CHENNAI: The Madras Dyslexia Association (MDA) in association with the  National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) wing of IIT Madras launched ‘e-Shikshanam’, a free online teacher training programme to provide remedial support to children with specific learning difficulties. The course is open to primary school teachers up to class 5.

“Through this fundamental course, one can get primed into basic remedial instruction. Though our target is mainstream school teachers, parents who work with their children can also benefit from it,” said Harini Ramanujam, CEO, MDA.

There are nine modules which are broken into different segments. There will be a video, typically for 30 minutes followed by case studies for understanding and assignments at the end of each chapter to evaluate yourself. “The whole course is free and by the end of it, you will gain inputs on how to identify a child with dyslexia and how to help mild dyslexic children within the classroom. After the course, if a teacher is interested in certification, they can take a final exam by MDA,” said Mala R Natarajan, head, systems and technology, MDA.

Highlighting the unique aspects of this course, D Chandrasekhar, president, MDA said, “In Tamil Nadu alone there are 5,74,000 teachers and 90 per cent of them are in rural areas. Since the unremedied dyslexic children become social delinquents, this facility will channelise their untapped potential of to the benefit of the community.”
MDA has already trained around 2,000 teachers in government schools in eight districts of Tamil Nadu.

Course content
The team is planning to introduce the course in Tamil and start another programme for secondary training. The subjects covered in this course include an introduction to dyslexia, child development, screening, reading, writing, spelling, math, multiple intelligence and study skills. The NPTEL portal (https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/) will take this course to a wide audience. The link to the course can also be found on MDA’s website — www.mdachennai.com and Facebook page  Madras Dyslexia Association.