By Sietse Wouters & Vismit Bansal
When India announced its first Covid-19 lockdown on March 24, 2020, over a billion people were left with a few hours to prepare for a new way of life. The education sector was severely affected, and school closures followed for 18-21 months, resulting in unprecedented learning loss for a generation of children in India. While governments and education providers were quick to shift to remote learning, with initiatives such as the launch of education-based TV channels and the DIKSHA app for students and teachers, by most accounts, these had limited impact on learning. The Azim Premji Foundation study on ‘Loss of Learning during the pandemic’ (2021) found that for maths and language, 82% and 93% of students, respectively, across Grades 2 to 6 lost at least one of four foundational skills.
Despite dismal learning outcomes overall, some bright spots exist. The lockdown ushered in a new era of remote learning in India’s school education system. Education providers supported by the Quality Education India Development Impact Bond (QEI DIB), one of the world’s largest education outcomes-based financing contracts, saw encouraging results in their remote learning interventions.
At the start of the pandemic, they pivoted to remote learning initiatives and, over the past two years, continuously iterated to improve the effectiveness of their interventions in the face of challenges such as low device penetration, lack of relatable content for students, and staff capacity, to show positive learning gains. While these gains were not as steep as those demonstrated in a normal school year, students in these schools still learned 2.5 times faster than their peers in non-participating schools in the two-year Covid-19 period.
Education providers have now had the time to evaluate how various innovations in the Covid-enforced period have played out, what works, and what might be scalable. This could have wide applicability for creating tailored learning opportunities, alleviating education inequality, and harnessing education technology to benefit students across the nation.
To this end, the success of remote learning interventions by the QEI DIB’s education providers puts forth five lessons across three categories.
Making remote learning work in low-resource settings
Complement digital learning with in-person, community-based interactions:
As of 2019-20, around 1.26 million of the 1.5 million schools in India are in the rural parts. In low-income rural and urban communities, students are often, and sometimes altogether, unable to access remote learning due to poor device access or data connectivity. Incremental innovations that rely on driving remote learning through an in-community component can help overcome this barrier.
Gyan Shala, which operates in low-income neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad and Surat, installed TV sets in its classrooms in community spaces to play pre-recorded content for children. The students, most of whom lacked smartphone access at home, were called to the classroom in small groups of 3-5, each supervised by a teacher, to view the content.
In similar settings in Lucknow, the Education Initiatives-Pratham Infotech Foundation (EI-PIF) established community labs to provide children with Mindspark, an adaptive learning platform developed by EI. Before Covid-19, it operated dedicated labs within schools. During school closures, the PIF repurposed the school-based hardware to set up community labs that allowed students to access Mindspark through unique login IDs and continue their education remotely.
Look towards non-traditional digital channels to deliver learning remotely:
While digital devices largely drive the remote learning wave, traditional mediums of remote learning such as printed worksheets and assignments remain just as important, especially for students that lack ready access to technology. The Society for All Round Development (SARD) in Delhi pivoted to deliver a very effective digital learning intervention via WhatsApp and smartphones. Despite this, it was unable to regularly reach students who had no device access or faced other constraints. When the SARD designed and distributed printed worksheets to students, it reached 15-20% more students than it was reaching through digital means alone. Similarly, the Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF) in Mumbai developed in-house worksheets and distributed them to students (or their parents) in schools on days when midday meals were distributed.
Ensuring students engage with learning content and activities
Create feedback loops to improve content continuously:
Digital mediums enable education providers to access and use various content resources that have become readily available. But it is important to ensure that the content is adapted to the students’ context.
This could mean content that is engaging, easy to understand, and low on data consumption. The SARD piloted several forms of content, including animated videos to share with students on WhatsApp. It steadily improved the videos based on student response to develop a library of content that saw high engagement from students and was also adopted by other education providers (outside of the programme) for use in their interventions.
Similarly, Gyan Shala’s teachers observed students’ responses to pre-recorded TV lectures and shared feedback with their content teams to make improvements.
Ensure regular follow-up through parents and other touchpoints:
In remote settings, it is difficult for teachers to ensure regular attendance and engagement of students. For instance, a student may be unable to engage regularly since the household has only one mobile phone available with the parent or might have data limitations. Involving parents can make them more invested in their ward’s education, keep tabs on the child’s progress, and support learning at home. Education providers under the programme such as the SARD and the EI-PIF regularly connected with parents via phone calls and SMS in the initial months of the pandemic to involve parents in their child’s education and keep them updated on resources and content to share with their children. The EI-PIF also shared in-home activities that parents could conduct for their children to ensure continuity of learning at home. Programme field staff, such as teachers, often directly connected with relatively older children to directly follow up and nudge them towards greater engagement.
Creating a conducive learning environment for children
Focus on socio-emotional learning (SEL) support for children:
Covid-19 has been particularly harsh for children, especially younger children. Factors such as grief, fear, uncertainty, social isolation, increased screen time, and parental fatigue have been reported to negatively affect the mental health of children. Not only were they missing out on valuable learning, but also losing a childhood that enabled them to mingle freely with friends, have adequate playtime and organic interactions, and engage in creative activities that schools offer. KEF Mumbai and Ahmedabad created specialised modules that allowed their field staff and teachers to engage students in creative activities, such as painting competitions, to provide vital SEL support and educate them about the dos and don’ts during Covid-19.
Similarly, the SARD engaged students in a series of dedicated activities that focused on students’ physical and emotional well-being. These activities had the added advantages of bringing vibrancy to remote learning and keeping students engaged. The above lessons are context-dependent, and education providers must determine what works for them and the communities they serve. The following five factors spanning strategy and execution can help education providers successfully deploy remote learning interventions:
a) Decisive leadership,
b) Data-driven decision-making,
c) Iterative implementation,
d) The involvement of ‘intermediaries’, and
e) Prioritising team wellbeing.
When implementing these recommendations, an outcome-focused approach should be the go-to strategy for all education providers. Interventions and subsequent iterations must ensure that students are able to seamlessly access and engage with remote learning even in the most challenging contexts. Constant monitoring and refinements are essential to ensure the creation of strong and inclusive education systems that stand the test of time and tribulations.
Wouters is the Program Director for Innovative Finance at the UBS Optimus Foundation. He has worked closely on the design, structuring and contracting of the Quality Education India, Utkrisht Maternal and Newborn Health Development Impact Bonds.Bansal is a Senior Project Manager at Dalberg Advisors. His recent work includes defining the organisational strategy for a leading non-profit in the child protection space, leading performance management for the QEI DIB, and managing a study around the efficacy of entitlements delivery for two of India’s largest social protection schemes.