Roughly three million children are out of school in India. Civil society estimates show that of the children in school, at least 53 per cent are behind expected learning levels.
India has often been hailed as a laboratory for enterprise and innovation but how do we channel that spirit and know-how into tackling the problems we have in education? At an event organised by the Asia Society on Tuesday, Maheshwar Peri, founder and chair of Careers360 moderated a discussion about how innovative platforms and tools can be used to improve learning levels and make education more equitable in India.
Explaining the learning problem in India’s schools, Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, said that over 90 per cent of children at primary school-going age have actually been enrolled in schools and that over the past 10 years or so, the number of children in an age group like Class 8, for instance, has risen from eight to 10 million to about 25 million. “This means that more kids are staying in school and staying for longer. The demand for schooling and education has expanded, and that means that we have to manage both the numbers and the expectation related to schooling. That it is a magic bullet that can improve the lives of children and their families.”
When Pratham released its first Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), Ms. Banerji said that they decided to see if rising enrolments were actually corresponding to an increase in learning and capabilities. Pratham took reading and basic arithmetic as basic measures. “When we did the first survey ten years ago, people were shocked; ten years later the results continue to be shocking. The headline fact is that half the children surveyed in Class Five are not able to read at a Class Two level. In arithmetic it is a little worse.” The reality, she said, is that while India has reached near universal enrolment levels, something is still missing. Curricula are moving forward in a linear kind of way but children are routinely being left behind. Luckily, she said there were solutions to this problem and Pratham was working on getting kids at every age level to master reading and arithmetic to a level where they can propel their own education.
Rohini Nilekani spoke about EkStep, an early learning platform she and her husband, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, launched last year. EkStep wants to solve the ‘learning problem’ by creating a technology-led platform to help children improve their learning outcomes quite early in their lives. It is an open platform where content will eventually be crowdsourced, with teachers and educationists being able to add to it. “We are at a point where we can do something at a large scale using our collective imagination and build learning journeys for millions of children,” Ms. Nilekani said.
The backbone of EkStep will be an app called Genie — which will be freely available on the Android platform — which provides knowledge through stories, games and easy-to-engage-with worksheets. The platform’s data analytics will eventually let users know what content works best for early learning. Eventually Ms. Nilekani hopes EkStep will provide an ecosystem of collaboration that can be scaled up to meet the needs of 200 million children who need access to better ways of learning.
Shantanu Prakash, founder of Educomp Solutions, a company that equips schools with digital products and online solutions, said that classroom learning had to move toward a level where there is personalisation for each child. Smart classrooms, he said, have shown that problems such as poor teaching quality and rigid curriculum can be overcome but the challenge is ensuring that digital learning is properly incorporated into the fabric of the curriculum. “There are about a million digital classrooms already in schools across India but we have to look at what the outcomes are in terms of learning.” Another challenge, he said, was to keep in mind whether the skills being taught to children today were going to be relevant in a few years’ time. “If the structure of our education system is itself going to become irrelevant, then how do you innovate?” Mr. Prakash said that a key challenge is personalisation; he pointed out that a mobile phone can possibly be the biggest driver here, with kids using apps like EkStep or Educomp’s Fliplearn.
The discussion was on how innovative platforms and tools can be used to improve learning
