I remember, as a kid—having only seen the Ambassador cars—getting a shock when I saw a foreign car with an open hood. Compared to what was inside the Ambassador, what was under this hood seemed like out-of-the-world technology.
But those days for Indian technology are seemingly gone. Now, Indian internet companies are competing head-to-head with the Americans and Chinese in technology. Or are they? Let us look at ed-tech, where I have some expertise.
Ed-tech, or education technology companies, are selling the concept of “personalised learning” or “adaptive learning”. So, what is personalised learning and what is the problem ed-tech companies are trying to solve?
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Let us go back three decades to the research of Benjamin Bloom. The American educational psychologist’s famous “2 Sigma Problem” is about how to recreate the effectiveness of one-on-one tutoring. His research showed that students taking one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations (2 Sigma) better than students who did not receive tutoring. The average tutored student performed better than 98% students in the traditional classroom. Why this jump? One-on-one tutoring is the ultimate personalisation of learning. However, Bloom noted that one-on-one tutoring is “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale.”
What educationists agree is that each student learns at a different pace. Further, a student’s pace is not uniform but varies based on the subject or even the concept one is learning. But a teacher in a class cannot personalise for each student. So, what kind of ed-tech do we need to solve this issue, and where do Indian companies stand?
US company Knewton has emerged as the clear technology leader for “adaptive learning”. It uses a technology called Item Response Theory (IRT) as a foundation. IRT is an adaptive assessment technology used in high-stake tests such as GMAT and GRE, and is expanding to being used in American K-12 assessments. Knewton’s ed-tech has expanded IRT Adaptive from “assessment” to “learning”—a great feat. A number of ed-tech companies are now paying to use their technology, thus acknowledging their leadership.
TutorGroup of China appears to lead in ed-tech for synchronous tutoring with a live tutor, and the concept of connecting anytime from anywhere using current and emerging devices.
WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), started by Google but now open source, is becoming the favoured technology to base such live connections on. But open source can be a misleading term because proprietary products are being built using WebRTC. Technology and devices are fast evolving and such live person-to-person interaction will also always be evolving and remain a technology challenge. TutorGroup is an ed-tech company that has achieved unicorn status.
Another hot promise in ed-tech is gamification—interactive activities that make children learn while having fun. Can ed-tech achieve this for students and anxious parents? Age of Learning, a US company, has delivered on such products with wide adoption by parents, opening their wallets to buy gamification products.
There are many more global success stories in ed-tech, but all technology innovation is coming from the US, followed by China.
In India, terms such as adaptive testing, personalised learning, and gamification are on home pages of ed-tech firms selling products to students, but there are no technology breakthroughs that Indian ed-tech players have made. Nor have they incorporated or replicated the genuine ed-tech being made outside India. However, they have the same grand claims of technology.
Most Indian ed-tech companies might go the way of the Ambassador, once Chinese or American ed-tech comes to India, and once Indian students and parents start comparing foreign technology to Indian. But the good news is that these American or Chinese ed-tech companies are expected to employ Indian educators, content-writers and curriculum experts. So, talented educators might benefit.
Indian ed-tech players must understand that the “tech” in “ed-tech” stands for real technology. They must also realise that world-class technology will certainly come to India, and before it becomes a threat, they must start producing their own ed-tech.
By Ashish Sirohi
The author is co-founder, Eduwizards.com
