BENGALURU: A completely online Bengaluru-based school is the first to announce the integration of web 3.0 technology to help encourage students to be more creative. 21K School, headquartered in Bengaluru, has around 3,000 students from 35 countries.
From the next academic year, the school will introduce metaverse and blockchain technologies, like Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), as ways to help students learn and create. “Whenever someone creates, be it music, art, podcasts or apps, it’s a big deal for us and we want to encourage this,” said Santosh Kumar, school CEO and co-founder.
‘Data will help identify learning gaps in students’
“We decided to convert kids’ creative projects into NFTs, which they can access in the future. It will be a new experience for them as well,” said Santosh Kumar. The use of a virtual reality environment will help make teaching and learning more fun and engaging for students, he added. The school is ahead in terms of technology, being the first and only completely online school.
Students are given a choice of studying British, American or Indian curricula, and are allowed to learn in their own time. “We make use of a data-driven instruction method and computational learning, where every student is monitored and teachers are given information on where they might be struggling. This helps in identifying and filling gaps in learning, so that a student is engaged and able to grasp concepts.
We also make use of activity-based learning to help improve student engagement,” said Yeshwanth Raj Parasmal, co-founder and director of the school. The founders said that 21K is able to cater to children whose parents have transferable jobs, home-schooled and disabled children who might be unable to attend offline schools. “Where we lack compared to physical schools, we make up by allowing students to socialise not only outside their age group but also with children different countries.
Classes last for four hours. We have one-hour periods and, overall, dedicate 30 minutes more per subject as compared to physical classes. This means less stress, full night’s sleep to children,” Parasmal told TNIE.
“The reason we wanted to create the school was to be able to provide good and affordable education to students, which we found difficult to do in an offline setting as passionate teachers are hard to come by. With the school,” said Kumar. He mentioned that the lack of infrastructure meant that students have access to quality education at a fee of Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 per year.