Technology is an innovation amplifier – Industry and Institutions together can bring transformation : Prof Sadagopan, Chairman, MeltingPot2020 2017 Edition

It was an honour to have Prof S Sadagopan, Director IIIT Bangalore, as the chairperson of the Meltingpot2020, a landmark movement, an initiative by CL Educate, that is working towards bringing youthful, research-oriented entrepreneurial education institutions and innovation fostering industry players.

(Prof Sadagopan interacting with Dr. Mashelkar, former chairperson of CSIR, the keynote speaker at MeltingPot2020)

Prof Sadagopan, in his opening remarks spoke about how the time has come for both, educational institutions and industry, to work together with technology playing the role of innovation amplifier to solve problems that will change the nation.

• IT as innovation Amplifier
  • Core competence of most of us who started in 1960s –
  • We digitized everything over the forty years
  • Changed industry after industry
  • 2Ts were the largest exports
    • Tea, to drink
    • T for textile
  • IT is the largest now
    • 8bn dollar revenues today
    • MMT changed how travel industry works
    • Today innovation has changed how governments functioning
    • IT has been enabler and amplier of innovation
    • Kapital needs is much smaller in tech space compared to other spaces

NEXT PRACTICE, from CK Prahalad, one of the foremost thinkers India has produced in the modern times spoke about how next practice is what we need to focus upon

For the youngsters, your time has come, with all humility we can change the world

• Our generation went to the US, worked for the best, for the US and Europe
• We contributed a lot, that shows up… GOOGLE and Microsoft
• SATYAM, SIVAM, SUNDARAM….soon we will have a SIVAM joining Satya of Microsoft and Sundar of Google

Solving problems in India

• From 2010 things have changed
• Indians solving India’s problems, in India
• They have global reach
• Tweak the innovations with price-performance parameters
• Examples
  • Railway reservation
    • A 60 kg human being had  to go 16kms for reserving his seat, one day gone
    • Now we can have it in a jiffy, from anywhere. With millions doing reservations every day; imagine the man days saved, at one-tenth cost
  • Travel-khana
    • Food delivered at Train stations – priced at 29,49,69 rs
    • Delivered to your seats – breakfast, lunch and dinner
    • 33 million people travel every day on trains
    • Investment is a pittance
  • Redbus
    • Organizes small bus operators
    • Handling 2 buses to 6000 buses today
  • A Stanford undergrad student of sociology
    • Heard about India’s innovation explosion
    • Landed in Blore at my office
    • She was fascinated how they were using Egipura
    • They were using missed call
      • Husband comes up picks her on cycle when he receives a miss call
      • Missed call service offered by banks
        • 1 for balance in account… 2 for ….blah blah
    • She starts a business in Thailand and Malyasia – Valerie is her name

Can we make a difference to our neighborhood, that is happening

It can make a big difference

We need to make a delta difference, not just an epsilon

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Indian Education Congress 2017 : The Digital Transformation in Education & Training

Session Highlights:

• Is Digital Transformation only for the big institutions
• Should we transform a Training Organisation in totality or only the skill learning component
• Are schools ready for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
• Should we integrate Student Management with LMS in Higher Education

Session Moderator: Mr. Aditya Malik, CEO & MD-Talent Edge & Senior Partner-Lumis Partners

• Dr. Antriksh Johri, Director-IT & CISO, Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)
• Prof. Dr. Dwarika Uniyal, Assistant Dean, & Executive-Education, IIM Kashipur
• Mr. Gopal Devanahalli, Senior Vice President, Manipal Global Education
• Mr. Sreenivasan Ramakrishnan, Co-Founder, CL Educate (Career Launcher)

As an introduction to the session, a short film about a toddler playing with an IPad thrown among a few print magazines, was shown; and naturally the toddler liked the response of the icons on the IPAD that open new windows when pressed upon and not the print media that was passive and did nothing on pressing the photos on it! And was told that child of future will naturally make his choices….

