Digital Study Hall Online

Digital Study Hall Online (DSHOnline), an initiative of Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), was created 10 years ago with Mona Foundation’s support as a forward looking approach to overcoming the shortage of qualified teachers in poor and remote rural schools in India. DSHOnline creates videos of the best teachers in actual classroom sessions teaching standard textbook materials, and then provides them free of charge to all teachers and students in poor public schools. Ongoing teacher training is offered to reinforce quality of teaching and learning.

Digital Study Hall’s approach to education has been described as “YouTube meets Netflix in a schoolhouse with a dirt floor.”

With the country in lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and all schools closed, thousands of teachers and students are now flocking to the DSHOnline platform, allowing children to feel part of a social learning environment from the safety of their home. And it is working! When Mona started supporting this initiative 10 years ago, DSH was offered in 23 schools. Today, with 1,643 relevant instructional modules for grades 1-8, they are in 2,320 schools with 94,000 subscribers, 2,000,000 unique users and 14.5M views.

Studies have shown dramatic improvement of student performance and local teachers demonstrated significant improvement in their grasp of subject matter. Digital Study Hall also works at the forefront of women and girls empowerment programs by including gender education into the core of their academic curricula and community education campaigns.

“I am a social studies teacher and I have a Bachelor’s in Education as well. I always watch your video lessons to learn how to teach mathematics and next day I teach children in my class. I feel indebted.” – Ranju Chaudhary commented on Class 6 – Algebra.