In a country like Pakistan, where the commoditisation of education has made it increasingly difficult for students coming out of the backwoods to make it to prestigious institutions for professional education, a small initiative is shining like a light at the end of a long narrow tunnel.
D-study, the brainchild of Mehsam Samir and Waqar Karim, two Intermediate board toppers, initially began as a small endeavour to help out a few students who could not afford expensive private tuitions for university entrance exams.
Little did they know that it would snowball into something quite extraordinary.
Making use of Pring, an up and coming Pakistani mobile social network that allows users to interact with each other through their cellular network, the D-study community can be joined by anyone who has access to a mobile telephone- bringing connectivity along the lines of other popular social media networks to the millions of Pakistanis who do not have access to internet, computers or smartphones.
Today, the official D-study page on Pring boasts nearly 5,000 followers, most of them coming from rural areas who have subscribed to the communitys Pring stream through SMS. Additionally, the community has branched out into separate subject heads such d-Maths, d-Commerce and d-English which are helping out students with subject specific queries.
Word of mouth in government schools and colleges in far-flung areas has helped spread the cause- all you need to do is send an SMS "9900" and you can get ask questions about topics that are troubling you and get tips to score higher on university entrance exams.
The flow of communication displayed on the communitys web page is thick and fast, with students sending in SMSs asking questions related to everything from Biology, Physics to Mathematics.
"What is the most abundant carbohydrate in nature?" asks a student sitting at home in a remote village in KPK, "Cellulose", is the reply he gets on his phone within a few minutes, information that he could not have received as quickly without using the internet- access to which he most likely does not have.
Others have chimed in to say thanks. "I am Abdul Wadud Khan, now studying in Ayub Medical College Abbottabad. I utilised D-study and qualified medical entrance test", says one community member, while another from Bannu volunteers his services, saying that D-study helped him get into an Electrical Engineering programme at Air University.
Apart from offering answers to queries that students put up, administrators at D-study- which is run by volunteers the like of Mehsam and Waqar- offer valuable counseling advice to students. Everything from time management to ways on tackling a particularly tough numerical without using complicated calculations is discussed, allowing hundreds of students to avail the benefits of a private tuition minus the cost.
Talking to BR Research, Muhammad Nasrullah, the Chief Technology Officer at e-Business Pvt Ltd, expounds on the way Pring has given a platform to this voice of change. "Social networks are indeed becoming the biggest medium through which information exchange is taking place today and to limit this flow of information to a few people who have access to the internet or computers is taking away an intrinsic right from the rest of the people who do not have such luxuries," he says.
What Pring has done for people like Mehsam and Waqar is to give them a tool which is designed keeping in mind Pakistans demographics, allowing them to disseminate information to those who truly need it, the kids in backward rural areas whose only interaction with technology takes place through the mobile phone that their family owns.
Comments
Comments are closed.