I was not in consonance to this way of looking at digitization of education. It is very important to really understand a human being first, to know where to introduce, what to introduce and when to…

About a decade or two, children were branded as couch potatoes addicted to television. A family had one television and every one fought for the remote. Circa 2017, there are as many personalized entertainment gadgets in hand, as as many people in the home !! Children do not want to move out to play….. on the other hand, a young doctor of 24 complains about 72 hours of non-stop duty in the hospital. Imagine the fitness needed from a young doctor ! Will you get that if you thrust the Ipad to a 7-month old?

The human being is the most creative and intelligent being that has ever been created by the almighty. A child has so many intelligences and we intend to confine the child to playing with icons? One of the popular theory of Multiple intelligences propounded by Mr. Howard Gardener, talks about eight of them that a human being is naturally born with –

• musical-rhythmic,
• visual-spatial,
• verbal-linguistic,
• logical-mathematical,
• bodily-kinesthetic,
• naturalistic
• interpersonal,
• intrapersonal

Unless we do not facilitate the child to blossom in all these intelligences, we lose out on of the greatest creation that god has bestowed on this world – creative, thinking human being.

Of course, digitization can help in personalization of learning, but we should know when we should introduce and what quantum and which features.

A FEW FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS you need to ask yourself, to understand underlying principles of learning-

• What percent of what we have been taught we apply? What do we apply?
  • The audience responded …less than 20%
  • We apply more of what we learnt in the playgrounds and other arenas where we were involved in action and learnt a great deal.
• What percentage we learnt from teacher, what percentage we learn from friends?
  • Here again, majority of what we learnt is from discussions and interactions, not from a lecture that is made boring by most teachers. Of course, there are brilliant exceptions
• How many teachers do we remember fondly and why?
  • We were very good in those subjects where teacher showed affection and compassion.
  • We naturally want to perform well in those subjects and took interest

And HOW MUCH do we retain or recall of what we have been exposed to?

• What we hear….10% retained
• What we read….30% retained
• What we see…..40% retained
• What we do……70-80% retained

So whatever we create in the learning process, we need to lay emphasis on hard-core hands-on experience that the learner will retain for his life-time.

Why do we need Digitization of Education?

1. To learn at your own TIME and SPACE
2. To reach the best of the faculty and learning process to the remotest learner
3. Revisiting the important or to understand, as many times as you want
4. Engaging the learner enough to help him understand and imbibe
5. Ability to create a variety of resources at the learners disposal

As CL Educate what has been your experience?

• 2000 AD: compasscom : The supplementary and complementary web-based facilitation for school education beyond class VI
• synchronous and asynchronous modes
• 2001 AD Facilitated Live sessions on various subjects . …even biology, with a lot of animation and graphical representation of processes was used then
• engaging content, desktop/laptop

In 2005 created even a virtual chemistry lab – catering to the US schools under no child left behind program

Over the years mobility has come to play a central role

• Over the last two decades the digitization processes in CL Educate has helped to
  • Create enough resources online to engage every learner
    • conceptual learning, demonstrating the concept
    • applying to understand
    • practice to master
    • engaging with fellow learners to feel good and also share and learn
      – discussion rooms, forums,
      – gaming!
  • Ability to facilitate upward of 3000 students in a single session, at times
  • Enough Success stories created
    – across the segments
    – study at home students CAT/ LST…
    – schools …using

What is the Role of a teacher in the digitized world? One has to be a
– An eager learner all the time;
– courage to fail as he pushes his boundaries
– Have humility to unlearn and learn, even from students
– Ability to be an ideator, generate ideas and implement them
– Of course a facilitator to even those who are learning from huge geographical distances
– Create MOOCs
What sort of Impact on learners in CL Educate endeavours
– test prep … Night classes, huge numbers attend to these classes every day from comfort of home
– any time anywhere… having mobile resident modules as well as ability to log into live sessions even while on the move
–

What Future trends do you see…..

