Edu-Tech Must Focus On Engaging, Enriching And Empowering All Learners: Experts

Startups have covered a huge distance in the race to sustain their businesses under the complex market conditions in India. After seeing disruption in FinTech, e-commerce, healthcare and even in the food and beverage industry, the focus of technology is now concentrated towards education. Innovations under cloud-based learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, gamification and open learning have reached out to the students of our country.  Innovators, and new age educators are working with schools and universities to bring about a necessary revolution in the education sector. Applications like BAYJU’S, Faststudents, Prozo and others are known to provide effective and easy methods to grasp knowledge through digital platforms. 

Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BAYJU’s – The Learning App says, “Our focus is to use game design principles that drive certain reactions, successes.” He explains about the game design feature of the APP when it talks back. “During a practice test round, when the app says ‘Hey, did you answer that question a little too quickly? That is game design,” he says, elaborating that the idea is to make it more fun and give positive responses to the student. 

The year 2018 is sure to see more innovations in the industry and enhance learning experience for students. Technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have a very high potential in providing a unique learning experience to students. “AR and VR have made a deep impact by creating an immersive teaching and learning cycle that impacts in engaging, enriching and empowering,” says Yuvraj Sharma, Co-founder and Director, Kompanions. He explains the three-step process. Engagement is the first step to arouse curiosity and create a deep purpose of learning among young learners. Enrichment and learning are incidental by-products of AR and VR as they not only help the students to grasp concepts better but also faster. The third and final step these technologies empower young learners with innumerable vantage points that help them to widen their learning quotient. “This gives them the confidence to succeed, do better and build skills for life,” believes Sharma. 

Beas Dev Ralhan, CEO and Co-founder, Next Education, elaborates on how AI – just one system can cater to different students and provide each of them with different worksheets and learning experiences after analyzing their capabilities. “Once a system integrated with AI learns about the performance of learners, it uses clustering algorithms to categorize them according to their learning capacity, needs, style and preferences. It then teaches itself to recommend students belonging to each category the shortest learning path based on the data pertaining to students from the same category.” Depending on their preferences and learning styles, AI can suggest the best schedules and tools to learners. “It can suggest audio-visual content to one learner and hands-on activities to another, as per their requirements,” explains Ralhan. 

There is no doubt that Indian parents are uber conscious about their child’s education. However, the challenge since the beginning has been how should children learn? Radhakrishnan elaborates, “So far the focus has been on rote learning. Students are trained to solve questions but aren’t encouraged to ask questions. He adds that the challenges we face today can easily be addressed by technology. “Technology has helped us innovate the way subjects are taught and personalize content based on the capability of the student. However the real challenge is to change the mindset of parents and educators make learning accessible, engaging, effective, meaningful and personalized for everyone,” Radhakrishnan concludes.

Bhaktvatsal Sharma

BW Reporters The author is a journalist with BW Businessworld