From Bollywood Movies to QR Codes

As soon as Ranjitsinh Disale, Ed.M.’25, set out on January 5, 2009, the first day of his first teaching job, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy. 

For starters, his mother had to drive him an hour away to a drop-off spot, where, because of muddy roads, he walked another mile before reaching his destina­tion: the Parishad Primary School for girls in Paritewadi, India. 

Things got even more chal­lenging when the school’s head­master brought him inside the two-classroom building and pointed to one of the rooms.“This is your classroom,” he said. 

Disale’s heart dropped. “My classroom was sandwiched be­tween a cowshed and a store­room,” he says. And it was occupied by a local villager. “He put goats and cows and feed in my classroom.” Disale removed the items, which angered the man, who threw stones at him. 

But on that first day, Disale faced what he saw as an even bigger challenge, one that would motivate him to radically change teaching and learning in the area: There were only three students. 

“I was very, very aspiration­al, very motivated, and wanted to see the world and change this world,” he says. “But when I land­ed there, oh my God, there were only three students. Three.” 

Given the small number, some in the village questioned why he needed more space. His answer was because he wanted every 9- and 10-year-old in school. This prompted him to start asking why more girls weren’t attending. He learned that teen marriage was common, and many parents didn’t think formal education was important. Textbooks were also not written in the local language (Kannada). So a few months in, Disale set three goals for himself: change thinking around indiffer­ence toward education, get 100% of children enrolled, and give stu­dents a quality education. 

He started by moving to the village and visiting families to have tea or just to chat, which is very accepted in India, he says. 

“If you’re a teacher, you’re al­ways welcome,” he says. “Society respects you and I wanted to take advantage of that. I used to go to each parent’s house every day.” In time, especially after making an effort to learn their primary lan­guage, Disale gained their trust, and more families began sending their girls to the school. 

He wasn’t content with just more students, though, so he borrowed a laptop from his fam­ily — “At the time, my salary was about $100 a month” — charging it at his home each night because his classroom didn’t have electric­ity. In class one day, he showed a Bollywood movie, which got the students excited. 

“I said, this is wonderful, right? Now tell your friends who are not coming to school tomorrow that school is a fun place,” he said. It worked, and even more students showed up. (Today, 100% of stu­dents in the village go to school.) 

Eventually he started record­ing his lectures, and parents asked if they, too, could see them. He tried sharing to their mobile devices, but technical glitches were common. Disale realized he needed a better solution. He found it one day when a shop­keeper had him scan a QR code for his purchase — something he had never seen before. He real­ized this was the answer. 

He quickly created a couple dozen general codes that would link to his lectures and the text­book material, and then start­ed creating individual codes for each student to personalize their lessons. After a year, he got fund­ing to scale the QR code project to about 300 schools. Educators started seeing positive results. 

“The results were impressive with a 10 to 15% increase in test scores,” he says. In 2014, he sub­mitted a proposal to the Indi­an government. At the time, QR code technology in India wasn’t well known, but then something happened that made the govern­ment take notice, and Disale was able to expand his QR code proj­ect. A publisher printing geogra­phy textbooks for schools across the country made a big mistake on a map. Reprinting the text­books would have been a huge cost, especially considering the number of students across India. Disale suggested keeping the original textbooks and giving students a QR code that would take them to the correct map. 

“This is when the govern­ment realized the potential of this technology,” he says, and in 2019, the Indian government made a policy decision that fu­ture textbooks would be shared with QR codes. When COVID hit and schools closed, QR codes al­lowed students, no matter where they lived, to continue learning, Disale says. 

That same year, he learned that for all his hard work, from turning around education at his small school with the goats and cows to using QR codes across India to a virtual field trip project he started for his students using Skype, he was being crowned Global Teacher of the Year by UNESCO and the Varkey Foun­dation. He celebrated by sharing half of the $1 million prize money with the other nine teacher final­ists. They all used the money, he says, to fund their own learning projects around the world. 

“My philosophy is I want to work for the betterment of soci­ety,” he says, noting the education foundation he co-created with the other teacher finalists. “I want to be a changemaker. I decided to give away that money because I believe that money can change the lives of thousands of students and empower them, not just em­power Ranjit. And the change I brought in my local community, I now want to bring to the inter­national level.”