Disruptive technologies will bring huge shifts in the entire learning cycle. We will see the impact of a few of the following technologies very soon..
– virtual reality, augmented reality
– machine learning
– deep learning

VCCircle conference on Edu-Investments, November 18, Gurgaon, India – My notes as a Panelist

I was part of two sessions, one as a panelist and the other as a special invitee… Here is my notes – Pre-event, during Event and post thoughts…

PANEL

Edupreneurs: Revolutionising the Effectiveness of Education Delivery Systems (How can edupreneurs work in a dichotomic market like India to merge the chasms between the organized and highly unorganized education sector in the country, mainly higher education? Building sustainable businesses is the key to being a successful entrepreneur. How should entrepreneurs and institutes walk away from working in silos and leverage each other’s strength in creating a robust education system?

Panel Members –

– Manjula Pooja Shroff, Chairperson, Kalorex – Moderator
– Bindu Rana, Director, Millenium schools
– Prachi Windlass, Director, Michael and Susan Dell foundation, INDIA
– Gopal Devanahalli, VP, Manipal Global Education, Manipal Group
– R. Sreenvasan, Co-Founder, CL Educate

Each one planned to introduce oneself and ones work, in short….

My Pre-Event NOTES of CL Educate Intro…

Career Launcher is a leader in –
– Test Prep
– K-12 education – Indus world schools
– Skill education – skill schools

Also through the following entities, CL does capacity building of University and Corporate

– CL Media – Digital Presence
– GK Publications – Curricula and Pedagogy; Curriculum Support & Publishing
– 361 degree – On Demand  Learning
– Accendere – Research Incubator
– Bilakes – Business Incubation & Seed Funding
– Kestone – Corporate empowerment and building institutional Partnerships

Statistics in Numbers

CL – 265 locations, 1.5 million engaged, over 1.5 lakhs more than 50 hours
Accendere – Research incubation, Patenting, Journal publishing
CL Media – 163 institutions trust with us for branding, outreach and awareness building
Kestone – integrated marketing,events, customer activation, training, staffing; 100 corporates, 500 events – wipron nokia, microsoft, snapdeal, PayTM
G K P – 1.5 million books.. career and education
361 degree – largest in India – online enabling partner for University and corporates over 20K learners

Footprint – 20K schools and colleges; 1.5 lakh students > 18,200 hours on our web offerings per week

What CL does at UNIVERSITIES AND INSTITUTIONS

Academic Thought Leadership, International Presence, Institution Credibility

– Capacity building of universities and institutions, learning institutions
– Consulting Visioning Strategic Thinking
– Faculty, Academic development, Research and innovation
– Admissions: Outreach and Application – TAAF Services
– MARTECHING
– skill education
– Incubation and entrepreneurship
– Career Development Center – Employability, Higher studies facilitation

—CONTEXT——- current market scenario —–challenges for the nation

Only 18% graduates are employable in India
91% software professionals lack programming and algorithm skills while 60% lack domain skills
71% lack soft and cognitive skills while 73% lack English speaking and comprehension skills
57.96% have poor analytical and quantitative skills
For core jobs in mechanical, electronics/electrical and civil jobs, only a mere 7.49% are employable

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The session was supposed to be on higher-education, but the panel felt that the continuum from school to university has similar challenges and reforms are needed across the segments. Also opportunities and investment needs do exist across. So the pre-session discussion covered the entire spectrum.

Pre-event notes of each of the panelists..

Issues I noted down ..

– Democratization of Learning and its access
– Contestability of markets, access to Universities
– Digital technologies and creating impact
– Mobility and the influence in learning; Global Mobility
– Integration with industry; Industry funding research
– Opportunities for entrepreneurs and Funding possibilities

– Life-long LEARNERS, COURAGE, HUMILITY : Key, How to instill?

