MindHour: affordable one-stop online learning solution for schools

– Sumit Marda, Co-founder & CEO, MindHour

The world today is facing an unknown enemy in the form pandemic Covid-19, an enemy for which there was no premonition. Like every other aspect of our life, schooling and education as we knew it, has come to an abrupt stop, with all schools having to shut doors as a precautionary measure. The country has been in lockdown for more than 30 days and by now some schools have managed to stitch together stopgap measures to help them move the schooling and learning online. But is it enough?

Going by even the most conservative and optimistic estimates today, pre-covid19 normalcy will not be returning before the end of this year. In these circumstances are these ad hoc online learning measures taken by the schools robust enough to be seen as a true online alternative for the traditional classroom teaching? More so, are these solutions affordable enough to be replicated by schools en masse?

Going by the feedback received from many a schools, the timing of the pandemic outbreak was such that most schools in India were between academic sessions, and as a result were caught off-guard, having little or no time to prepare. As a result, schools had to suspend regular classes without any contingency plan in place. Even today, many schools are trying to organize a semblance of “online learning alternative” by using ad hoc means such as WhatsApp, YouTube, and the generic learning content off the internet.

Schools relying on smart-class technology are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to share their existing library of digital content with their students. On the other hand, teachers are often found lacking the tools or the expertise to prepare digital content on their own, and even in some instances are relying on mobile phone images of hand written notes, far from ideal. Not only that, these makeshift measures lack any monitoring or reporting mechanism for the school and teachers to know whether the students are learning or not.

Providing learning material to the students however, is only one facet of education, the other important part, reliable assessments which act as feedback tool, is something schools are unable to provide to their students in the current scenario. Some schools with enough resources at their disposal, have been able to set up online classes through applications such as Google class and Microsoft team. However, they are finding it increasingly difficult to operate the classes effectively, given the increased demand in internet bandwidth.

It is not the lack of willingness on the part of schools or the teachers, rather it is the lack of right tools, affordable applications, and quality content which is proving to be the stumbling block.

With no end to the pandemic in sight, compounded with the impending summer holidays, schools today are looking at a lockdown that can continue for the rest of the academic year. Keeping these challenges in mind, we present to you MindHour Edge, a cloud based solution, which can not only help the schools tide over this unprecedented situation, but also make them future ready, while providing quality education to its students at the same time.

MindHour Edge is currently available for classes I to X, for both CBSE and ICSE schools, and comes with all the features that a school today needs to run the classes and learning online.This includes:

Ready to use digital content (learning videos,notes and question bank)
A platform for teachers to upload and share homework and other reference material with their students
Inbuilt capabilities to host virtual live classes
Artificial-intelligence based practice exercises the results for which are shared with the teachers and schools for corrective measures
Dashboard to monitor and track the performance of students with the help of the preloaded AI-based assessment
MindHour Edge also comes with doubt clearance support, wherein students can ask and clear their doubts on one-to-one basis.

All these features and more, makes MindHour Edge the one-stop solution, not just for the lockdown but even beyond.

Given the crisis, as a contribution to the education system, MindHour has made the standard version of the platform available for FREE for all the schools for the complete year.

Few of the schools learning on MindHour Edge :