More children are going to school, but they’re not really learning
Innovative technologies can help bridge the gap
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
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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