Updates – Feb 2021

After 10 months of a concerted team effort by the entire AHRAYA team in the US and India, I am proud to announce that we successfully launched the Cafe Sensorium Learning Platform (CSLP) in 5 higher primary schools in the Gundalpet taluk (Gundalpet, Annurkeri, Raghavapura, Shindapura and Kuthanuru). We have also converted one school which has been participating in the onsite Seed Sensorium program in Hanur area (Ajjipura) to CSLP. We have thus deployed CSLP to 450 students in 6 schools. Please follow this link to view the video on the inauguration function conducted on Feb 26 2021: https://youtu.be/JOxCOXik8J8

The unique aspects of CSLP are:

  1. It brings online learning to rural areas in India so that they can be on par with students in urban areas
  2. The entire content has been developed by teachers who have been running the onsite Seed Sensorium program in the 10 rural schools over the last 14 years. Hence all the content has been tried, tested and confirmed to work in rural settings with proof points at every stage.

Here is what we completed to get to this stage:

  1. Completed the development and build of the CSLP website (https://www.ashraya-usa.org/my-sensorium/cafe-sensorium/) with
    • One overview page and 8 lesson pages per club x 6 clubs (science, art, book of the month/story writing/drama, MLL, computers and all-rounders), i.e. 64 pages which incorporate ~ 180 original videos (lesson videos, past club sessions, past student demos),  assignments and quizzes for each lesson, lesson descriptions, sample past student submissions and external links to take learning beyond each lesson.
    • Online student journey process for registration –> account management –> viewing lessons –> downloading assignments –> doing assignments offline –> taking photos and videos of completed assignments –> uploading assignments photos and videos –> viewing scores granted by teachers online
    • Online teacher journey process for registration –> account management –> viewing submitted assignments –> granting scores online
    • Live chat box for students to ask questions in real time to remote teachers assigned in each club (in Hanur taluk) and for teachers to answer the same in real time using an app on their mobile phones
    • Demo videos for students and teachers to understand how to use CSLP, with links directly on the website
  1. Distributed laptops to each of the 6 CSLP remote teachers (running our seed sensorium program) – 5 of these 6 laptops were donated by Open India. Thank you Open India. The teachers will use these laptops to view the assignments and score them online, answer student questions in the live chat box and create new lessons videos over time
  2. Got all the 25 desktops in each of the 5 Gundalpet schools (5 per schools) repaired and brought them to working conditions. Most of these desktops which had been donated by big foundations such as Wipro and Infosys were not in regular use
  3. Procured internet connections form BSNL for each of the 5 schools (some of these remote schools needed few fiber cables to be laid) plus one school in the Seed Sensorium area (Ajjipura) which we converted form onsite learning to online learning – ASHRAYA will pay for the monthly internet bills for these 6 schools going forward
  4. Purchased and installed keyboards, mice and speakers for 30 computers (in schools in Gundalpet and one school in Hanur) – most of the computers did not have these key accessories
  5. Purchased and delivered one camera for each of the 6 schools. These cameras will be used by students to take photos and videos of completed assignments and upload them to CSLP through the desktops using card readers.
  6. Worked with the local school principals to select 15 students per club x 5 clubs in each school (please note that students for the 6th club, the all-rounder club, will be selected from students participating in the other 5 clubs)
  7. Purchased materials needed to do the offline assignments (lab reports, art materials, note books etc.) for each school and delivered to these schools
  8. Hired a local program coordinator (Mr. Mallikarjun Swamy) to manage the program in the Gundalpet area. He started work as a fulltime ASHRAYA employee on Feb 1 2021.
  9. Selected one teacher each in each of the 6 schools to act as a local resource person for CSLP. We will pay a small stipend per month to these teachers
  10. Trained the program coordinator, 5 local teachers and all selected students on the basics of using computers and the details of accessing and using CSLP. Our Seed Sensorium teacher Ms. Vishalakshi did the computer training and our project advisor and team lead Mr. Savukar Raj did the CSLP training.
  11. The inauguration function was presided by the Gundalpet taluk BEO, Mr. Shiva Murthy who is the main sponsor for this initiative. It was arranged and compered by our team lead Mr. Savukar Raj. Our entire Seed Sensorium team of 6 members went to Gundalpet from Hanur to attend the function and introduce themselves to the students (“the faces behind the voices and videos”). All selected CSLP students, local school teachers and principals also attended the function in each school.

