English Education for Rural Children in China

In Fall 2018, we continued to scale up the Videolink Program sustainably and creatively. We taught regular English classes via the internet to more than 680 children at 6 primary schools in rural parts of Shanghai, Anhui, Henan and Hunan. Adding new schools to our roster takes a significant investment in terms of hardware, software, time and human resources, so partnerships must be chosen carefully.

One way we can scale up in a cost-efficient manner is to partner with organisations who already have infrastructure installed at a rural site; an example of this is our fruitful partnership with the Chi Heng Foundation, with whom we successfully run a videolink program in Nandawu, Henan province. We also capitalised on existing relationships with rural partners, for example starting a new videolink program at Taohuajiang Primary School, Hunan province, where we had already done rural trips.

Other advances include continuing to refine our volunteer management processes, as well as leveraging the Zoom videoconferencing system’s multi-user feature to do online group trainings, making our training process far more efficient. We also invested in better internet connections for some of our more disadvantaged schools.

Our aims for 2019 are threefold: (1) to continue to explore different ways to start new videolink programs; (2) to start at least 2-3 new programs at rural sites; (3) to do a complete overhaul of our teaching and training materials, thanks to a generous grant from Porsche; by the fall of 2019, we will have 120 bright and colourful new videolink PPTs in-line with our new Stepping Stones curriculum, plus redesigned training materials to support these new lessons.

Links:

• https://steppingstoneschina.net/