ClassRoute: Bridging the Digital Academic-Content Divide

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has revolutionized almost every sphere of life by enhancing access to information anytime and anywhere. However, there still exists digital inequalities both between and within countries. This digital divide is not merely physical access to ICT but also access and usage of information (such as educational content) generated by ICT, which is often limited due to language and geographic location. This possesses a major obstacle to education of pupils who lack access to quality study materials in their mother tongue language.Addressing this threat, ‘ClassRoute’ - a multi-language educational community learning platform and content generator - is proposed to disseminate quality educational content to the most disadvantaged pupils in India. The novelty of ClassRoute is its focus on a mother-tongue based community learning where the multilingual content generation is achieved using ML/NLP models for channeling/utilizing existing online translation tools and APIs on freely available as well as new educational videos, and then improving the results for translation quality, grammar, and cultural relevance. ClassRoute aims to ensure inclusive quality education that promotes lifelong learning opportunities for all by mitigating these issues. This paper discusses ClassRoute’s architecture and experiments, and its potential to bridge the gap of the digital academic-content divide in the Indian subcontinent, which faces a serious digital divide due to income, gender, race, age, and language.