In the coming days, we will register all the 450 students on CSLP and start the lesson curriculum by mid-week. Each club will have one hour classes per week in each school. Since we have 15 students per school and each school has only 5 computers, students will work in groups of 3 but will submit assignments individually on CSLP. The entire curriculum in each club is designed to take 28 weeks: 2 weeks for overview + 3 weeks per lesson (one week to view the lesson online and download the assignments, one week do the assignments offline and one week to take photos/videos of assignments and upload the assignments) x 8 lessons = 24 weeks + 2 weeks for online certification = 28 weeks.

I would like to thank the entire ASHRAYA team (Mr. Savukar Raj, Ms. Shweta Shetty, Ms. Savita Kumari, Ms. Vishalakshi, Mr. Ramesh, Mr. Prabhuswamy and Ms. Jyothilakshmi) who have worked tirelessly in the last 10 months to record all the videos and create all the content for each lesson; and our daughter Divya who created the artwork for all the web pages, designed the lesson page layout as well as created most of the lesson pages. I am especially indebted to my friend and partner Mr. Savukar Raj who has led this team from Day 1 and is the driving force behind all our programs in the field. I would like to thank Mr. Sundip Gorai for funding the launch of CSLP; Open India and all you donors for continuing to believe in us through these years.I would finally like to thank Mr. Shiv Murthy, the Gundalpet Taluk BEO who offered to take up this program in his taluk.

I will send you all frequent updates on the progress of CSLP, as well updates on our Seed Sensorium program which we moved from the Zoom/audio conferencing learning to onsite learning from Feb 1 when all government schools reopened in India.

Updates – December 2020

I am very excited to announce that we have made significant changes to the Cafe Sensorium Learning Platform (CSLP) since I sent you an update in early October. You can view and navigate through our new and improved website and CSLP at www.ashraya-usa.org. These changes allow us to scale the platform as we plan to add many schools to this platform in the coming months once the schools reopen. The latest guidance from the government of Karnataka is that schools will be opened on a limited basis (alternate days for each grade) starting Jan 5th adhering to social distancing guidelines. We plan to pilot the platform in 5 schools (10 students per club per school x 6 clubs x 5 schools = 1500 students). Here are the main changes/additions we have made to the platform to get ready for the launch (I am unabashedly proud to state that I made all the changes on my own using various plugins and have become a serious WordPress developer in the last 6 months, savings thousands of dollars in development costs and also setting us in a good position for the future since it will be very easy to update the website and the content going forward).

