Jewish day-school education faces many challenging obstacles. The most visible one for is affordability. We are all too familiar with the fact that tuition has skyrocketed and parents with just two or three kids can be looking at a tuition bill of over 30k. The median income in American is $50,000; you do the math.
A challenge that has been getting more recent attention is the assembly line style of teaching; schools have so many kids at all different levels of ability and it becomes increasingly difficult to address each child’s needs and help them maximize their learning. To address these serious hurdles several organizations have been working with day schools to implement an innovative blended form of learning to reduce costs and increase student participation and success.
Most of these innovative efforts, are overwhelmingly focused on the secular education within our Jewish Day schools. There is still a present and growing need to make learning torah more affordable and effective for our kids. After all, Judaism is primarily a text-based program of education and therefore lends itself to a linear sequential form of imparting required knowledge. If you can have a Khan Academy for Math, Science, Biology and History, then why not for Chumash and Rashi and other basic Jewish subjects?
Several initiatives have been launched at moving Jewish Education online. A popular website called “G-DCAST.com” publishes short infotainment vids on the Parsha of the week. A website called alephbeta.org produces videos for high-school and college-level teenagers on Chumash.
Most recently, Scrolltutor.com launched online and is receiving some great initial response with much interest and growing sign ups. This initiative is the simplest to understand and market. Using “Khan Academy” like short videos with colorful drawings, creative use of images and video clips, and embedded quizzes that make sure the student has understood the first part of the video before allowing them to progress, students can learn three verses at a time with Chumash and Rashi keeping the videos to 10 minutes in length and making the material highly digestable. Each chapter has overviews, hard words, translation and an animated video of characters asking each other questions to think about. The product is the brain child of Yaakov Shallman and Dovber Schwartz.
Teaching Chumash and Rashi to kids is a challenging task for everyone. If a child is falling behind in school or needs more one-on-one help, tutors are extremely critical and helpful . “ Paying for tutors can get very expensive and teaching kids really requires consistent and regular study. Also, with growing numbers of homeschoolers, there is a big demand for Chumash and Rashi tools”, said Shallman. “The key is to keep the videos short and engaging so kids can feel like they have determinable goals and bite size classes to complete and master”.
Dovber Schwartz who teaches the videos had this to say, “Look, one of the most important things for children is giving them measurable “wins”. I remember going through school and being frustrated feeling that I couldn’t point to something concrete that I completed. Besides the many benefits of our engaging videos I think is that kids can point to 100 videos on Shmos and say, ‘Here. This is what I’ve accomplished. I only got 80 questions wrong and have learned 10 hours of Chumash’. It’s a measurable metric. As Scrolltutor grows, we will be working on gamification of the videos which in my opinion could be big for kids using it. If you turn learning into a fun informative process, well – that’s powerful.”
Scrolltutor is launching their website with a range of subscription packages from $ 20-40/month which will be available in the coming months. If you have 2 or 3 kids using your account – you can really use a great tutoring tool for a few bucks a month per student. The site is currently in beta and the Scrolltutor team is getting initial interest and offering free trial accounts to get feedback from parents and students to make sure the videos are meeting their needs for successful instruction.
