Following Byju’s fall from being India’s most valued Unicorn to being sued for insolvency, there is a growing perception that edtech, as a sector, should be shunned by capital and talent. This would be a mistake. One mismanaged company should not damn an entire sector. India needs technology to revamp its education sector and realise its demographic dividend.
Online coaching for intensely competitive entrance examinations is but one area for the deployment of technology in the education sector. And it is the one service that is most is most likely to be at the receiving end of outrage and anger, if the stress produced by preparing for intensely competitive entrance examinations leads on to despair and self-harm, including of the terminal kind, by some exam takers.
There is a case for vastly increasing the number of premier technical and medical educational institutions at the college level, and reducing the competition to get placed in a few elite institutions. A generalised increase in quality across-the-board is necessary to prevent wasting much adolescent passion and health in coaching and cramming to gain admission to an elite handful of institutions.
China’s restrictive approach to coaching
China put severe restrictions on supplementary coaching, in terms of how late into the evening it can rob students of rest, recreation and one another’s company, and of how much can be charged for coaching. Chinese restrictions went as far as to limit capital raising opportunities for companies in the edtech sector.
This is extreme. India needs edtech, superior to Byju’s in terms of corporate governance and fiduciary responsibility, and in terms of the technology as well. The world has left behind it the reassuring era, in which what someone learned at school or college stood them in good stead for a lifelong career.
Skilling never stops
Today, skills that were unheard of in the past decade crop up and grow in importance over a short time horizon, and disappear into obsolescence, just as fast, as newer ones take over. People need to reskill and upgrade what they know all through their career, if some algorithm or robot is not to eat their respective jobs. And edtech would be the mainstay of constant skill upgradation and retraining.
We need more, and constantly evolving edtech, to keep our talent always contemporary and flexible. Search for an online course to learn a little more on anything, whether wine, Shakespeare, probability or Natural Language Processing, you will find a massive open online course waiting for you, and offered by a university from the West. There is no reason to cede this space of supplementary education to foreign firms. Artificial Intelligence opens up the possibility of sharply reducing the cost of evaluating academic outcomes in such online courses. Indian companies must thrive in the space. For that, there must be startups, venture capital to fund them, and top-notch talent to staff them.
Schools are more, not less important
But for students to be able to take advantage of online courses, they should have learned to learn, during the course of their formal schooling at whatever level. If, instead, they merely learned some pre-defined stuff and even used coaching, online and offline, to that end, but did not learn the art of critical inquiry and constant expansion of their mental horizons, the best online courses for skill upgradation and further study would be of little avail.
The education system, at large, fails India’s young in multiple ways. For one, it even fails to teach them enough of anything, in quantity or quality. This is why, year-after-year, surveys of education report high-school students who cannot read at Class 3 levels or divide a three-digit number by, say, 8. Students complete high school without learning anything much. Thanks to the vagaries of our education system, some of them go on to college and graduate, only to join the army of those dubbed unemployable.
This is tragedy at the level of the individual and costly squandering of our potentially massive demographic dividend, at the level of the economy and the nation.
Edtech can complement schools
This should not be allowed to continue. Our schools must be rendered functional. And edtech can play a very useful role in that process. A primary use would be to measure individual progress in a large class of students with differing abilities and different levels of attained proficiency, with a view to identifying the laggards and assisting them to catch up. Students who move up through different levels of schooling, without having mastered what they are supposed to learn at the early levels, end up with low comprehension of what they are supposed to learn at higher levels, particularly in subjects like maths and science that build upon prior learning to develop an understanding of more advanced concepts.
The only way for a country like India, with limited resources and an enormous student population, to make real progress in education is to deploy tech to assist teachers in continual monitoring of the scholastic achievement of individual members of their class, locate shortcomings and take steps to remedy them. That tech, which would replace once-a-year exams with continuous evaluation, needs to be developed, and that calls for attracting investment and talent.
Edtech has not become redundant. Rather, it gains in salience with every step the world, and therefore, India, take towards and into the expanding knowledge economy. Let not our disappointment over one fallen star stop us from seeing all those points of light that point us to the future.
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