  1. We have updated the theme used for the entire website that is compatible with the latest version of WordPress and also has a very good look and feel. I selected Education Base Pro as the theme since it is designed for, and used by many schools and universities.
  2. Using this new theme, we have given the UI of the home page as well as all sub-pages a total overhaul – you can see the results for yourself if you go to www.ashraya-usa.org. There are 5 main sections to the website with the new theme:
    • The student tabs in the top menu (Student Registration for registration, Student Account for login, and Student Journey for accessing lessons in each club, uploading and view assignments, and viewing the latest performance scores)
    • The teacher tabs in the top menu (Teacher Registration for registration, Teacher Account for login, and Teacher Journey for viewing submitted assignments and entering the scores online in each club)
    • The 3 main content links that donors can click and see – My Sensorium, Seed Sensorium and Cafe Sensorium right in the main body of the front page. These provide copious information and about our current classroom-based Seed Sensorium program as well as the new Cafe Sensorium learning platform based program.
    • The lower value links in the footer (Ashraya Overview, Latest News, Annual Reports and Team Members)
    • A header top bar with links to social media and a button for donors to click and donate directly on the website.
  1. The new theme also facilitates a persisting background, a top menu that persists from page to page and a much cleaner boxed UI in each subpage. It also allows a search across the entire website.
  2. The new website theme automatically adjusts the UI for desktop/laptop, tablet and smartphones so that the platform can be viewed on multiple devices. You can check this out for yourself (the mobile one really looks good with dropdowns replacing tabs)
  3. All the assignments that the students upload will now be stored in a back-end connected Google Drive (and not on the website) that will allow us to scale the site as well add many students in the coming months
  4. All scores that students see are fields coded into the platform so that students can now see all these scores as part of their “Student Journey” without having to download any spreadsheets. Thus, they now get to see only their scores and not the scores of others. Given that all the scores are now fields in the platform (10 lessons per club x 6 clubs), we can also display average scores at various levels (school, taluk, club) to incent students to do better over time. We have also made sure that students cannot change their scores (they don’t have write permission on all the score fields).
  5. When students upload their assignments (images, documents and videos), they now provide rich attribute information such as lesson number, school (HPS) name and Taluk name that can be used for filtering by teachers while reviewing assignments (see below).  They also get to see all assignments loaded to date in a nice tabular format with all rich attributes tagged to each assignment (lesson number, Taluk, HPS)
  6. Teachers can now see the assignments submitted by all students in their respective clubs in a nice tabular format, and can sort/filter the assignments by student, HPS and taluk for a given club.
  7. Teachers can now enter the lesson level and overall scores for all their students directly on the platform (using a plugin that I used to facilitate this) without having to download/upload any spreadsheets to and from the website. Thus the scores get updated in real time as teachers enter the scores on the platform AND the students can see their scores in real time as well (as teachers grade them).
  8. I have applied restrictions on all pages of the website so that content is viewed based on role-based permissions.
    • Students (after registration in the Student Registration tab and login in the Student Account tab) can see all pages under the Student Journey tab but cannot see any pages under the Teacher Journey tab
    • Teachers (after registration in the Teacher Registration tab and login in the Teacher Account tab) can see all pages under the Teacher Journey tab but cannot see any pages under Student Journey
    • Donors and visitors can only see pages that can clicked on in the main body and footer sections of the home page but cannot see any pages under the Teacher and Student Journey tabs
    • Teachers cannot register as teachers on the website in the Teacher Registration tab unless they receive a password from us orally (this will prevent students from registering as teachers and viewing scores)
  9. We have completed the lesson level content for 8 to 9 lessons in 6 clubs (~50 total lesson pages). This completes the content for all the core lessons needed to complete one year’s curriculum in each club. Each lesson page has an introduction in English and Kannada, the main lesson video, a student demo video (demo of what the Seed Sensorium students have done on that lesson), assignments, quizzes, questionnaires, sample past student submissions and suggestions on the path forward (from this lesson). Our teachers have completed creating ~80 videos of 15-40 minutes duration each in the last 6 months directly out of their respective homes, to get the CSLP ready for launch. They have also tried to make these videos interesting by shooting them in various backgrounds (front of a temple, front of a lake, home backyard, farmland etc.)
  10. Divya (our daughter) has created original drawings for each page on the website to make the website colorful and interesting for students. Please look out of her club specific drawings (in pages related to each club), drawings related to the entire Cafe Sensorium experience and the student user experience from Student Registration to Student Account to Student Journey (lessons to assignments to scores)
  11. The website and all its pages are now secure and follow standard web security protocols
  12. We have tested the website with dummy student and teacher accounts and also uploaded dummy assignments and entered dummy scores.
  13. To test out this website for yourself, please use the following dummy accounts:
    • To view the sections in the main body and footer sections of the website, you don’t need any logins
    • To view all the pages under the Student Journey tab as a student, first click on the Student Account tab, login using the following user name (suryakumar@gmail.com) and password (shwetha). You can then click on the Student Journey tab and navigate through the various clubwise lesson, assignment and score pages. When you do this, please follow the steps outlined in the main Student Journey page. You can also upload some dummy assignments and see them show up as soon as you upload them.
    • To view all the pages under the Teacher Journey tab as a teacher, first click on the Teacher Account tab, login using the following user name (deeparamesh302@gmail.com) and password (87654321). You can then click on the Teacher Journey tab and navigate through the various clubwise assignment viewing and scoring pages.

Hope you like what you see. Looking forward to your feedback. We wish you and your families a happy new year and a resurgent year ahead.

