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our education system, (especially true for government schools) like availability of talented teachers, reliance on outdated learning methodologies etc.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.