Why Tablets Are Failing To Take off in Indian Education?

TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEX structure of school education in lndia is

a mammoth task. I and my colleagues have visited over 1000 schools in the past few months to try and understand for ourselves – what enables learning, how students are evolving and forcing educators (sometimes unwillingly) to keep pace with them, and the unique instances of what kind of technology adoption works and what doesn't.

 

While some technologies have worked in schools, unfortunately tablet adoption, once touted as a paradigm shift in education for the masses, has failed to take off. We have not seen even one school that has adopted tablets full scale for its students and there are only a handful of schools across lndia who have done some kind of pilot for tablets. Our in-depth analysis of the issue will shed more light on such low levels of tablet adoption.

1. Hype

Over the last couple of years, media has hyped tablets to be a panacea for modern education system in lndia. MHRD’s initiative "Aakash" was projected to solve all issues that plague our education system, (especially true for government schools) like availability of talented teachers, reliance on outdated learning methodologies etc. Aakash has failed to deliver even the basic hardware functionality promise, leave alone educational value on top of that. Other general purpose tablets like iPad, Galaxy, Nexus and several others have also failed to take off given the urban rural digital divide.

 

2. Education requires intelligent applications not one-fit-for-all static content

What we need for the diverse diaspora of lndia is highly adaptive dynamic content for learning and not one-fit-for-all static content like the one provided by almost all the content providers today. ln 2010, we did an experiment. We bought about 200 different educational content CDs available in lndia and abroad. We selected students from diverse demographics and learning levels and played this content for them. Here are our observations: 

1. Limited attention span further decreased due to uninteresting content - No student wanted to see any content beyond 5 minutes. Some got bored in 2 minutes.

 

2. Static Content not refreshed regularly - No student wanted to see the content that he had seen the previous day.

 

3. Non-personalized - Students complained of content not being level appropriate (it was either higher or lower) and unable to contextually react to their need at that moment.

The difference between classroom learning and such technology enabled, albeit static learning is the presence of a "Teacher" who contextualizes and personalizes learning for each child. So unless educational content is super intelligent and can interact, adapt, encourage and personalize for each learner at every moment - it will be impossible to create learning engagement and outcomes.

3. Tablets require Wi-Fi and 3G for intelligent and interactive applications. An intelligent and interactive educational application cannot run on a standalone tablet. It requires the tablet to be connected to the internet. ln lndia, according to a recent report on 'lnternet in Rural lndia' by the lnternet and Mobile Association of lndia (lAMAl) and IMRB, penetration of claimed internet users in rural lndia is 4.6% in 20 l2 (dropping to 3.7% if we consider active internet uses). Given this, apart from a handful of urban schools, tablets without access to high speed Wi-Fi enabled internet are of limited use.

 4. Learning is a heavy duty interactive app – not like a mail or video application

Teaching is an inherently complex task. lt is like a heavy duty application. Students spend hours in classrooms and at home learning from humans and through books; unlike a video or mail that an adult surfs during the day. Digitization of content requires a quality check on not just the content but also on how the student interacts with content.

Furthermore while tablets are very effective for one sided delivery of content, for two-way interactive usage especially through multi lingual typing (imagine typing a complex

equation on a tablet), it is not user friendly with the touch screen sans a keyboard. ln the same context, tablets require careful handling with students of all ages using them.

5. Tablets are costly for schools and parents. Tablet prices in lndia range from Rs. 5000 to 35,000.There are dozens of tablet providers in the market. Assuming a tablet costing Rs. 10,000 is good enough for quality interactive educational application - a school with 1000 students will have to buy 1000 tablets if each student has to get a tablet, taking the cost to almost a crore. An unviable investment for school alone, the management then tries to convince parents to pay for the tablet. Parents are interested in educational outcome, which no tablet provider is able to demonstrate. Therefore parents do not see much value in tablets. This is one of the reasons why schools have been unable to adopt tablets full scale despite school managements being interested.

 

6. Classroom design does not support tablets lf tablets have to be adopted at full scale, each classroom should have a safe storage place for tablets, each classroom should have a central charging unit for 30-40 tablets. Each desk should have space for the tablet in addition to notebooks and books. Current classrooms are designed for brick and mortar world - so it becomes quite difficult to implement tablets even if all other factors, for a moment, are desirable.