Updates – September 2020

Hope all of you are staying safe and healthy with your families. We are going live with Cafe Sensorium (CS) on October 15th when the schools are supposed to reopen – we will start with one operating block (5 schools) in T Narasipura Taluk for 5 months this year (shortened year due to Covid). The Cafe Sensorium Learning Platform (CSLP) is also ready – I have made significant improvements to the website since I sent you an email on V1.0. For starters, we decided to change the operating mode to a full hands-off mode with no CS staff onsite except a project coordinator. So, instead of hiring staff in each operating block for CS, we have decided to build a call center in Kollegal where we operate Seed Sensorium (SS) that can serve multiple CS operating blocks. This way, we can develop scale and also make sure that the SS and CS components of our operations are both in the same place (and also promote cross learning). For this pilot year (2020-21) with one operating block and a shortened school year of 5 months, we will pay extra salaries to the current SS teachers to operate CS. Next year (2021-22), we will build a dedicated call center for CS that can support up to 4 CS operating blocks (5 schools per block x 4 blocks = 20 schools). Please visit the CS overview page (https://www.ashraya-usa.org/my-sensorium/cafe-sensorium/overview/) and see a detailed description of the new CS operating model along with student footprint, school selection criteria, expected student workload, how the students will access and use CSLP, what will we provide locally/central location and our operating budget. Please go through it and give me your feedback before we finalize the operating model for this year and next year.

I have also added totally new functionalities to CSLP to make it ready for primetime. I learned advanced modes of WordPress and used many plugins to make this site totally functional and ready for use – I have saved thousands of dollars doing this on my own without hiring any developers :). What I sent you last time was the club overview pages for a few clubs and one lesson page for each club. Now, what I had added are the following:

  1. The club overview pages for all clubs are done with art work by Divya done specifically for all clubs. You can access each club from the main CS page at https://www.ashraya-usa.org/my-sensorium/cafe-sensorium/
  2. Under each club, we have added more lesson pages (3 in most clubs) thanks to the great work done by our SS teacherds who have generating one lesson plan per week for their respective clubs (each lesson includes an introduction, 30 min lesson video, quiz, assignments and links). We plan to have 5 lessons ready in each of the 6 clubs by Oct 15 when we launch. Given that we have a shortened school year this year, we just need 5 lessons in each club. By next school year (starting July 2021), we will have all the remaining lessons done (~9-10 per club)
  3. I have created the STUDENT tabs in the top panel of asharaya-usa.org
    • The first tab is called STUDENT REGISTRATION. In this page, each student in each school will register themselves with a username, password, email address and clubs that they participate in. Each student has to visit this tab only once.
    • The second tab is called STUDENT ACCOUNT. In this tab, the student will log in every time they visit CSLP, and logout after they are done with a given sesion. They can also upload their profile picture if they like.
    • The third tab is called STUDENT JOURNEY. In this tab, each student will access the content of all clubs (lesson plans) they participate in. They can also upload the assignments after they are done with each lesson under each club by clicking on the link titled “Manage Assignments” in the STUDENT JOURNEY tab. In the same Manage Assignments pages (one for each club), they can also view and change/delete all assignments they have uploaded to date. Each student will only see their own assignments in this page (and not the assignments of other students)
  4. I have also created the TEACHER tabs in the top panel of asharaya-usa.org
    • The first tab is called TEACHER REGISTRATION. In this page, each student in the CS central team in Kollegal will register themselves with a username, password, email address and clubs that they teach. Each teacher has to visit this tab only once.
    • The second tab is called TEACHER ACCOUNT. In this tab, the teacher will log in every time they visit CSLP, and logout after they are done with a given sesion. They can also upload their profile picture if they like.
    • The third tab is called TEACHER JOURNEY. In this tab, each teacher will access the assignments uploaded by all students for a given club (across all schools). They can download the assignments, change the assignments (to provide feedback to the students and add their scores to the assignments) uploaded to date. Each student will then see their own corrected assignments in their student journey pages (for a given club)
  5. I have also created a tab called STUDENT PERFORMANCE in which the teachers are allowed to upload the scores across all students in a given school for each club in the club sub-pages under this tab. They will upload one set of scores for each club for each school. The students can visit this page and see the scores for their club in a given school. they can see scores of all students in their school, but not be allowed to change the scores and upload changed scores (they can only view and download scores from this tab)

