Engineering students curate online educational resources for underprivileged children kept home from school by COVID-19 pandemic
An online library built by hundreds of graduate students at the University of Waterloo is helping teach underprivileged children in Pakistan who have been shut out of their schools by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The curated collection of links to educational resources — the centrepiece of an engineering course for master’s students in management sciences and at the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business — has been under construction for more than three years.
Teachers in Pakistan work on lesson plans in an initiative supported by engineering students at the University of Waterloo.
But it has become increasingly valuable since the coronavirus crisis triggered stay-at-home orders for students in Pakistan and countries around the world.
About 500 teachers a week now use the Technology Enabled Education Resource Library to find videos, assignments and exercises for lessons they can email to students working at home.
“Technology allows us, even being here in Canada, to help the disadvantaged and improve the world more than ever,” says Peter Carr, a management sciences lecturer who supervises the course and its library project.
“We’re using that technology to create a motivating, rewarding learning experience for our students, while at the same time doing some real good in another part of the world.”
Peter Carr is a management sciences lecturer at Waterloo Engineering.
Developed in partnership with Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the public education system in Pakistan, the library is organized by grade and subject to follow the national curriculum.
More than 400 students from Waterloo have painstakingly sourced and validated more than 15,000 links aligned with most of the material in grades one through 10. Work continues to cover grades 11 and 12, as well as add content in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.
Tanya Baptist, a master’s student in management sciences who took the course last term, welcomed the project management experience she gained by working in a group, meeting weekly with a representative in Pakistan and handling other tasks to stay on track.
The bonus was knowing that all her legwork to test, validate and find alternatives to unsuitable or broken links would actually benefit grade one students half a world away.
“It felt good that something we worked on would make a difference,” says Baptist, who returns as a teaching assistant for the course this term. “It was a really satisfying experience.”
A team of fourth-year engineering students hope to develop an app this year to improve mobile access to the library since smartphones are more widely used than computers for internet access in Pakistan.
Once the library is completed through grade 12, there are also plans to build similar online resources for teachers, parents and students in other countries in Asia and, possibly, Africa.
“Not only do we believe everyone should receive a quality education, we think it contributes to stability and improved living conditions more broadly,” Carr says. “We’re not creating jobs, but hopefully better education enables people to start companies and do the other things that build economies.”
