A Digital Socio-Technical Innovation to Bridge Rural–Urban Education Divide: A Social Entrepreneurial Perspective

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of extant rural–urban divide regarding access to quality education and training and describes a sustainable social entrepreneurial model using social technologies (Social technology is an umbrella term used to capture a wide variety of terminologies depicting internet-enabled communications, platforms and tools, which has the potential to establish collaborative connectivity among billions of individuals over the globe) to bridge this divide. In the context of West Bengal, India, we describe our social entrepreneurial initiative named NexConnect which is a digital teaching–learning platform that connects learners from all socio-economic background and geographical locations with knowledgeable senior citizens. Unfortunately, in today’s world, the educated senior citizens in India, who possess knowledge from their acquired experiences, are no longer considered to be a part of the mainstream socio-economic activities of the nation. NexConnect uses the dormant knowledge resource of those educated elderly or retired teachers by connecting them online with marginalized children and young learners. The paper is a descriptive understanding of NexConnect as an example of Digital Socio-Technical Innovation of a social entrepreneurial initiative in solving the problem of access to quality education and to include marginalized communities into the mainstream.