To be able to test the functionalities in their tabs (if you like), you have to register as a student and a teacher separately using different email addresses using the STUDENT and TEACHER tabs. Let me know if you find any lacking/glitching functionalities before we finalize the functionalities for the Oct 15th launch. If you register and log in as a teacher, you will see some sample assignments that we have loaded to CSLP to test out the functionalities (we will delete them by time we go live). I have also trained all the current staff in SS on CSLP since they will act as the central staff for CS for this year (we plan to pay them extra to do this over and above what they can get paid for SS). You can read the full user experience of the student journey through CSLP in the CS overview page  (https://www.ashraya-usa.org/my-sensorium/cafe-sensorium/overview/)

Hope you like what you see. Looking forward to your feedback. And please keep in mind that we want only the MVP for Oct 15th and we don’t want to hire any developers for this year to make it fancy. We can do that before the beginning of next school year (when we extend CS to 5 operating blocks). I would like to thank our SS staff who have been working nonstop to get CSLP ready for launch.

Updates – August 2020

Hope all of you and your respective families are staying safe and healthy through these tough times. Last time I wrote to you, I solicited your feedback of changing ASHRAYA’s name to My Sensorium to be in line with what we do now and plan to do in the coming months and years. Feedback from some of you suggested that rebranding the org is confusing and could create churn/grief amongst donors, patrons and users alike, especially given that we have been operational for ~30 years now.. So, we came up with a good compromise. We decided to retain the organization name as ASHRAYA and our website as www.ashraya-usa.org. But we decided to change the name of our main initiative Project Terra Firma as My Sensorium which resonates with our experiential learning programs. And under My Sensorium we plan to have two sister sub-initiatives – Seed Sensorium and Cafe Sensorium. Seed Sensorium is the test bed for all our programs in which we build all our content, develop and finetune processes and systems. This is the program we have been running in the Kollegal area since 2007 and will continue to run to test and prove out anything new. Cafe Sensorium is the online learning platform that will be executed all over Karnataka in a hand off franchise model (and pilot in T Narasipura starting this October).

Over the last few months, our online classes using Zoom (for ~50 students who have smartphones) and Eagle Audio Conferencing (fot ~60 additional students who have regular phones) have been going very well. We have learnt a lot, and been enthused/heartened by how we can leverage online technologies in rural India. Kids are excited about online learning and post their submissions including videos and reports using WhatsApp (we have created one WhatsApp to disseminate tests and received student submissions) for each class (art, science, book of the month, story writing, MLL, computers and all-rounders). It is fun to see students sit in their rural home environs, shoot videos on their art/lab work and post those videos on WhatsApp (with cows and goats in the background watching on in bemusement).

We (our staff in the Kollegal project area spearheaded by our project advisor and dear friend Mr. Savukar Raj, your truly and Divya, our daughter) have been feverishly working on building the online learning platform for Cafe Sensorium (to be ready for the pilot that we will start in T. Narasipura area when schools reopen in Oct 2020). I am very glad to showcase to you V1.0 of our Online learning platform. In the process of doing this, we both learned WordPress and revamped our entire website (www.ashraya-usa.org) for two reasons: (1) It had not been updated since we built it using a 3rd party agency in 2014; and (2) we had to make “room” for our online learning platform, i.e. the whole message has to flow well from ASHRAYA to My Sensorium to Seed Sensorium to Cafe Sensorium. Good news is that all the hard work is done. Just to give you an idea of the work involved, we have created/used ~60 original videos created by yours truly and the team in Kollegal, 500 original photos and 70 original artwork created by Divya to make this platform ready (tailor made for each part of the platform). Here is the flow of the platform that you can go through and review/provide feedback at your leisure. You can start with the main ASHRAYA website page: www.ashraya-usa.org. Now you can go to the second row of the main page, which is where we have all new content: Here you will see 4 tabs.

