India's leading Youth Career Accelerator - TalentSprint has announced digital programs to help address the chronic shortfall of school teachers in the education sector. With a mission to empower one million youth realize their career dreams, TalentSprint is situating these comprehensive, well-designed and easy-to-learn programs on the cloud in order to help rural and semi-urban youth overcome traditional barriers such as gender, geography and privilege.
An UNESCO report pegs the current shortage of teachers in India at over 3 million. Though the desire, especially among women, to seek education careers is high; and government and private schools are turning increasingly to Central and State level Teacher Eligibility Tests (CTET and TET) to find talent, the selection rates are abysmally low at less than 10%.
According to K. Sridhar, Chief Digital Officer, TalentSprint, "Generating a steady stream of competent teachers is a multi-dimensional problem of quality, quantity and reach. Our objective is to elevate the success rates of 100,000 aspiring teachers through professional intervention. Going fully digital is a great way to synchronize our work with the call for a Digital India."
The flagship program for CTET preparation is being launched in time for participants to appear for the forthcoming assessment in September 2016. The fully digital platform is designed to help aspirants self-learn by watching interactive video lessons, taking multiple practice tests, getting detailed explanations and personalized mentoring, and interacting in real time with instructors and peers.
According to Saloni Gupta, Head of TeachersChoice, "Building capacity and capability has been a major challenge for both pre-service and in-service teachers. We believe that our novel digital platform will have far reaching impact by solving the challenges of content accessibility, affordability and quality, all in one go. We believe there is no other effective way to reach out to 100,000 young teachers within a short window of time."