How Embibe is using Deep tech and Data Science to truly personalize education
There are some unavoidable truths about India today. It is a highly populated, and highly competitive country to grow up in. The vast income disparity keeps the top 1% comfortably on the top, while the rest of the population is stuck, struggling to break and reach above the upper limits of their communities. The only way, for a country like India?
Education
Take a look.
Read the entire feature on inc42.
In countries like India with super low teacher:student ratios, the whole system relies on a series of scores to make an assessment of a person’s career potential. Access to better schools and colleges is almost always — solely contingent on achieving high scores. Better schools and colleges automatically ensure better employability options. In some cases like the public sector, these scores also determine access to jobs directly.
It has become so important in fact, that parents are willing to shell out over 2 lakh (even in low-medium income households) just to pay for the education of their students. While China has the largest share of parents paying for additional tutoring (74%), India (71%) and Indonesia (71%) are not far behind. Hence, it’s not at all surprising that exams like the JEE attract an average private spend per student of roughly $1000 per year! (Put that in the context of a per capita GDP of $1500).
One would think that after this kind of spend and urgency, students would have access to a reasonably good level of teaching and personalised guidance. The whole premise of the private tutoring industry is rooted in the famous “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem” according to which “the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class”. The thing is, in India today — most classrooms look like this — even in private tutoring models:
There is virtually zero access to personalised feedback or guidance for the average student. Teachers especially engineer the lectures in classrooms like these to be one-way interactions to ensure most classes end on time. To ensure that more ‘batches’ can be squeezed into the schedule in a day. There is also social censure against asking questions.
My favourite way of illustrating of what I call the ‘attention, ability & economics paradox’ is the following:
Ironically, if we superimpose the money paid by each student — that looks like this:
This is where things go further downhill. The students who need the most attention are the ones who get it the least. In fact, they start to mentally check out and are left to their own devices to solve for motivation, confidence and other behavioural issues. All this amidst stressful prep cycles. Deeper academic support only comes from peers or less trained substitute teachers in a one-to-many format.
We conducted a small survey recently of the top reasons why students lose marks. The top 5 results had little to do with learning:
This means that even after learning — things like test taking skills and behaviour/confidence become the two biggest levers to realise scores. The question is: how does one control or influence these? For the average student. For the masses.
Our research has distilled over 5 billion insights in student test taking to 27 parameters. These parameters can predict and impact scores to the tune of 93%.
This is the result of 3+ years of talking to hundreds of teachers, observing thousands of tests in person, analysing hundreds of thousands of hours of engagement on the platform across 300 cities.
The most awesome thing is that these parameters are generic and can be abstracted to any curriculum. Our ‘education genome’ — is an incredibly dense graph concepts from science and maths . It identifies byte sized gaps in student learning and provides byte sized learning to remedy them. This graph makes learning a true continuum over 5 years of education and is the backbone of our adaptive algorithm.
Our focus on behavioral and test taking parameters also accelerates score improvement vs. focus on learning alone. Short term improvement is also a great motivator to move student morale up. All leading to deeper engagement for an impatient market.
Further, investments in the platform have ensured the ability to rapidly scale to support any curriculum from any country. We want to create true, meaningful convergence between the teacher, student data and personalised content in the future.
Read more here on inc42.