Gopal Devanahalli wanted to talk about

– I would like to focus on higher education and continuing education for working professionals.
– Changing learning needs of working professionals – esp in certain industries like IT
– Online courses & types of courses that are relevant to the learners
– The effectiveness of the online delivery model and how to make it more effective.
– Regulatory issues

Prachi Jain Windlass  wanted to talk about the following –

– Opportunity areas in K12 education, college entrance and career readiness.
– Opportunities for collaboration and leveraging the ecosystem. Many of our portfolio companies: Avanti, Convegenius and OnlineTyari are taking this approach. understanding their core and leveraging the ecosystem for non core areas.
– Our experience in breaking down the silos in the govt education system, and the role that private sector players can play, risks involved.

Manjula Pooja Shroff of Kalorex wanted to focus upon
– Changing scenarios
– Integration of k-12 to Higher Ed
– Teaching Learning delivery process

Bindu Rana’s concerns included

– Challenges in running schools – to deliver the intended
– Regulations stifling the effectiveness
– Challenges in setting up rural schools – quality, price point, training, delivery

– Why cannot the government see education as any other industry? With challenges of access and quality existing all across..

• Promote PPP models across
• Engage and bring in private partners to collaborate in school and university systems
• Use technology to improve training of teachers in enriching content, pedagogy and all processes
• ….

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Other Issues discussed across panels – My notes

Is the nation ready for only digital? Is that trend every where?
– hybrid model is the most successful one
– engaging is the key, mentoring, giving the confidence

Lessons from failures? Key to success
– Team with vision
– sustainable relationship within and with customer
– respect with disagreements in board room and among the team members

Skill education went through cycles.. now we are in the third..
A. IT education – 80s and 90s
B. Sales upgradation – 2000 onwards..
C. now vocational? Entrepreneurship
– quality of higher education is lacking
– rote to conceptual learning, how will we make it happen
– concept of job, loyalty shifting
– nature of learning will have to shift
– propensity to entrepreneurship
– learning to learn paradigm

How do we enable learners to face VUCA?

– VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity
– learning, calling passion from within, help others raise their capabilities

Public education….how to revive?
– policy enablement

– Rote to Conceptual learning?
– edtech – retrain teachers, students,
– appraising teachers, reward them, being discipline,monitor

Home schooling
– becoming popular
– investment opportunities?
– work-life, work-home balancing

Key to succeed in Education space

Quality first, then scale
Be prepared for long haul, then scale
Then comes franchising

—————————————————– As a special invitee..

AKAMAI Presentation – Digital delivery platform, especially Video that will be 80% of the content on-line in the near future..

– formats : 5 min and 20 min content
– launch has to be fast, else you lose the client/subscriber

High quality
– no stalling/no buffering;
– always available, relevant,
– no data plan restrictions

Education on mobility? what are the trends, and what will be challenges of the future..

Instant user experience – FB provides
Consume as much as possible
Offline content goes online – you tube
Download during nights, local content play while travel
Challenges about space on device
Battery running out – delete the app

Here is the link to a set of photographs of the event uploaded by VCCircle on their FB page https://www.facebook.com/VCC-Events-1176152369113449/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1355409131187771

Save

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#Vision #Purpose #Passion #Perseverance – John Hanke and Pokémon Go.

How long does it take to create an overnight success? For John Hanke it’s taken him 20 years to create Pokémon Go.

This week, the Pokémon Go app has broken all records, with 10 million+ downloads in the first week, exceeding Twitter in daily active users, and with higher average user time than Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram & WhatsApp.

How did John Hanke create such a massive overnight craze? Here’s the 10 times he levelled up in his lifetime to reach Pokémon Go:

1st Level up: In 1996, while still a student, John co-created the very first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called ‘Meridian 59’. He sold the game to 3DO to move on to a bigger passion: mapping the world.

2nd Level up: In 2000, John launched ‘Keyhole’ to come up with a way to link maps with aerial photography, and create the first online, GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world.

3rd Level up: In 2004, Google bought Keyhole and with John’s help, turned Keyhole into what is now ‘Google Earth’. That’s when John decided to focus at creating GPS-based games.

