‘Helping rural students in education’
View(s):Dharmavahini Foundation started out as a Buddhist Television Channel in 2006.
Soon it was decided that more work could be done to benefit the distant villages of the country.
Distant Education
Dharmavahini Foundation introduced the Distant Learning education programme in association with
the Ministry of Education to help school children in remote areas who, in an era when students depend heavily on private tuition, are handicapped since they can neither afford nor has access to tuition.
Twelve years ago, on 11 October 2008, a MOU was signed between the Ministry and the Foundation to provide content for an Educational TV Channel targeted at GCE O Level students. The well-illustrated lessons were recorded at the Dharmavahini TV Studio.
‘Learn TV’ was born in association with DialogTV and transmissions via satellite on Channel 72 commenced in July 2009. The telecast covered 10 subjects based on the Years 10 & 11 syllabus of which 10 lessons were telecast over a period of 8 hours each day. These lessons were repeated on a 24-hour rotation so that a student could follow the sessions without losing a lesson.
Wider reach
In keeping with global trends, we have developed several APPs to reach the overseas market.
On the Internet we are presently broadcasting 14 channels all over the world.
Broadband is the future of education.
Higher education
In 2016, we setup the Virtual Higher Education College (VHEC) in which we have a virtual
platform for teaching, BIT (Colombo). On this platform students can study from home or wherever they are and come to Colombo to sit for their examinations twice a year.
This platform is very useful for students living outstations and in working environments, as they can do there studies in the evening and on weekends.
In 2019 we awarded 350 scholarships and this year we are aiming to give around 3000 scholarships.
The studying is completely free and there is only a small registration charge at the time of logging in to the system
BIT Programme is designed to:
Produce qualified IT professionals through external mode in addition to the internal degree programmes.
Set professional standards for Information Technology degree programmes concerning the IT industry requirements.
Facilitate those who could not register for an IT degree in a public university as an alternative / additional academic qualification.
Provide an opportunity to those who are working in IT to obtain a formal qualification in IT through self- study.
What benefits VHEC can offer
- We have a series of video tutorials based on BIT syllabus.
- All lectures are conducted by the qualified academics
- Each video tutorials are in 10-15 mts segments
- All the MCQs are based on BIT exam’s structure and past papers
- Self-Monitoring of Progression system available online
- Online Revision Programmes available for all subject
Funding
Dharmavahini has up-to-date been funded purely from private donations and in fact started with a 2 Mil donation by a well wisher who could see that the work done was worth sponsoring. For 2 year this Sponsor looked after all the expenses of the Foundation and they are still supporting much of the work that goes on in the Foundation.
It has been our policy that we should try to run on private local sponsorship and corporate CSR funding and not go for Government or foreign funding for this project.
Future Plans.
It is envisaged that within the next few years we will be having most of the courses on line and we expect students who are studying in most of the Local Universities to be studying from our system on-line and going for their tests and examinations to the Local Universities.