The document discusses the Indian education space and needs of various learners. It identifies categories of learners including students in regular/distance colleges, coaching students, working professionals attending courses. It notes unfulfilled expectations of these learners including access to best teachers, practice tools, and doubt clarification. Challenges for Indian learners are also discussed such as long commute times and lack of internet access. The document outlines use cases for teachers, students, and parents on digital solutions. It proposes an educational workflow model and discusses technical and non-technical components needed for an educational solution, including preparing educators, creating content, and packaging/delivering content.
ENGLISH 7_Q4_LESSON 2_ Employing a Variety of Strategies for Effective Interp...
Indian Education Digital Solutions Needs
1. Indian Education Space
Working in Indian education space and having looked at the needs of learning from school student,
college student and working professionals, the learners can be categorized in to groups as follows.
Student go to regular colleges and study courses
Students attend distance learning course and keep working in a profession
Students attend coaching classes in addition to their regular course of study.
Students who complete their education and are working towards entrance exam for jobs or
careers
Professionals attending part time courses to enhance career opportunities
Learners attending short term courses and lectures to upgrade their knowledge levels.
We observe that the students of courses in colleges and universities have more unfulfilled expectations
in the current colleges and universities.
Access to best teacher lessons
Support mechanism to practise and revise lessons in private or after class
Support mechanism to prepare for MCQ based exams
Get doubts clarified beyond the teacher who might not be expert in the subject and also get
industrial or practical application of the concepts.
Easy way discuss, capture and share discussions to understand concepts better.
Ability to learn how they have studied compared to others who would appear for the exams
Need for recommendation to know which subjects they are weak and where they need to
contribute more to have higher probability of success
Hearing a teacher explain concepts makes students learn quicker than reading and
understanding by themselves.
We observe that distance learning students have more unfulfilled expectations in the current distance
learning method.
There is limited or no engagement with distance learning institution
There are no regular assessments that would provide them feedback of their learning
There is no organized reach to expert to clarify doubts. They miss contact classes at times to
honour the professional commitments and difficulty to travel to contact center
The learning is individualistic most of the times and there is no mechanism to interact with
their peers to share and discuss concepts and get clarified as community.
We find both the following other challenges for learners in India in general
Students travel long hours to reach colleges or their work and are not able to utilize this time
for learning.
Some students requires extra explanation of concepts in their native language in addition to
English to have better grasp of the concept.
Computers are not affordable to all students and even where computer is accessible, they are
not able to best utilize computers for lack of regular electricity.
2. We find purchase of educational solution is influenced by people beyond the actual user.
Student: The actual user looks forward for cool features and also influenced by his classmates
what he wants. It is quite possible that the student might not be able to purchase the
solution/tablet he would prefer due to other users.
Parent: The parent purchase power has major influence on the price that can be paid for
tablet/solution. In addition, the parent would like to understand how the solution provide the
children with better growth opportunities.
Educator (school and teacher): They play a major factor to adopt the solution and also influence
the capabilities needed on the tablet and applications needed. Parents look at educator to help
them take a right decision to select the tablet to purchase.
Any digital solution to help the educational ecosystem should keep in mind the following.
1. The solution should be available on the devices even at times when there is no internet
connectivity on the device. Internet connectivity and power shortage are common challenges
faced both in cities and rural areas of India.
2. The solution should enable download and upload of short amount of content or differential
content using internet or Wi-Fi access. It would nice that tablets and solution make use of
external storage to load bulk educational content at the start of the course.
3. Parents and teachers like to control and monitor usage pattern of the tablet by the student. The
Indian parents would prefer to use all tablet features themselves as the student tablet would
become more of a family tablet.
4. The teacher needs to be trained to make use of technical solutions to impart education. The
teachers are not computer savvy as in USA.
5. The teacher needs content creation tools that are elegant and easy to use. Solutions to build
content with chemistry and mathematics symbols need proprietary software.
6. There has been no formal way of interaction or engagement between students and teachers,
between teachers and between students. Teachers have to build the new habit of
communication using technology.