4th Level up: John ran the Google Geo team from 2004 to 2010, creating Google Maps and Google Street View. During this time, he collected the team that would later create Pokémon Go.

5th Level up: In 2010, John launched Niantic Labs as a start-up funded by Google to create a game layer on maps. John explains why he called it Niantic:

“The Niantic is the name of a whaling ship that came up during the gold rush and through a variety of circumstances g hv bot dragged on shore. This happened with other ships, too. Over the years, San Francisco was basically just built over these ships. You could stand on top of them now, and you wouldn’t know it. So it’s this idea that there’s stuff about the world that’s really cool but even though it’s on the Internet, it’s hard to know when you’re actually there.”

6th Level up: In 2012, John then created Niantic’s first geo-based MMO, “ingress”:

John explains: “In the case of Ingress the activity is layered on top of the real world and on your phone. The inspiration was that it was something that I always used to daydream about while I was commuting back and forth from home to Google.”

“I always thought you could make an awesome game using all the Geo data that we have. I watched phones become more and more powerful and I thought the time would come that you could do a really awesome real-world adventure-based game.”

7th Level up: In 2014, Google and the Pokémon Company teamed up for an April Fools’ Day joke, which allowed viewers to find Pokémon creatures on Google maps. It was a viral hit, and got John thinking the idea could be turned into a real game.

8th Level up: John decided to build Pokémon Go on the user-generated meeting points created by players of Ingress, and the most popular became the Pokéstops and gyms in Pokémon Go:

As John says, ”The Pokéstops are submitted by users, so obviously they’re based on places people go. We had essentially two and a half years of people going to all the places where they thought they should be able to play Ingress, so it’s some pretty remote places. There are portals in Antartica and the North Pole, and most points in between.”

9th Level up: John raised $25 million from Google, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and other investors from Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 to grow a team of 40+ to launch Pokémon Go this year.

10th Level: John and his team launched Pokémon Go on July 6th in USA, Australia and New Zealand. Since its launch, Nintendo’s share price has risen $12 billion, and the app is already generating over $2 million daily in in-app purchases, making it an overnight phenomenon.

The overnight success of Pokémon Go has taken John Hanke 20 years to create. Throughout these 20 years, while he had a big vision of a game layer over the world, he didn’t know what form it would take. At every step, he just focused at his next level up.

At each new level, he had new powers, new team members, and new items in his inventory…

Are you, like John, treating your own entrepreneurial journey like one big MMO?

Keep the end in mind, but focus today on simply levelling up.

At every level, grow your powers, your team, and your luck.

And know it takes many levels to win the game.

“It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.” ~ Eddie Cantor

#sharing #knowthyself #sreeni.org

Connected Bharat, Enabled Bharat, Empowered Bharat – An article for digitalEARNING Magazine!

Here was the request that came from the magazine, “After years of discussion and deliberations the ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme has been announced. What is the first step/initiative/challenges that you will address or take towards realising this goal, specifically in the field of EDUCATION?
I would request you to provide me a quote of around 100/words, along with the details mentioned below and a high resolution photograph.

Name: R. Sreenivasan;    Designation: Chief Innovation Officer; Co-Founder

Organisation: CL Educate”

————– My article to the request…..

I would want to call it, ‘Connected Bharat, Enabled Bharat, Empowered Bharat’ rather than DIGITAL INDIA. India has been in the digital era for the last three decades with only the URBAN INDIA making something out of it, and to some extent impacting larger masses too. We have had significant success in rail reservation, telephony etc, but mostly the service providers made use of it to deliver reasonably better services.

Now, the mobile revolution, especially the smart phone capability, in the hands of the ‘AAM ADMI’ is making the big difference now. I can see the impact happening in Education, Health and Sanitation, transportation while being connected with families live 24X7 from anywhere.

Having been at the forefront of web and related technology in the education space since 2000, I see now, the light at the end of the tunnel that we have been passing through over the last decade, to reach out to the real masses. The last mile connectivity is getting cleared now with Mobile technologies empowering their finger tips and their endeavours.

