It’s been quite a while that the world has moved towards audiovisual learning methods, and Bangladesh is only beginning to put that method into practice. A number of online groups have already begun to develop audiovisual lessons. BRAVE – Be Related to Audiovisual Education – a voluntary online group based in Chandpur district, is one of the pioneers.
Despite all the advancement in the fields of science and technology, human beings have managed to understand only a tiny of bit of how their brains work. One of those findings is that it becomes a lot easier for the human brain to understand and remember any input that appeals to multiple sensory avenues – auditory and visual to be specific. From such understanding, BRAVE has been developing different kinds of audiovisual learning resources for the web, mainly targeting school and college students for several years now. The voluntary group was formed back in 2013 by Rupok Roy, a young associate professor at a local college in Chandpur.
The idea of developing a series of audiovisual (AV) web content on different chapters from school and college textbooks came to his mind. As a student, Rupok worked on developing audiovisual content. So, with some online-enthusiast students from his college, he formed BRAVE. BRAVE doesn’t have a full-fledged workstation setup as yet. The members usually source footage from the internet and when needed shoot small video clips with their mobile phones or basic digital cameras. Then, they add text and voiceover to the video using free video and sound editing tools.
BRAVE won the Joy Bangla Youth Award in 2017 for their contribution to promoting AV-based learning methods in Chandpur. In the beginning, BRAVE tried to convince school and college teachers and sought cooperation for classroom screening of their AV content. Most teachers were skeptical; only a handful realized the potential of such teaching methods and agreed to cooperate. An active member of BRAVE, Md Nazmul Haq said, “Now that we have got the Joy Bangla Youth Award, it would be much easier for us to make teachers understand what we are doing isn’t worthless,”
Slowly, BRAVE’s way of learning is gaining popularity in Chandpur and a number of schools and colleges are now screening their content on Liberation War, history, ethics, humanities, social studies, science, economics, etc. in the classrooms. Several volunteer members of BRAVE have taken training on film-making, documentary-making, acting and videography from the National Institution of Mass Communication.
