Building The Next Edtech Supply Side Movement In India
Personalized Adaptive Learning is being heralded as the way forward in the edtech world. Personalised Adaptive Learning (PAL) solutions are those that tailor teaching instructions to the exact learning levels of each child. This is effectively building a unique learning trajectory for each child basis his/her inputs. PAL solutions typically show real-time progress of students’ learning. Based on the features of these dashboards, results can be analysed that lead to efforts for policy formulation and implementation support.
India is at a very nascent stage with respect to PAL. And while we are at it, building the demand and supply side for PAL solutions, there are many India specific challenges that need to be factored in. This article discusses few such issues on one aspect of the supply side of PAL solutions. The idea is to follow this up with more nuanced possible solution designs for each of the problems articulated here.
Supply and Demand side of PAL
Diversity, which is one of the most beautiful fabrics in the social tapestry of India, ironically is a catalyst for further complicating the digital content problem. For PAL solutions to cater to all children in India, we need a robust supply side, which translates to a massive repository of contextual and vernacular digital content. How do I differentiate between contextual and vernacular digital content? Vernacular content is content in regional language/dialect, and contextual content weaves in social and cultural aspects of your region in the content. And that’s why diversity becomes a humongous problem to solve with 36 culturally distinct states and UTs — without even getting into the diversity within a state or UT. According to 2001 census of India, there are 122 major languages, and 1599 other languages/dialects in India. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India has 22 listed languages, and a request to add 42 more to the list.
Solving this problem requires very different thinking than the status quo. Let’s first explore the status quo to unpeel why it isn’t a feasible solution or is a very slow-paced course of action.
1. No One’s Unbundled The Problem
To understand why the status quo doesn’t work, we have to unbundle the elements of the problem. Creators, creation tools, common curricular framework, common search methodology, incentives are few of the elements that are pieces of the system.
In the current solution architecture of the system, all these elements are concentrated at one place and not decentralized. This leads to a lot of lag in the system.
2. No Common Framework and Guidelines For Digital Content
Majority states have different curriculum frameworks, and that inhibits any kind of easy sharing and reusing/repurposing content. There’s also no common knowledge of how much content built against the curriculum framework of, let’s say, Rajasthan is applicable to the same of Haryana. No tools, or solutions in the market have that information available, which could be very useful for the digital content players.
The other issue is that content quality guidelines aren’t democratic enough. They are also heavily built from a creator’s quality lens and not for the user. For example, I have created a high quality digital content that ticks every guideline mentioned by xyz, but is never used by the intended group of students or teachers because it doesn’t cater to their immediate need or doesn’t cater to a format of understanding they aren’t used to, especially in the lack of consumption trainings for the same.
What we need is a methodology to establish linkages across these frameworks to understand relevance across them. This can be done by using concepts or learning objectives as those linkage points. The other aspect is to have recommendations on usecases of the content from a user’s lens. This has to be done by someone who’s familiar to the local context.
3. Content Creation Isn’t A Democratic Process
All educational content that exists is majorly in English and Hindi even though there’s huge demand of other vernacular content. A major reason for this is that content creation as a streamlined activity is done by certain content production organizations only except few exception of locally run YouTube educational channels. As economies would suggest, there’s hardly any incentive for a large content organization to produce content for an obscure language/dialect with a small market size.
With the daunting numbers at hand, content creation has to be a more decentralized activity. It’s almost surprising how teachers have never been seen as one of they key players in solving this problem. With the exception of Central Institute of Education Technology under NCERT, there’s no large scale effort to organize teachers for this activity. Their efforts too aren’t as streamlined and organized in this regard. If you move away from the general perception of a digital content being animated, and all flashy to begin with — the bare construct is to break down the topic conceptually which can be easily understood by different learning groups. One can say with a lot of conviction that there’s evidence on the intent side, with a lot of teacher run and largely followed YouTube channels primarily in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, among others.
4. Lack Of An Educational Content Aggregator
To facilitate this movement of large groups of teachers, there need to be easy-to-use, open source, mobile device friendly tools and templates. With a projected mobile data penetration rate of 60% by 2022, all such tools and programs have to be designed keeping it at the centre. Ironically, it’s the exact opposite on the demand side. These tools will help look at content from other states and help repurpose them to fit their own context or create it from scratch.
Along with the availability of tools, a robust and customized curriculum framework needs to be organized state-wise for aggregation of this content.
5. Lack Of Incentive For Creation
You might be thinking, why would teachers want to do all this extra work? That’s an important question to ponder upon. This is also a key reason why teachers aren’t part of this yet.
There needs to be effective advocacy around this to carve out funds from ICT budget heads. While this is important, building social recognition structures is equally important. Giving out state awards and also peer recognition structures will help build this movement. National and state ICT awards are a great stage to leverage.
It’s time we went back to the drawing board on approaching these problem areas mentioned above. Building an effective ecosystem around this is critical. While we solve this, we have to re-think of creating more online and offline access channels to PAL solutions in the country.
In further articles in this series, we will explore each of the solution items briefly mentioned here in more nuanced detail.