CL Educate started delivering live, interactive courses empowering Indian Children who used to log in from their homes in the middle-east (Indian expatriate population) in 2001 and have been doing so with fair amount of success since then. I can vividly recall one of the faculty, Mr. Pankaj Kumar, taking a session over the web,  on botany with a lot of animation built in, from his home in Patna, and students in Dubai, Manama and Kuwait city were enchanted and enthralled! Since then we have facilitated hundreds of children from the Middle-east to reach the sought after portals of IITs and IIMs and also the best of the universities abroad. Pankaj Kumar and his colleague, VM Sharma are reaching out to children in the remotest schools of Andamans, now!

Only in the last 4-5 years we have been able to generate the same momentum in India through better last-mile web connectivity, with about 3000-4000 students regularly logging in from homes across the country to attend one single session from the best of the masters in the test-prep space. But what is really transforming today, is the mobility – any time, any where – possibility. This year we have been able to reach tens of thousands with mobile apps within twenty four hours of launch of the courses on the apps – Truly enabling every Indian.

This morning when, I wrote this article, and was to upload on my website, I noticed a huge spurt, that happened yesterday, in the visitors on my site ! and I amended this article!!

 

Over 900 visitors hitting the site in one single hour, to read an article on Piyush Tiwari and his endeavour, SAVE LIFE FOUNDATION – https://swamanthan.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/act-promptly-save-life-piyush-tiwari-founder-save-life-foundation-indialogues/”. Most of these hits have been from mobile, immediately after watching a reference to Piyush on television in the programme, “SATYAMEVA JAYATE”, powered by Amir Khan. So television and mobile together created this tsunami on www.sreeni.org.

Similarly, classes on the web and mobiles in hand to attend them and respond, creates quite a few tsunamis, every now and then!!

These tsunamis are bound to grow in magnitude pretty soon. I see the mobility dimension impacting the real masses with every human being in the remotest part of the country enabled. If we are able to ‘power’ the country with alternate sources of energy – solar charging panels, solar powered lights etc, then the boundaries will vanish sooner. There are endeavours in that direction by brilliant set of ‘energy’ enablers.

If world class education facilitation reaches every family, the nation will be enabled and empowered. We are heading in the right direction. We will see the impact in the next three to four years; 2020 will see a different dawn!

know more about http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/

looking forward to your feedback. Humble thanks.

Dream It, Do It! – Towards inclusivity with the smart cane – Pranav Lal (an IMI alum), an inspiration

I came across Pranav’s post this afternoon and thought of carrying it on my site. In over sixteen years of knowing Pranav, I have been inspired immensely for his steadfastness, optimism and go-getting attitude. Pranav has been a student of CL once upon a time, preparing for CAT.  Being completely visually challenged, he took on the IIM fraternity when he was deprived of additional time, after having promised, when he appeared in CAT then. He managed to get into one of the premier business schools. He then joined CL in the tech space on graduating, before he moved on. Since then he has headed technology and internet security functions in MNCs and continues to contribute immensely to the betterment of physically challenged.

 

————–
This afternoon has been a triumphant one. The smart cane, which I have been testing for a while has been launched! The smart cane is a regular cane but with an attachment that provides tactile feedback as you approach an obstacle.

It uses sonar for measuring distances. The motor’s speed increases as you approach an object so the vibration you feel in the handle of the cane is increased. Different distances are represented by different vibratory patterns.

The cane has 2 modes namely indoor and outdoor. in the indoor mode, obstacles are detected at a range of 1.5 meters while in the outdoor mode, obstacles at a range of 3 meters are detected.

My favorite feature is the collision detector. The cane will warn you with a distinctive beep if someone is going to collide with you.

The cane is rugged and has been designed to take tropical conditions into account. I have dropped it down a flight of stairs a few times.

The price in Indian Rupees is about Rs. 2500.

The cane is inclusive because it does not require any supporting infrastructure. There is no need to add anything to the environment so the device can go directly to the user.

