At today’s Google for India online event, the search giant said that it’s partnering with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), an Indian schooling body, to help 1 million teachers run online classes by the end of the year.
The company will help teachers from 22,000 schools across the country to conduct classes online through tools such as YouTube, Google Classrooms, and GSuite. These tools will be available in eight Indian languages including Hindi and Gujarati.
Google’s new program aims to solve three key problems in the education sector in the county including lack of digital educational content in local languages, access to devices and internet, and training teachers to use digital tools.
[Read: Google promises to invest $10B in India over the next ‘5 to 7 years’]
Sapna Chaddha, senior marketing director, Google India and Southeast Asia, said that when the pandemic hit the company gave schools free access to premium features of tools such as Google Meet:
When the pandemic restricted mobility across the country, we enabled free access to the premium features of tools like Google Meet, as well as sharing free education tools like Google Classroom. The results have been heartening, including at schools like Podar, Kendriya Vidyalaya, Nehru World, and GD Goenka.
Google has invested in several educational initiatives in India. Last year, the company launched an offline app, named Bolo, to help kids in the country speak English and Hindi. This May, the app was launched globally under the name Read Along, with support for additional languages such as Spanish and Portuguese.
Along with the new partnership with schools, Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, is donating $1 million to Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF) for training teachers on digital education tools
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