Presenters: Gowri Mahesh & Sethuraman

Moderator: Jibu Elias

Education in India: What Gives?

India has the distinction of running among the largest educational systems in the world – with nearly 25 crore students. The government passed the Right to Education Act in 2009 making education free and compulsory for children between the ages of 6 and 14. But the reality at the ground level is starkly different. According to the Annual Status of Education Report 2019, only sixteen per cent of children in Class 1 in 26 surveyed rural districts can read the text at the prescribed level. Forty per cent of students cannot recognize letters. The report states that the lack of age-appropriate skills in the early years is alarming, and this can impact the entire education supply chain in India. A massive shortage of qualified, trained teachers (about 26 million worldwide) is also a significant challenge in our school education system. According to DISE data, 18 per cent teachers in India, in 2016-17, had no professional qualification in teaching.

This is a serious issue that requires immediate intervention. But much like doctors, teachers too require training and assistance to achieve a level of competence and be considered able enough to teach. This is a fairly time-consuming process, riddled with competitive exams and the like.

Can AI Fix This Issue?

Yes, it can and some entrepreneuers have already started showing the way how. Sethuraman is the cofounder of an AI-based Ed-tech organization called Jungroo Learning with a vision to leverage technology to cater to the unique learning needs of each and every individual child. Gowri Mahesh is the cofounder and chief operations officer at Learning Matters, another online edu-tech platform that focuses on using AI for scalable, low cost teaching solutions mainly by keeping the teacher at the center of the entire learning process. By equipping teachers with assistive digital & non digital tools, Learning Matters aims to help teachers help students better.

AI in education is a must today. It has become evident that while the quality of education is high, learning outomes are comparatively low in India. One of the reasons me and the team at Learning Matters wanted to start this company stemmed from the desire to bring about personalized education. We recognize that in a class of 40-something kids, some need more help on certain subjects and this is a fairly standard observation, Moreover, a poor teacher-student ratio in India doesn’t help. This is where AI can help, explains Gowri.

Sethuraman adds by declaring how AI cannot be the silver bullet to challenges being seen in education today. But specific problems can be identified and addressed using AI, and this impacts the overall outcome gradually. As a teacher, Sethuraman didn’t know what my kids knew and what didn’t. I would teach the class, probably take a test to assess their level of understanding and grade all the papers manually. Then I would load their results on an Excel sheet to do a comparison of their competency levels. But it crossed my mind many times this really didn’t give me an accurate picture of how well a child understood a math or a science problem. This is why me and my cofounder decided to focus our technical knowledge into building an edtech platform that would use AI to map out exactly how well a child understood what was being taught in class, allowing us to better comprehend his best path to learning.

Using Tech To Address The Gaps

Gowri then spoke about how Learning Matters was harnessing voice-based assistive platforms, NLP and Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech to help teachers teach better. TARA, the voice based AI for education encourages learning by listening, can repeat lessons, converse and provide the most accurate feedback, and can function with a range of learning modules in it. “Only 1-2% of schools in India can be considered top of the pyramid, and are consistent with producing results based on competency levels of students. For the rest of the 98%, it is a struggle. So we decided to approach the problem from the point of view of a teacher – TARA is an assistive platform for teachers and requires no training. It can be placed in a classroom and can guide the teachers in their techniques and understanding the competency profile of their students.”

TARA is a handy learning tool for over 1000 students in science and English, and the team is now working on adding competencies for Math as well, said Gowri.

In the case of Jungroo Learning, Sethu compared the learning process of a student to that of giving directions. Say you want to travel to New Delhi from Bangalore – the most optimal route from start to end would be to either take a cab or a bus to the airport, take a flight, then another cab or bus to your destination. But the routes of learning to arrive at a concept are not this clear and defined in the minds of many children, realized Sethu. And this is what he wanted to replicate using AI. “We have artificially created systems of grades in India, which often fail to provide an accurate assessment of a child’s learning curve. A child in Std 1 is taught some basic concepts, which he has to master to be able to progress to Std 2, where he learns some more and the collective knowledge of the past two grades will allow him to thrive in Std 3, and so on. But in crowded classrooms, it is impossible for one or few teachers to accurately size up how each child is faring. Jungroo creates AI-based adaptive assessment to find out what they know and what they don’t. If they are failing or lagging in one area, it allows the child to practice further and improve his competence in that area, so he can be on par with the rest of his class, but in his own time. Our platform can do multi-level assessment of students in just 15 mins

Gowri adds how NLP provides the most accurate response to the learner. Voice technology is core to Learning Matters, as they rely on Alexa and Google for the TTS and STT conversions. This tech can also be scaled with ease, she adds, with the entire solution suite available on the cloud.

Impact:

By assessing every student at their respective levels of comprehension, it allows for more personalization and better results at the end of the academic year. If they continue to get assessed without being gauged on what they truly know, they lose interest and incentive to learn. If they are guided at every step, it makes the learning process more engaging and productive, says Sethuraman.

Gowri adds that it is important to keep in mind that adoption on a largescale in a country like India is a challenge as legacy systems in education cannot be removed overnight. The ideal way to make an impact would be to complement existing systems.