7. Teachers need training and tools to help creation of high quality audio and video lessons in easy
and affordable manner. Teachers still visit studio to record audio lessons.
Today the student access to internet on their devices (in addition to family) falls under four segments.
Students with family PC or laptop and own mobile and continuous internet (major cities).
Student with family PC(internet), mobile phone and no Wi-Fi access (small towns)
Students with mobile phone and has access to Wi-Fi at educational institution. This is common
in engineering colleges in cities and in university campus
Students with mobile phone and do not access internet.
Educational solution should be made available to learners as whole solution or part of the solution.
1. PC or laptop
2. Tablet/Smart phones with SD card and Wi-Fi capability: This is for students who attend colleges
or study centers with Wi-Fi enabled.
3. Tablet/Smart phones with SD card and GPRS capability: This is for students who attend distance
learning programs and for corporate training.
3. Use Cases for teacher in digital solution
The teacher shall be able to perform mostly all the read-only tasks expected from the teacher on the
tablet. There is a good set of features to have application targeted at teacher.
Deliver engaging lectures (Use handwriting on electronic
whiteboards to reinforce key points )
Lectures
Grading an Assessments
View student exam attempts in mcq format
Review and grade papers , project reports and written exams
Distribution of learning
content
View syllabus(static with ability to update)
Send quick on demand assessments/Short notes
View static contents present in reader of the student
View exams(through wireless or SD card) that is delivered to student
and answers/solutions
Scheduling/Calendar
Plan the schedule for themselves across year and vacations.
Use Cases for Student in digital solution
Taking Notes
Quick notes on tablets
way to search through them
Way to share them as blogs
Record Lectures
Record short lectures and discussions to reinforce learning
Personalize learning
highlight text in reading material
skip pages, flip to paragraphs,
copy and paste and make notes while studying
Randomize question selection for assessments
Search Contents
Search for all contents in tablets
Search in specific category
Save specific search contents as favourites
An time anywhere
learning
Receive updates or submit even during a bus journey
Productivity tools
Sync with course schedules and updates, college events
Ability to set remainders and notifications
Force self-exploration of contents
When needed most
When learning for the first time
When wanting to learn more
When trying to remember information
When something goes wrong
Spaced learning
Helps to move learning from short-term to long-term
Helps to get better understanding across time.
Engaged learning
5 or 10 minutes of media is more realistic for mobile learning
Support of silent option when being in public.
4. Use Case for Parents in Digital Solution
Granular Control
Track student and
school
Restrict downloads and browsing to sites – Firewall for children- to
make sure it is used mainly for school work
Ability to have free access to all aspects of tablet in parent login
Allow games for a specific time of the day only and monitoring tablet
usage
Review students marks
Get updates , reports and feedback from teacher
5. Educational WorkFlow
Education can be envisioned as on-going circular work flow model and some of the major stages in work
flow model are as follows. There is loop feedback mechanism to model which enables the work flow
model to mature itself.
Generating
Activities and tasks to collect or create information, and prepare and structure it
Transforming
Processes using human interactions and technology to produce information in
forms suited to making it distribution-ready
Managing
Organizing, structuring, aggregating, storing, versioning, analyzing, and preparing
information for its various intended uses
Transferring
Downloading the content from platform to device through a variety of delivery
systems and communication infrastructures
Using Content
Organizing contents for usage in mobile application and presenting information in
forms that meet the audience needs
Adding Value
mixing/remixing, reusing/repurposing existing content to enable consumers to
extract the value and increase the worth of information
Evaluating
Analyzing, tracking, measuring, quantifying, and qualifying information to
understand the usage to determine outcomes of uses
6. The solution for educational ecosystem involves building technical and non-technical components or
process to handle the following. The non-technical components include
Prepare educator to come on Board
Create Content
Prepare educator to come on Board
An educator might have already published text contents on e-learning space or might have no exposure
to e-learning space. It is more interesting to find good teachers in India who have online presence in
terms of good quality audio and video. This might also involve identifying the right device needed for
seamless execution of the solution and the solution to provide best learning experience for learners
based on the content available. In principle, we need to work with educator on the following