 

As apparent from this analysis, tablets are far from solving the learning problems of students in a country like lndia. Unless they are cost effective, infrastructure friendly and not dependent on internet to deliver personalized, adaptive and intelligent content – adoption of tablets for education will remain a non-starter.

Five Reasons Why India Is Likely To Become An Education Superpower In This Century

Over the last few quarters, I have visited close to a hundred cities and towns in India. Let me share my observations as to how education is shaping up in India:

 1. Aspiration of an Indian Parent:

I met with a few parents who are MDs/IAS/CxO etc. Most of them have an inherent Indian desire for their children to leap forward (compared to themselves) in their careers. They are keen to put their kids in the best of schools like those with annual fees of Rs. 5-6 lakhs. They are also quite happy to spend crores to get their kids a degree through a US/UK based university like MIT/Oxford etc.

I also met a few parents who are class-3 employees in factories, or drivers or maidservants. Most of them also want their kids to be engineers or doctors. A Horse Cart owner from Bijapur was proud to inform me that his eldest son is currently pursuing a BE in Computer Science from a local engineering college. He also expressed a strong desire to ensure his younger kids also get into college.

Irrespective of economic status, every Indian parent has a deep aspiration that their kids must do better than themselves in their careers. This is the most important factor that drives the demand for high quality education services in the country.

 2. Systemic shift from Agriculture Economy to Industrial/Knowledge Economy

India is in the middle of shift from Agriculture-Economy to Industrial/Knowledge economy. I talked to some farmers recently. One of them says that he has 15 acres of land, but still cannot have a lifestyle even equivalent to a class-3 worker working in a factory. Hence he does not want his kids to do farming even though he has a large piece of land compared to all others in his village. He is determined to make his kids study in the best possible school at a nearby city even at the cost of selling a part of his land to pay the fees.

I’ve also observed that many well-to-do families from villages shift to cities, rent a house and stay there for few years to ensure that their kids get the best possible education.

This is a systemic shift. The per-person net income exponentially changes when you shift your profile from being a farmer to a class-3 factory worker to a class-2 officer to jobs like engineer/doctor/IAS/NRI. There are many examples that people have seen during the last 20 years. Hence everyone has the aspiration to move on and make the quantum shift.
This is creating, and will continue to create massive demand for high quality education and training.

3. Young Minds and Massive Consumer Base

We all know the demographic dividend is in India's favour. We have the largest young population in the world. Human mind is the most productive asset to enable progress of a society. Machines, technologies and automations in vacuum (without significant consumer base) cannot create a sustained economic advantage, Japan is an example.

Large young population acts like a massive consumer base, and also as a large human capital that can be used to develop goods and services to be in turn used by this large consumer base.

This needs massive scale education and training of all young minds at school level, college level and vocational level.

4. Cost Structure:

Most of the good schools in large cities have annual fees in the range of Rs. 15000 - Rs. 50000 per annum. This is less than 1/10th of what you see in developed world either in terms of per capita cost in public schools or per capita fee in private schools. This makes high quality education affordable in India. This cost structure is certainly sustainable for the next few decades. We have teacher quality issues, but when we have millions of graduates and post- graduates unemployed, it is just an issue of addressing the teacher training problem. Few weeks ago, I was in a very small town called Gokak in Karnataka, where 200 candidates walked-in for a primary school teacher job in a good private school. This indicates that there are large numbers of aspirants available for teaching jobs. This in turn will ensure that education cost does not inflate due to disproportionate increase in teacher’s salary costs.

This cost structure has started driving students from other countries to come to India, and it will definitely accelerate further.

 5. Globalization

Technologies and tools like the internet, flight travel, telephone have made human relocation easier. Indians do not mind leaving their hometown and settling in any part of the world. A large no of Indians would continue to relocate either within or outside the country to produce greater income for their families. This creates a larger demand for trained and educated human capital supply chain.

