DigiScript Solutions LLP

Education in India: An app does not a revolution make


Education in India, as we all know, needs a revolution. Some believe it has already begun. With the emergence of many EdTech startups that focus on simple and accessible course material, the education sector looks ripe for change. But before we accept these alternatives or characterise them as innovators or game changers, let us ask a few questions.
1. Why exactly do students need startups to innovate with the content or the delivery of the content?
2. What are their pain points?
3. How is the current lot of startups addressing them?
4. How efficient are they?
5. Who is benefiting from the products?
I will try and answer them one by one in this article.
Based on the couple of apps I downloaded and from the countless service calls I received after I installed them, I was astonished to find that the service that these freemium model startups offered was indeed first class. They offer the students content and curriculum that is curated and hosted by their websites, with the help of their own team of experts and teachers/professors. There are video tutorials to tackle basics. Some are also tailor made to look great on a tablet, in case your parents can afford to buy one.
But what is the fundamental change that they have brought to the teaching environment? How are they helping students perform better? Are they replacing the one-to-one engagement between peers and between teachers and students? Or, by making education personal, are the students becoming more isolated? Isn’t learning more about discovering facts together, by collaborating with your peers, rather than monotonously learning on a tablet? Isn’t learning more about generating curiosity in a subject and then exploring it than about getting content at the click of a button? Isn’t learning more about stories told by your teacher with drama, that you will remember for the rest of your life, than about jotting down dates and events of history while watching a video? Isn’t learning more about calling your best friend for help with a chapter than about dialling a hotline number?
Although their mode of disbursing content is different, these apps are not all that different in the way they conform to the same meritorious, test-based and grade-based, rote learning-oriented education system that we have in our country. How is this innovation and game changing?
Learning is validated only when you remember something that you have already learnt. Learning something requires an inherent interest in the subject. That is generated when you generate curiosity. But where is this validation in today’s startups? The idea that no startup has yet addressed is that learning is more about inspiring the students and pique their curiosity so they explore it on their own, rather than spoon-feeding the content to their brains. The fundamental idea that everyone misses is that we have to be creative while developing content. Perhaps one way of doing further motivating students is to encourage like-minded learners to form groups and explore a subject together. Group learning will mean early, practical exposure to management ideas like teamwork, delegation, distribution of work and aggregation of the completed tasks, debate, agreement and coming to a common conclusion.

Our existing education system is churning out students like machines churn out tools in an out-dated factory. The metals that are melted down to fashion the tools have no say in what they will eventually become. Some are hardy and thrive under pressure. Others crumble. They could, however, be better suited for other purposes. In the same way, our education system is class based, target based, and highly biased against the differently abled?
Every human being is unique in the way he or she grasps and interprets information. Some beget better results learning by hearing while others respond to video and graphical cues. But in the eyes of the education system, we are all the same.
Education, if it doesn’t make the society better, is of no use. The biggest question to ask is this: are we, in the end, moulding the people of the future or fashioning tools that the 21st century no longer has any use for?
Now let us revisit the questions we posed at the start of this article.
1. Why exactly do students need startups to innovate with the content or the delivery of the content?
Even if content or information remains the same, the way it is delivered in schools needs to change. Collaborative study is the key.
2. What are their pain points?
Students are not interested in learning anything and everything. Every student is uniquely intelligent and we need to appeal to their interests. We need to pique their curiosity and promote group study which leads to a questioning temperament.
3. How is the current lot of startups addressing them?
By distributing the same content through tablets and smartphone applications, these models provide enough study material but the most important videos are not free. Students still have to mug up and rote-learn. Students still have to give tests to determine their intelligence. Students still have to learn to respect their peers and understand how to collaborate. They still have to learn how to manage and how to lead. The current crop of startups in education are encouraging students to isolate themselves, with tablets and learning through personal computers, which will only advance the isolation of a student from his peers and from learning anything new.
4. How efficient are they?
My personal belief is that they are concentrating too hard on developing the same content differently. The efficiency of these start-ups will be measured when everyone learns in a different way.
5. Who is benefiting from the products?
Not every student has access to the Internet so these alternative education models cannot be a standard solution for all. Not every family can afford the cost of both schooling and online education. To make students better engage with a subject, we need collective curiosity. An app does not a revolution make.

Watch this space for real, game-changing ideas on education.

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