National Curriculum Framework 2005 states that the textbooks should be such that it establishes a connection with the real life experiences of students that happen outside the classroom. Eklavya understand well the relevance of this meaningful connection and hence is an active partner of CLIx in developing the Science Modules for grades 8 and 9. Under the guidance of professionals and scholars in the field, Vinod Raina Fellows are working on developing the Chemistry, Life Sciences, and Physics modules.

The key features of the Science Module are:

• Blended In Nature: The modules are developed in a way such that it comprises both of print and media content. There are multiple digital interactive (games and digital experiments) that are designed with the help of MIT team.

• Experiential Learning: The various thought experiments integrated in the module will give an opportunity to the students to test their hypothesis.

• Collaborative Efforts: Experts in the respective domains are working to contribute in the module with a scope for teachers to involve themselves in the module and form their instructions so that students have a better experience of learning.