The smart cane however represents something else in Indian disability history. It is probably the first project that has fructified industry, academic and NGO collaboration. Over 30 NGOs have been consulted. My thanks to all of them and all my fellow testers.

My special thanks to Phoenix Medical systems, the industry partner for their expertise.

For international readers, the cane will get the CE mark within a week from today.

Also, thanks to the Welcome Trust who funded the development effort and guided the team. Thanks to the professors and staff at IIT Delhi. In particular, the project lead Dr. Rohan Paul who besides being a scientist, humanitarian is a fantastic project manager.

Thanks to Dipendra Manocha a continuing inspiration for many of us. It was his idea, his hand at the helm that began the journey in 2005.

What the smart cane can’t do –

• It cannot tell you what the obstacle is. A dustbin and a person produce the same vibratory patterns.
• It is difficult to detect below knee obstacles. The cane is designed for detecting above knee obstacles but you can adjust the angle of the sonic transducers and pickup below knee obstacles if you hold at the correct angle
• The sonar attachment cannot be mounted on any other cane though you can use it without the cane. I understand this is something that is being worked upon.
• You get no texture information.

The road ahead

Much work still has to be done in getting this device out to the poorest sections of Indian society. These portions are sparsely served by NGOs.

It would be easy to combine the cane with sensory substitution devices. There may not be any need for modification because the signals will be combined in the brain. I am going to test the cane with The vOICe.

Contact the Saksham Trust for more information.

To read more of his postings, kindly go to Pranav’s writings on techesoterica.com for the challenged

Can we be masters of the technology rather than slaves – ICT in Education Summit

“Learning has hugely shifted online and is no more restricted to schools and colleges. The modern ways of learning have evolved with technology with a variety of tools and resources available online to facilitate this learning. It is to understand and deliberate on this that the 4th ICT in Education Summit was conceptualized and organized, which was attended by around 200 guests comprising of academicians, think tanks from the corporate world and government representatives.” – VAR India, who organized the event. The report is on 4th ICT in Education Summit

The afternoon panel discussion was themed around “Education in India merits Change.”  It was moderated jointly by Mr Vijay Shukla, Managing Director, Eduvisors, and Mr Sujit Panigrahi, CTO, Convergent Technologies. The panelists included, Mr Adil Usman, Business Head, iProf Learning Solutions; Mr R. Sreenivasan, Co-Founder, CL Educate (career Launcher); Ms Vineeta Mittal, Principal, The Millennium School, Gurgaon; Mr Gaurav Tomar, Director, Rabindranath World School, Gurgaon; Mr Varadarajan Sridharan, Fellow, Ed Tech; and Ms Sara H. Basson, Ph.D., Worldwide Program Director, IBM – TJ Watson Research Center.

The panel, discussing “Education in India merits change”

Topics for discussion revolved around the present education system in India, spanning from how to make Schools’ ICT Investment Count and technology-led disruption for Indian education ecosystem to upgrading ICT infrastructure to make learning environment fit for the future and safeguarding devices and prioritizing cyber safety and security.

Opening the session, Vijay set the tone for the panel discussion ..

– How does ICT impact the three dimensions of quality, access and equity
– Is the school space or higher Education radically impacted
– with just 18% gross enrollment ratio for higher education in India, what is the game changer

Varadarajan shared

•  ICT challenges and compels improvement
•  21^st century saw ICT push, because of quality – as tool to enhance
•  Most technologies and tools have evolved in the last decade
•  The hole in the wall experiment by Dr. Sugata mitra, showed how ICT can make a difference
• So, teachers’ role has changed – It is a question of how fast you adapt, what do you do as a facilitators
• It all boils down to how do you, as an institution empower the mentors
• concept of learning environment, home work and evaluation change
• Policies of the state has to keep pace with this change in the outlook and environment