1. Define the goal to achieve from the learning solution and identify the gaps
2. Identify and agree on content sources and subject
3. Identify technologies and tablets needed ( includes to create content)
4. Identify the gap in existing digital contents.
5. Identify the training for teachers
6. Give oversight of cost of implementation and future potential
7. How to measure impact? How to make students and community accept?
Create Content:
This involves having understanding of the different devices supported for students of the customer. This
also involves better understanding of the challenges to develop learning content suitable to work on
multiple devices and be aware of the impact of great myths with respect to content
1. A great teacher in classroom would be able to convert classroom training to great videos and
audios in first attempt.
2. All contents are available for e-learning and they can be used with no additional work for tablets
and smart phones.
3. A great authoring tool is all you need to create a great learning media content
4. If users do not complete media based learning, the media content might be bad. It might be
learners want to learn what they need a short time and not sit through an entire course.
5. Learning need to be fun and content creation would be fun. To make actual learning fun, he
amount of work to create content is not fun.
In addition, any education or learning solution in India should support vernacular languages. To make
this happen, the content needs to be available in Indian vernacular languages in digital format and the
recommended tablet support for multiple languages.
Here, we observe that multiple language support is not available on all tablets and phones and creates
bottle necks for technology adoption in the Indian environment.
7. Some pointers to keep in mind during content creation are
Be selective about your content.
Break all content into small chunks to develop.
Short audio or video content can be more powerful than pages of text content.
Simplify graphics.
The technical components includes mobile components and web components. Both web and mobile
components integrate seamlessly to offer rich experience of the solution consuming content on smart
phones, tablets, PC and TV. The web solution involves the following
Create Content:
Package and Deliver Content
Collect Results and Feedback
Multi-tenant model at the server
Integrate with existing LMS and other SCORM compliant systems
Create Content: The web solution enables the user to upload data in structured fashion to the server.
The content can be one of the following types.
Text Lessons: HTML contents that combine to provide a reader experience.
Assessments: multiple choice questions and answers can be added to build quizzes and other
Media: Audio and Video of certain formats and specific resolutions can be uploaded
Short Notes: Teacher send short notes across to students on demand.
The solution should allow usage of chemistry and mathematical symbols. It should be possible to have
images together with text contents.
Package and Deliver Content: The web solution consists of publish process
Mark content preparation and creation complete and indicate readiness for packaging
Package contents. This also includes packing contents for devices with various screen factors. As
part of the packaging process the content is marked for its validity and is encrypted to offer
content protection.
Mark the packaged content available for download/delivery/consumption across multiple
devices over the internet.
Remove content that are expired validity dates or extend the validity of the content for further
specified period.
One can also explore other non-internet based distribution solution. The contents can be provided on
preloaded SD cards of the contents can be preloaded on the device and offered as bundled solution. We
also need to make sure that contents are delivered and used only by authorized users.
Collect and Analyse Results: The mobile application send results and submit feedback to the web
solution and helps the educator to measure the impact of the learning solution.
Though we recommend that the mobile application sends the information to central learning solution,
the information can be tracked offline with information stored on the mobile and then sync with LMS.
8. Our go-to-market strategy
Customer segments
B2B customers:
Universities and colleges :
◦
Privately run universities and colleges
◦
Premium distance education programs of universities and colleges
◦ MBA and premier programs of universities and colleges
Schools : Towards maximising our reach in the K12 school segment, we will seek alliances with
organisations with significant school networks such as publishing houses like Scholastic; school
related programs such as Abacus,Kumon, etc.
Education companies such as Pearsons/ Edurite, Educomp, Everonn, NIIT, etc.
Test preparation companies for various entrance tests
Well established Individual tutors with large student bases
Corporates for internal corporate training.
For language learning
English language promotion bodies such as British Council
Language teaching institutes
NGOs involved in teach English
Vocational skill development companies