Gained in translation: American Khan Academy now in Punjabi for govt school kids | Education News,The Indian Express
In Punjab, a team of 26 government teachers took on the mammoth challenge of translating Khan Academy’s entire maths content for Classes 6 to 10 into Punjabi from English.
A room at the Punjab Education Department’s office in Mohali was turned into a studio, with softwares for screen recording and editing, tablets with a digital pen, some laptops and a microphone. A team of 26 government teachers took on the mammoth challenge of translating Khan Academy’s entire maths content for Classes 6 to 10 into Punjabi from English. A year later, and after translating nearly 11 lakh words and creating 440 new videos, Khan Academy’s Punjabi website is now live for students and teachers to login and study, anytime, anywhere.
Behind this is a memorandum of understanding signed over three years ago by Punjab’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the globally acclaimed online coaching platform to help children in government schools.
Punjab has made the website fully functional in Punjabi, with over 9.5 lakh students from its government schools registered as users and 3.3 lakh of them actively using it. Every mathematics teacher also has a login ID to check students’ progress.
For Khan, who was born to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother in the US, it all started when he had started helping his 12-year-old cousin in solving maths problems over the phone. Soon, he developed a software to help kids study online. Currently, Khan Academy reaches at least 13 crore students across 190 countries and a crore in India via video lessons and online content focusing on maths and science, which is free to use for all. It currently has 7.46 million subscribers on YouTube alone.
To ensure that content and videos in Punjabi matched the standards and format followed by Khan Academy globally, the Punjab teachers were given training by its staff and a review process was followed before putting it on the website.
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