  1. The first link from the left is titled “My Sensorium“. This is our overall program (originally called Project Terra Firma and rebranded in the last few months). You can click on this link and read a very short overview of what My Sensorium is
  2. The second link from the left titled “Seed Sensorium” will take you to the Seed Sensorium main page. Here will you see multiple tabs: Program summary, Program Descriptions, Main Videos, Key Success Factors and Program Details:
    • Under “Program Summary“, you can see a short overview of our complementary experiential learning programs and a link to our youtube channel.
    • Under “Program Descriptions“, you can see a description of each club under Seed Sensorium
    • Under “Main Videos“, you can see links to some key videos from our past 14 years of running Seed Sensorium
    • Under “Key success Factors“, you can see what we think are the main factors that makes Seed Sensorium successful, and any franchise model under Cafe Sensorium successful as well
    • Under “Program Details“, you will multiple sub-tabs in which you find latest updated and rich content from Seed Sensorium such as student profiles, teacher profiles, program profiles, past annual events, collateral, yar-ending project monitors, year-ending scorecards, a photo gallery of each club and current year’s budget. I have updated each section with the latest content and videos in this tab.
  3. The third link from the left titled “Cafe Sensorium” will take you to our brand new online learning platform (V1.0) which is geared towards teachers in a franchise Cafe Sensorium location (such as T Narasipura), from which teachers can download content (templates, study material, activities, quizzes and tests) and watch videos to self-learning how to run the clubs and the various lessons under each club. In the main page of Cafe Sensorium, you will find a brief explanation of what Cafe Sensorium is and what you will find in this online learning platform (various sections of). In this page, you will find links to the following pages. Please note that in each page, in the top panel, you will see artwork created by Divya related to the page (that can resonate with students).
    • Under “Overview“, you will find an overview of a franchise Cafe Sensorium in action (scope and budget). You can watch an introduction video created by me, as well as download the operating manual for Cafe Sensorium (50+ pages, written by our project advisor Savukar Raj in Kannada). You can download the operating budget from this page (for a franchise Cafe Sensorium)
    • Under “Program Operations“, you will see videos and templates for all the operational components of running a franchise Cafe Sensorium at a given location (budget tracker, expense tracker, student data and project monitor, performance scorecard tracker, library catalog tracker, attendance tracker etc.). You can watch videos on the details of running Cafe Sensorium as well download job descriptions for a project advisor and project coordinator needed to run Cafe Sensorium at a given project location.
    • Under the remaining pages, one at a time, you can see the pages related to each club: Library Club, MLL Club, Science Club, Art Club, Book of the Month/Story Writing/Drama Club, Computer Club, All Rounders Club and Remedial Club. Each page follows the same structure and format.
    • You can then see the Lesson Plan for this club. You can click on one lesson at a time to access rich content on each lesson. We have one lesson page completed in each club at this current moment. We will have all pages done in the next 3-4 months.
    • The fourth link from the left titled “Latest News” will provide the latest developments in our organization (such as running online classes in Seed Sensorium using Zoom/Eagle conferencing due to COVID, building and launching the online learning platform for Cafe Sensorium etc.). You can click on the latest annual ays under Seed Sensorium.
  4. What is left to be done:
    • Complete all the lesson pages in each of the 9 clubs –> this will take 3-4 months I think given that we have 8-9 lessons x 9 clubs. You will be able to see more and more lessons every week as she creates them (at least 2-3 per week).
    • Change the WAYS to HELP page to seek funds for each CAFE SENSORIUM franchise at a given location (we could ask people to take up funding and owning a Cafe Sensorium at a location they come from).
    • Start scripting the content in all pages under Cafe Sensorium in Kannada, get them translated to English and then to other Indian languages (one at a time) and subtitle our videos in several languages to make this a multilingual rural-based learning platform.

Please go through all the content and give us your feedback. I would like to thank our entire Kollegal ground staff spearheaded by our project advisor Mr. Savukar Raj, and to Divya for all the work and putting the whole platform together. Have safe days and weeks ahead.

Updates – July 2020

Hope you and your families are staying safe and healthy.

