India’s school education system is beset by difficulties. Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, the country was suffering from a severe learning crisis, with one in every two children unable to read at the age of ten. The epidemic threatens to deepen the issue, particularly because 15.5 lakh schools have been closed for almost a year, affecting over 248 million pupils.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is converging on the learning crisis; now is the time to reinvent education and match it with the extraordinary technological upheaval. As traditional brick-and-mortar service delivery methods are disrupted throughout industries, the pandemic serves as a sharp reminder of the urgent need to incorporate technology into education.
The new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in India responds to the urgent requirement to integrate technology into all levels of education. It proposes the creation of a self-governing entity, the National Education Technology Forum (NETF), to lead efforts to give technology deployment and utilisation a strategic boost.
With flagship programmes like Digital India and the Ministry of Education’s initiatives, such as the Digital Infrastructure for School Education (DIKSHA), open-source learning platform, and UDISE+ — one of the world’s largest education management information systems — India is well-positioned to take this leap forward.
A comprehensive ed-tech policy architecture must focus on four key elements: improving governance systems, including planning, management, and monitoring processes; providing access to learning, particularly for disadvantaged groups; enabling teaching, learning, and evaluation processes; facilitating teacher training and continuous professional development; and facilitating teacher training and continuous professional development.
We can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t based on our cross-country experience and research. First and first, technology is a tool, not a panacea. Second, technology must be used to support the educational concept. It’s risky to provide digital infrastructure without a plan for how it’ll be used or what teaching-learning approaches it’ll support. Third, technology cannot take the role of schools or teachers. The solution is “teachers and technology,” not “teachers vs technology.” In fact, technology solutions are only useful when teachers embrace them and use them effectively.
Technology holds promise and has incredible potential in enabling greater personalisation of education and enhancing educational productivity by improving rates of learning, reducing costs of instructional material and service delivery at scale, and better utilising teacher/instructor time, subject to good learning design.
The Indian educational technology ecosystem has a lot of room for innovation. The market is poised for exponential expansion, with over 4,500 start-ups and a present worth of roughly $700 million – projections anticipate a market size of $30 billion in the next ten years. In truth, there are a number of examples of grassroots creativity. In collaboration with IIM-Ahmedabad, the Hamara Vidhyalaya in Namsai district, Arunachal Pradesh, is fostering tech-based performance assessments; Assam’s online career guidance portal is strengthening school-to-work and higher-education transition for students in grades 9 to 12; Samarth in Gujarat is facilitating the online professional development of lakhs of teachers; and DigiSATH in Jharkhand is spearheading behaviour change by establishing stronger parent-teacher-student relationships HarGhar Pathshala in Himachal Pradesh offers digital education to children with special needs. Through byte-size transmissions, Uttarakhand’s community radio promotes early literacy.
In the long run, as policy becomes more prevalent at the local level and technology-based solutions become more common, a repository of best-in-class technological solutions, best practises, and lessons learned from successful implementation will be required. The India Knowledge Hub of the NITI Aayog, as well as the DIKSHA and ShaGun platforms of the Ministry of Education, can help to support and magnify such learning.
It will undoubtedly be a long road from a holistic strategy to its successful implementation. It necessitates meticulous preparation, consistent execution, and calculated course corrections. With the launch of NEP 2020, a transformative ed-tech policy architecture is urgently needed to successfully maximise student learning.