Innovations in Education
Innovations in Education with Rohini Nilekani, Maheshwar Peri, Shantanu Prakash and Rukmini Banerji
“Why do we need to move to digital?” Is one of the first things panelist Rohini Nilekani, founder of EkStep, brings to the table. Digital platforms are interactive, give easy access to help, retains kids’ attentions, and are undeniably fun, thereby getting one step closer to EkStep’s goal of improving literacy and opportunities for students in the next five years.
Moderator, Maheshwar Peri, Chairman of Careers360, explains that parents put in so much, emotionally and financially, for their kids but unfortunately the state of education and physical infrastructure is not equipped to give them what they want, need and deserve. Peri tells a heart wrenching story of young girl named Shiya and her 814 classmates in shameful hygiene and schooling conditions, just outside Bombay, leaving the audience silent and wondering ‘how can we not just close the gap but raise the bar? Not just quantity but quality?’
Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, India’s largest Education NGO, starts by stating that we shouldn’t forget or overlook that among the 200-220 million children in India, 96% of them are in school. While more kids are in school and staying in school for longer, attendance levels and progress is still low.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) resulted in shocking results illustrating that kids are in school but not where they should be progress wise to the appalling extent that 50% of grade 5 students are not able to read grade 2 level material. This leads to a downward spiral of schooling getting more difficult as schools are busy rushing to finish the syllabus, unable to help every single student. Banerji aptly encapsulates that “more and more kids are being left behind because they aren’t learning their fundamentals on time.”
Banerji suggests a seemingly straightforward, realistic and low maintenance solution of helping students for two hours a day for 50 days to help them learn to read from scratch. Shantanu Prakash, founder of Educomp Solutions Limited, brings the conversation back to the digital world as he explains its importance in students’ lives today. He tells an anecdote of a school computer lab that was temporarily shut down but that had little no inconvenience to the students. This demonstrated that computers weren’t being used effectively and thus weren’t playing a vital role in the lives of students.
What’s important to recognize is how enterprising and willing kids are. They are obtaining information all the time and often have the tools right in front of them. As Prakash identifies, children with access to mobile phones have classrooms in their pockets. He states that the future of digital is on the rise and has the potential to change education as we know it. He sheds light on three main issues in classrooms: overcrowding, mediocre teaching stock, and rigid curriculums with minimal scope for teachers. He goes on to explain that the crucial challenges today include changing our model of learning from mass education and rote learning to personalization for each student.
The panelists agree that the step forward must be a group effort involving the government, private sector, NGOs, and individuals. Given the technology, resources and allowance to be flexible, perhaps teachers and students themselves can flourish far beyond outdated government and rural school syllabuses. This leads us to question how we’ve been teaching our students all along…
Reported by Rhea Bhatia, Programme Development Intern, Asia Society India Centre.
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Watch the full programme (1 hour 43 minutes) below: