Google ramps up efforts to help students, teachers continue learning, teaching from home

To help parents, students, educators find useful and high quality learning content created by education-focused creators on YouTube, Google has launched the YouTube Learning Destination.

To help parents, students, educators find useful and high quality learning content created by education-focused creators on YouTube, Google has launched the YouTube Learning Destination. (REUTERS)

With more than 1.5 million schools and more than 260 million enrolments, the Indian school system is one of the largest and the most complex education systems in the world. And one that is currently trying to navigate the global lockdown like every other institution.

Given the current situation, both educators and students have had to quickly adopt to not being able to attend physical classes and having to move the whole operation online as swiftly and as seamlessly as possible.

"As much as helping people find credible news and information is a key priority at this time, providing continuity in learning and education is equally mission critical and we are committed to providing helpful learning resources to families and educators in India," wrote Bani Dhawan, Head of Education - South Asia, and Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Partnerships - India as a part of Google coming forward to help students and teachers keep teaching and learning from home.

Supporting education and learning through YouTube

To help parents, students, educators find useful and high quality learning content created by education-focused creators on YouTube, Google has launched the YouTube Learning Destination.

The YouTube Learning Destination is accessible both from the mobile phone as well as the desktop from the Explore tab and contains resources covering curriculum-relevant topics in physics, math, biology, language skills, study hacks and even interest-based content like photography and yoga.

The YouTube Learning Destination currently features content in English and Hindi, with Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and other Indian languages coming soon.

(Google )

(Google )

Helping educators transition to remote learning

To help ease the transition to remote learning during this situation,Google has also rolled out free access to the premium features of Google Meet, to extend enterprise-grade video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, globally, until September 2020, which enables upto 250 participants in a single video conference.

In India, they have collaborated with FICCI Arise and have trained more than 250 schools across 23 states in the use of these tools. These tools can help teachers, students and customers can stay connected and work remotely.

To enable teachers and educators to get the support they need to begin teaching remotely, Google has provided training and tips through the Teach from Home hub, which is also available in Hindi. This resource has been built in partnership with UNESCO as a central resource for teachers.

(Google )

(Google )

The Teach from Home hub consists of numerous tutorials categorised around topics like "setting up and teaching with and without video, keeping students engaged with discussions and virtual whiteboards, staying in touch with other teachers by sharing teaching resources and even making the teaching sessions accessible to children with special needs by implementing voice typing and closed captions".

Google has also launched a global EDU hub comprising a collection of resources that help get started with remote teaching, to help educators ramp up quickly over this lockdown period.

Also to help kids understand the safety measures to be taken during this COVID-19 outbreak, Google has released books children from MoHFW (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare) and Chota Bheem on Google's reading app Bolo.