  1. Since schools have not yet reopened in India due to COVID, we have started our programs this year using online tools (Zoom and Whatsapp) for a select group of students whose parents have smart phones (~50 out of the typical 1,500 students who participate in our programs yearly). We have trained our teachers on conducting classes using these tools and have had very good initial success since we started our classes 2 weeks back (even though there is scope for a lot of improvement). We are also working with an e waste company in India (Bluebirch) to see whether we can buy old smartphones and distribute to students who do not have smartphones, so that more students can participate in our online classes.
  2. We are starting a pilot for a handsoff version of our program in an area 100 Kms from the current area we operate in. In this handsoff pilot, we will leverage all the content we are currently codifying online that can be accessed by anyone from anywhere. We will provide periodic support, training and access to online content as well funding to run this handsoff pilot. Good news is that a donor couple – Mr. Sundip and Mrs. Sudha Gorai – have offered to fully fund this pilot. We will like to do this in two phases. In phase 1 this year, we will complete codifying all our content into online versions in Kannada and run the pilot in T Narsipur area for 4 schools where a BEO who had worked with us a long time back in Kollegal has offered to run this program for us with our support and funding. In phase 2, we will get the content translated into other languages; and also facilitate the usage of the online content directly by students in situations where teachers are not available.  I would thank the Gorais for funding this project which will help us immensely in scaling our program to other locations over the coming years.
  3. We have received feedback over the years that our organization name is too generic (there are hundreds of organizations which use this name in India) and also does not resonate with the program mission. When we started our organization 30 years back, we were a funding organization for projects related to education, vocational training and income generation of children and young adults with various challenges. But in the last 12 years, we have focused on providing education in complementary experiential skills to students in rural higher primary schools through Project Terra Firma. Our goal is to continue with this focus for the many years to come. We looked around for names for our organization and our programs (a) that are more in sync with what we do; (b) that are differentiated (and hence not too generic); (c) that allow us to extend our programs in various locations and languages in the coming years with “sub-brands”; and (d) whose URLs are not taken already by others. We finally decided on the name “My Sensorium” which in Latin means “apparatus of an organism’s perception considered as a whole, the “seat of sensation” where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives”. This resonates very well with what our experiential programs are trying to do by helping students use their sensorium to develop skills that will help them in their future education and careers. The name is highly differentiated and is not used by any NGOs to date (even though some commercial companies use this name). We have purchased the URL www.mysenrosium.org. This name will also allow us to band our various programs as “Science Sensorium“, “Computer Sensorium“, “Drama Sensorium” etc. We plan to call our main program that we run the Kollegal area as “Seed Sensorium” since this is where we have developed all our content and processes and will continue to do in the coming years. We also plan to call the handsoff pilot as “Cafe Sensorium” ala Cafe Coffee Day since it will be run as a pilot franchisee model. We are currently in the process of changing our organization name to “My Sensorium” (involves changing the names used in incorporation, tax services in India and US, and website URL). We will keep you posted as we make progress on this front, and let you know once we have completed the change. Please do let us know if you have any objections/feedback in changing our organization name.

Updates – June 2020

Hope all of you and your extended families are staying safe and healthy through the global crisis that has beset us all. Good news is that our programs last year ended just in time before COVID hit India (except for one or two classes that we could not complete). We were able to complete 98% of our program content, had a very successful (and biggest to date) 3 day annual day event and also completed the certification exams and awarded year-ending certificates to all students.  The schools closed early this year (around March 20th) than the usual April 10th close date. We spend the school holidays building brand new content for the new year to come:

  1. Since we had used Shakespearean plays in our book of the month club for the last 3 years running, we got feedback from students and teachers alike that it was time for a change and also to make the books/plays more relevant to the indian context. We decided to use Grisih Karnad’s select plays and also write our own plays (yours truly that is) that are more relevant to the rural and historical contexts. We had to shorten and rewrite the 4 Girish Karnad plays we selected for this year (Yayati, Hayavandana, Nagamadala and Tuglaq), making sure that the mature content in these plays were appropriate for high school students. I rewrote these abridged plays in English and my partner in crime (Savukar Raj, our project advisor) translated them to Kannada. I also wrote 4 new plays of mine keeping in mind the rural context which have also been translated by Savukar Raj. We are thus totally poised for a great year ahead in terms of fresh content for the book of the month club and drama clubs. If you are interested in any of these plays for your own children, please do let me know and I can send them to you.
  2. The activity based story books around MLLs (minimum learning levels) also needed some new material since students have been using the same books and activities that we had written over the years (~30). Since we got some extra break this year, we decided to write 20 new books amongst us all (my family and our staff) – brand new stories with pictures and 6 activities per book linked to a specific MLL (example of a MLL could be profit and loss in finance, or gravity in science or traffic signs in environment). We have completed writing 10 new books already and plan to complete the other 10 in the coming 2 months. If you are interested in any of these picture books we have created, please let know as well.
  3. We have had great success in the current project area and a dedicated team with hand-on management and support. However, a question was posed by one of our donors about how equipped we were to replicate this program in a totally different project area in a hands-off mode with initial training and periodic overseeing, but not day-to-day management. To help towards getting there, we wrote a full and lengthy manual (I wrote in English and my project advisor translated it to Kannada) that explains every component of what we do (mission and goals, content, process and templates). Please see attached the manual in Kannada. We also put together a 4 hour video demonstrating every program in full (our entire staff recorded it staying at their respective homes, including my own introduction – this is truly a collaborative effort that everyone put their heart and soul into). Please follow this link to see this video – it is in Kannada, but you can follow the depth of the program content and process we have described in this video:  https://youtu.be/m4PXUlVzzrA
  4. We hired a full-time drama teacher (Mr. Arun Kumar) to convert the drama extension of our book of the month club that we started last year, into a full-fledged program. We plan to run this program in 4 schools as a pilot this year, and if found successful, we plan to extend it to all 9 schools next year.
  5. Our dear friend Hiriyanna (based in Bangalore) who has been helping us in an ad-hoc manner in the last few years (you might remember that he went on my behalf to run the annual day this year since I could not go due to COVID hitting the US first). Good news is that Hiriyanna retired from ISRO this year and has offered to be more involved in our programs. He will provide the much needed oversight and help us in content creation and dissemination as well as training and mentoring our staff. So welcome Hiriyanna to our organization and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Hiriyanna will be our India manager/liaison. He can be reached at +91 94490 51728 or isrohiri@yahoo.co.in.
  6. Our schools did not report for the school year 2020-21 as expected on May 28th. Our staff have been staying at home helping us build content (as described above).  The local Karnataka government has announced a tentative opening date of Sept 15.  We want to convert this into a great opportunity to try something new and not wait in a holding pattern for schools to reopen. We are getting ready to run our programs using distance learning using the Zoom platform – something that has not been tried before in rural India (it has become a norm in urban India and in the US as you know). We are currently conducting a survey in the 9 villages we operate in to find out what % of parents (of our students) have regular phones and smartphones.  Our initial results tell us that 60% of parents have regular phones, and 10% of parents have smart phones. Once we collect the data, we are planning to start conducting classes using the Zoom platform on July 1st (select programs that are best suited for online distance learning), for students whose parents already have smartphones. In order to make this a successful initiative, we would however have to deliver smartphones to students whose parents do not have smartphones. So here is my ask: If you have old and outdated smartphones that are lying in your closet and are not slated for future use by anyone in your extended family, we would like you to send your phones to us by mail. Please make sure that the phones are unlocked before you send them. The address to send the phones to in the US is Vasuki Subbarao, 2418, 140th Place NE, Bellevue, WA 98005. The address to send the phones to in India is S. Hiriyanna, 518, LakshmiShankar, 13th Cross, 7th Main, ISRO Layout, BENGALURU, KARNATAKA 560078. We will send you receipts of donations on the ASHRAYA letterhead as soon as we receive your phones and email you biweekly progress reports on our distance learning initiative. Our goal is to collect ~200 phones in the coming 45 days, deliver them to the students by Aug 1st and go into an extended phase 2 of our distance learning initiative. Once the schools get back into session, we will ask the students to return the phones to us since we don’t want them to treat these as freebies. I have put together a proposal if you need more information about our programs – please see attached.

Thanks as always for your support and have safe and healthy days ahead.

View ASHRAYA Project Terra Firma Distance Learning – Galileo’s Muse june 2020
View Ashraya Project Terra Firma Operations Manual Jun 2020