In Kerala, you will hardly find a house where a member of the family is not in the middle-east. I keep visiting Andhra towns, and we all know of their deep urge to send their kids to the US. There are mini-Keralas and Andhras in almost every part of the country. The only way to meet that aspiration to go out is to get good education.

And this is driving the demand for education services, and will continue to do so for many decades to come.


In economics, demand is the fundamental building block of progress, which has to be met by corresponding supply. Fulfilling demand for education services will create hundreds of large suppliers and entrepreneurs catering to various verticals and horizontals segments within the sector. Higher entrepreneurial activity leads to competition and innovation, which in long run creates a superpower status for the country in that sector.

I am quite positive that we will see India becoming an education superpower in our lifetime.

Thanks and Regards,

Rajeev Pathak, Founder and CEO, eDreams Edusoft Private Limited, Bangalore      www.edreamssoftware.com | rajeev@edreamssoftware.com

 

Entrepreneurship Lesson - Conversation between a father (farmer) and his son (IIT/Google background)

A farmer from Madhya Pradesh (India) and his son (who had passed out from IIT and has worked in Google at Mountain View for 8 years), are having an interesting conversation. 
Son is considering starting-up a high-tech product company.

Son: Father, I want to leave job and do my own start-up.
Father: So do it, what is the issue? I have never worked on others' farms. I love working on my own.

Son: I feel it is a big risk, I do not know what will happen?
Father: It cannot be bigger risk than what happens to our crops, we are fully dependent on nature god for rains.

Son: That is ok, what about taking care of family health - I will have no insurance for my wife and kids? What will I do in emergency?
Father: I and your mother had no insurance for whole of our lives. When you were child, we did not miss going to a doctor despite no-insurance, so why are you worried?

Son: Ok, what will happen to my monthly salary?
Father: I get no monthly salary. Many times I have financial losses for 2 years due to poor yield or price, I take loans and repay. You can talk to govt or other parties; you are educated and should be able to get bigger loan/investment than what I get for crops.

Son: That is Ok.  How will I get people to work for my company. It is very tough to hire good people in India.
Father: Please hire only few key people like what I do. I outsource major farming activities like seeding, harvesting and ploughing.  My key people focus on the selection of crops, selection of right seeds, and they timely arrange water and fertilizers. My in-house team focuses on just core; rest is outsourced/executed through contract workers.

Son: I am very worried, how will I sell my product?
Father: If you produce good quality product, people will come and buy. Last year we produced high quality Basmati Rice; all produce got sold on phone. Why can you not do that for your product?

Son: I will not have office space? Where from to work?
Father: I manage my work from my home for so many years, why you need office space when your work is small at this point.

Son: I am not aware of legal side of business, Not sure if we should register the company or not.
Father: Start small. When I just had one field - we had no tax to pay. In fact I registered my first field after 6 months of use.

Son: I have only 200,000 USD (1 Crore Rupees) savings, I feel it is too less to take care of family's future needs and to invest in company.
Father: You are farmer's son. A farmer does not have even 200,000 Rs(4000 USD) savings in his life time. He still does his work, takes risk - some time he succeeds and some time he fails. I am not sure as to why you are having these doubts. You must rise & start your venture ASAP!!

Relevance of Steve Jobs for India

Loss of Steve Jobs has created great void in global digital world.

Steve Jobs changed the world by many innovations like Design, Music, The PC, iPad,
Ads, iPhone, Apps Ecosystem, MacOS and Apple itself.

For most technologists, business men, and CxOs, Steve Jobs has been a role model
across the world.  Best business schools in business cover various aspects of Steve
Jobs and Apple Inc in dozens of  business cases as part of business management
programs.

I live in India, and these days I travel a lot deep inside country. I spend some time
interacting with people who belong to, what many people say, Bharat or real India -
where 70% to 80% of people live. These are towns, villages and small cities
consisting of 700 M population.

I ask people in my visits: do they use Mac? Have they seen anyone using iPhone
or iPad in their town or village? Do they know Steve Jobs?

I also do dipstick checks if they know Nokia, or if they know Google and so on.
There have been less than 1% cases, where my question on Apple or Steve Jobs
has resulted into any affirmative answer. In fact, people in India know more of
Google, and more of Nokia than that of Apple.

