How we make digital tablet education real in India

Originally Published: Jan 6, 2012

I’ve been thinking about this space a fair amount with Freeman Murray @ http://jaaga.in and here are my initial thoughts

We will soon have the platforms — phones, cheap tablets and reasonable 3G data connections — to enable a potential revolution in the Indian educational system. Perhaps, but lots of folks said TVs in the classroom would make education significantly better and it never happened. That said, given the interactive, ubiquitous and personal nature of cheap tablets and touch phones, this surely has greater potential.

Required Elements

1. Cheap Data — right now one 500MB Bollywood movie downloaded over 3G costs Rs 500 — $10 — aka 5x more than seeing it in a theatre. And 10x more than what the bottom 50% of India pay for their entire monthly mobile phone bill. It is frankly appalling that the government taxes 3G licenses to the tune of $40bn and then asks for cheap bandwidth. We need innovative telco incentives and business models that the poor connect to connect via their normal mobile carrier connections.

2. Localized Content — Just because India will have a great mobile and tablet ecosystem, does not mean that English language literacy changed overnight. The Khan Academy is great if you a smart 17 year-old who speaks fluent English but few 10 year olds in rural villages are going to understand Mr Khan’s American accent. We need content that’s taught in local dialects by great local teachers on locally relevant subjects.

3. Community and Face-to-Face learning — Face it — watching a bunch of educational videos by yourself if not fun and most kids don’t learn in asocial environments. We need to take a page from the Digital Study Hall and DigitalGreen.org — use the technology to create occasions where local groups connect and learn together in real life motivate each other.

4. Student Recognition and Incentives — Kids will need incentives to watch and learn from educational content rather than watching Bollywood movies (which will always be just one app tap away). We need to create ways that students who do demonstrate skills acquisition and learning from digital platforms are recognized by their peers, the media and in their communities (just as toppers of the college entrance exams are today)

5. School and Teacher engagement — given that most learning is social, the most logical place to accelerate learning is in classroom. Again taking a lesson from Digital Green, teachers need to be encouraged to create best-of-breed digital lesson videos and interactive modules on tablets and compete to get those seen and distributed in their local communities. We need “Teacher Idol” replicated in 100 regions across the country and viewed on a 100 million tablets so that exceptional teachers across India get the recognition they deserve.

6. Educational Research and Government Support — The business models for how one makes money creating great educational content communities for the poor in India are yet clear, but they certainly have the potential for massive and scalable society benefit. Government and philanthropy need to provide research money to try out lots of ideas. Some may yield profitable business models but given that public education is a good in its own right, the focus must be on improving educational outcomes at scale, not necessarily making money immediately by selling to wealthier students.