Vineeta Mittal

• It is a tool, definitely required
• What all needed to change in a school context –
  • Teachers have to move from content delivery to being facilitators
  • From memorization to giving conceptual clarity
  • life skills to be inculcated and taken forward
  • The learning will become interdisciplinary
  • May help children to evolve as out of the box thinkers

Gaurav

• Only compelling reason I found was, every school in the vicinity is placing hoardings all over about ICT, whether they understood or not
• Could procure hardware from Nehru place, software home grown
• But one significant shift that technology demands is the cultural change
  • How fast people in the system orient themselves to the shift
  • Is it imposed or embraced
  • The leadership has to facilitate the whole process

Sreeni

Tech or ICT is only an enabler. If I look back at our journey in CL Educate

• Launched compassbox in 1998, reached thousands of homes, initially mostly the MENA Region for curriculum support
• Then we went on to introduce classrooms on the desktop in the MENA region – 2001, teachers teaching from remotest parts of India. Pankaj, an amazing teacher with passion for tech, used to take biology from Patna in 2001, when internet penetration in India was miniscule. But Indians abroad lapped it up
• CL – we have sessions in the career and test prep space – webinars – attended by about 6-7k participants from nook and corner of the country and abroad too

The important challenges to focus in schools these days –

• To make the learning environment and processes that stroke the right brain, any ways we are masters of clerical faculties
• Idiot box was a challenge, it became a baby sitter… Now lap top, palm top… Whatsupp (FB acquired it for $19bn yday).. they all end up making  people unproductive, if not realized their role..
• I had shared about a film that I had come across, in which the grade 4 curriculum was completely taught through a project to design the furniture for the classroom, during the academic year. Here is the film..

What is very important is how do we use it, where and when to use it.. Possibilities include

• collaboration among mentors across geographies
• collaborative learning among students,
• customizing learning to differently-abled children in the same class
• promote interdisciplinary work
• bringing world class open source learning resources to the child and mentors

We need to be master of technology rather than ending up as a slave…. Hope the laptops distributed by the UP govt is being put to good use, not just for watching movies!

Sara

• education is the next big thing for ICT
• analytics holds the key to facilitate students
  • personalizing – individualized attention
  • Georgia school research. – with the data, can you predict the student where will he be?
  • enabling careers – education and the world – marrying the two
  • best innovation is pause and start buttonChallenges
    – complete info about the student
    – how did you know that he is going to succeed; analytics of historical data
    – we have technology, trying to find the solution; not the other way around

Adil

Problems that can be solved by tech

• check a few industries – health…. Tech has changed paradigm
• we need to think how tech can be used in the
• Challenges
  – shortage of quality teachers – people
  – access to high quality content and tools
  – customized learning paths
• We have deployed tools in – Meghalaya, Mauritius, now 15 million in CBSE
  – increase efficiency, reduce unwanted workload
  – tablet and online learning
  – Offline, online, in lass, outclass
  – mentors can be better facilitator

Vijay

– what is the matrix of success?

Q & A

Dr jayaprakash – I used IBM 1620 in 1964 first time; retired as Principal Baskara charya college

in Delhi and NCR ….
– quality of the student? How does it change? In NCR we do not have shortage of resources…what about the interiors of the nation

Vineeta
Kind of learners – visual, kinesthetic, …. Figure out what kind of learner and use it
Any where and any time learning

Varadarajan
– do we have a road map for ICT
– quality vision and road map
– Dmitry, a thought leader is working on Preserving his brain
– large hadron collider, whole movie has been made. How many get access to it

– failing to plan is planning to fail

Sreeni

• Having batted other way around let me bat for ICT
• In IWS, our schools, the best of the resources from the universities of the world is on the tabs for the students – imagine MIT, CALTECH videos to understand the concepts of specific gravity, viscosity..children get to see the experiments recorded
• Come to the class and faculty does only practical to help you understand better
• It is all about how best we use and we need to stroke the imagination of mentors first, then children will be take care off

Vijay
I sum up the discussion with a question

Can we strike a right balance both in creation and consumption of technology?