It is quite clear that Steve Jobs and his products have no real impact on India and
its vast majority of consumers at present.

Does it mean that Steve Jobs was elitist? Does it mean that his legacy has no
relevance to vast  majority of the world population living in developing world?

Answer lies in finding out if other legends like Henry Ford or Mahatma Gandhi
created any impact beyond boundaries of their countries either in their life time
or later. When Henry Ford brought automobile to America; countries like
India, large part of Asia and Africa had no impact for a very long time.
However, Ford's legacy lies in a fact that world created hundreds of
automobile companies in Japan, Korea, India and everywhere else, decades later.

It is hard to believe that common people across the world would have been part of
automobile revolution decades later, had Henry Ford not innovated the consumer
automobile for America.

Great Innovators create hundreds of thousands of followers, who incrementally take
original innovation further, and make it relevant to various sections of society.

I have no doubt that Steve Jobs has no direct large impact on India at present. But
he is very closely followed by thousands of urban technology entrepreneurs of Indian
origin living in India or outside. Somewhere deep within these people, lies an urge to
innovate like Steve Jobs, to make the world better place. Many of them, for sure,
will try to make their innovations relevant for their country, towns and villages.

It is this entrepreneurial urge among thousands of Indians, that would create massive
innovation, and impact on real India. And that would be the right time to say what impact
Steve Jobs had on India or for that matter on developing world!!

Does experience outplay education/degree?

Yesterday my team interviewed a candidate who comes with Masters degree in Computer Science from a reputed US university. After long hours of discussion with candidate, team told me that candidate needs at least 6 months of un-learning and then 6 months of learning to be relevant for us.

I enquired the team why a bright young chap who has spent 24 years of his life in learning at reputed schools/colleges/universities in India and abroad still needs to learn before he is useful at work. Very often it puzzles me as to why education is not delivering the relevant knowledge? Why 1-2 years of experience outplays 4 years/5 years degree? There could be many views on this question; here is what I would like to share:

1. Experience leads to learning that is directly relevant to modern times - need of current or near future industry
2. Experience leads to higher retention of knowledge
3. Experience makes people experiment/do mistakes/learn from it/see the practical use
4. Environment in company/industry does not test you how much you know but how much you have applied and contributed

Question arises why education systems globally are not able to provide learning equivalent to the one that comes from experience? Can we provide experiential learning in schools and colleges? How to create situation where we can say that 4 years degree in sociology is giving equal or more relevant learning than 4 years work in field? Can we explore some other disruptive paradigms? Let us brainstorm.

Will computers take over teachers?

 Let us first understand which humans tasks have been replaced by computers over last 50 years:

1. Reservations of flights/trains/car rentals
2. Payment of bills of all types
3. Directions and route-maps while driving
4. Resource and business management in enterprises (ERP, CRM etc.)
5. Communications (From face-to-face meeting/letters to mails to chats to text to video conference)
6. Controls and automation in factories and power stations.
7. And hundreds of others

All of above are repetitive tasks happening at multiple places. These used to be done by humans in past, and now by computers. Now let us see what is current teaching process:

1. Lecture on topic (same topic every year, almost same topic in every school, county and country etc)
2. Home work and class work (Again same stuff by every child)
3. Questions and answers (80% of questions asked by children would fall within all questions asked during previous 3 years)
4. Critical analysis, creative thoughts on new applications of subject matter

If you see 1,2 and 3 above, these are repetitive tasks and would certainly be replaced by computer based on history of last 50 years in other industries. The 4th one does require immense intelligence to be contextual which at present is not possible by technology.

It is gross wastage of human energy that millions of human teachers across the world
teach the same stuff, let us say concept of addition or concept of force or concept of time.  Rather, the best 10 explanations of the world could be recorded and reused in millions of schools.

Humans are best in doing new stuff. Machines are best in doing repetitive stuff that has large volume.

Hence teachers' repetitive tasks will and should be replaced by computers. Human teachers then can focus on creativity, innovation, critical thinking, inventions, individual attention and anything else that is new.

Thanks and Regards,
Rajeev