The Institute was started nearly two years ago to address the serious lack of job relevant skills in the local young population. Those who get good jobs in the surrounding cities have some amount of command of spoken English and at least basic computer skills. While many students can read English fairly well from the limited amount they learn in school, they can barely speak it. Computer skills are generally worse as virtually none of the schools in this area, or as far as I know any rural area in India generally do not include computers in their curricula in any serious way (mostly due to lack of electricity, funds and teaching expertise).
Thus there are huge numbers of private, for profit computer and English institutes all over the country, with new ones opening daily. There are 3 or 4 just in Bagar itself from none two years ago. The quality of instruction and one's job prospects after having attended any of these institutes is obviously quite patchy.
I spent most of my time here developing and teaching a 6 week course in computer hardware, networking, troubleshooting and administration as the main course the institute offers currently is a 4 month basic course covering copy/paste, the use of email, Internet and office programs and typing. I taught my lessons in the mornings and spent the rest of the day writing the lesson for the next morning.
In the last week, with the course finally complete, Ive been working closely with two of the students in the course who were selected by BEI's head to be the new instructors for the course. Teaching the course was extremely difficult what with my limited amounts of broken Hindi and the students patchy English reading and even worse spoken English skills. I learned a fair amount of grammar and syntax trying to translate handouts and tests while those students with better English learned a good bit about computes. The head of the institute, Kaushalji, very kindly sat in on nearly every lesson translating good parts of them and adding his own explanations.
I also spent time in Jaipur and some of the closer towns and cities interviewing the directors of other computer centres in order to get an understanding of their classes and operations in order to help BEI improve its business model in advance of a planned future expansion to other towns and villages in the are.
Sasha Riser-kositsky
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