Habiganj: Defeating the geographical barriers and other challenges, poor children living in a tea garden are getting modern education similarly with the kids of metropolis.

Availing the bliss of technology, the children of tea garden’s labourers are given education as per the curriculum of English Medium using multimedia system through a virtual school.

Now, the tea labourers who are struggling to manage food twice in a day have started dreaming to make their children doctors, engineers and high officials, which they never imagined.

The mechanism behind the online school is fairly simple, as the classroom is connected to a teacher in Dhaka via internet-based video conferencing technology, and the classes are run in the physical presence of local moderators.

The school, situated at the Surma Tea Estate under Madhabpur Upazila in Habiganj, started operation from December 2014 where local moderators support the online teachers during the class.

A moderator of the school told a group of visiting journalists a total of 40 children aged 4-6 years are reading in the school and they are mostly from nearby villages in the tea garden. ‘I helped the children to understand the lesson during the classes,’ she added.

Country’s leading cellular phone operator GrameenPhone in partnership with JAGOO Foundation and Agni System has established the online school.

The first Online School started in August 2011 with 80 Students. At the end of the first academic year, a comparison of performance was done among similar types of schools (Banani School and Rayerbazaar School) and Online School. On a GPA scale of 4, the Online School had a year-end average GPA of 3.3725 while Banani School and Rayerbazar School 2.8675 and 3.08 respectively.

Now, there are 693 students in 10 schools located in Gazipur, Gaibandha, Rajshahi, Madaripur Bandarban, Teknaf, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Hobiganj and Laxmipur.

Talking to BSS, Hafizur Rahman, Specialist, Corporate Responsibility Engagement of Grameenphone, said, ‘We’ve taken the initiative of online school to cut the gap between rural and urban in terms of providing quality education using technology.’

The online teachers deliver the lecture followed by an interactive session with the students for every class. The moderators at the receiving end assist the children during class work and help to maintain a disciplined classroom environment.

The modern software used for this form of schooling is WebEx which is an interactive and professional video conferencing software aimed at making the learning process communicative and interactive even with the virtual presence of its remote learners.

The programme contains interactive whiteboard, slide-sharing and video-sharing features and combines a sketch-board to acquaint the students with alphabets through just a stroke from its virtual tutor.

In order to host the classes from Dhaka in a disciplined manner, a studio has also been established named ‘Teachers Centre’ at Rayerbazaar. Online School Teacher’s Centre is capable of conducting 10 classes (each of 3/4 hours duration) simultaneously and it has the capacity of conducting 20 such classes every day.