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TEACHING’S NEW TRICKS
They could be a new hope for India’s basic education system. Armed with new ideas, these entrepreneurs are helping school teachers to teach better and also making it easier for students to learn .........Ravi Teja Sharma
FOR SOME entrepreneurs, education is a mission and transforming it a challenge worth taking on. Among them is Sridhar Rajagopalan who, along with his friends, started a non-profit school in Ahmedabad and ran it for over five years. “We realised that making a difference through a single school wasn’t enough. We wanted to reach out to a larger student population,” he says. So in 2001, the team launched Educational Initiatives (EI), which offers assessment of learning methodologies for students and schools, and develops digital adaptive learning systems for them.
Like EI, a host of other startups across India like idiscoveri, Catura Systems and uniLrn are making a difference to basic education through their unique solutions. “Since the core education environment is bound by regulation these new entrepreneurs are creating a space for themselves outside of the official system,” says Sairee Chahal, SAITA Consulting, a general management consulting firm in New Delhi. The education system in India has been under scrutiny for its teaching methods and reach. An emphasis on learning by r o t e with an evaluation system that rewards such learning, and a shortage of quality teachers has meant most students know but understand little. This, alongside the fact that literacy has been growing at a sluggish rate of 1.5% a year, according to a recent National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report. But there’s hope still. And this time it’s being driven by young entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and believe that today a business around education can also be commercially viable. No wonder the segment is evincing interest from the venture capital (VC) community. “I don’t see a VC today who is not looking at education,” says Arun Natarajan, CEO, Venture Intelligence. Though 2008 has seen only half a dozen investments in the education segment, it’s just the beginning. The best example is Tutor Vista, which has already secured three rounds of funding in the two years it has been in existence. It has managed to fill the gap in online tutoring and consequently scaled up faster than most others. Educomp, a much larger player, which works with schools to implement innovative learning models, successfully went public in 2005-06. Among the new crop of education-focused startups, EI has turned profitable as well, and is working with 2,500 English medium schools across the country. Its first product was a large-scale diagnostic exam, which tests the child and the school’s strengths and weaknesses, and then grades them on where they stand on the ability to understand. “We wanted to do something that will help students learn with understanding,” says Rajagopalan. EI’s new digital adaptive learning system called Mindspark determines the level of a student after a few initial questions and from then on sets questions a notch higher to push the student to improve. “This can be a supplement in places where getting teachers is a problem. We have already done some trials in rural areas,” he adds. Earlier this year EI secured funding from Footprint Ventures, which has investors such as NR Narayana Murthy, Jerry Rao and Gautam Thapar. While EI’s plan is to provide a substitute for quality teaching, Gurgaon-based idiscoveri has a different plan. It has developed an integrated teacher training and curriculum programme for schools, which would eventually translate into children learning better. The programme concentrates on making the teacher a more selfaware and reflective learner-practitioner. “We impart not only training to teachers but also help children understand their curriculum in a manner that enables easy understanding,” says Ashish Rajpal, co-founder, idiscoveri. Techniques include brain-storming sessions, and more practical approaches such as nature walks followed by assignments. Started by alumni of XLRI and Harvard, idiscoveri works with over 50 schools across India including the Doon School. Then there are others who use technology to make tried and tested teaching methods better. “There are many players in the online education space who are trying to redefine education by moving away from classroom education,” says Dinesh Mehta, CEO, Catura Systems. The company’s philosophy, explains Mehta, is to provide access to quality teachers and instructors for everyone, not just students from privileged schools. “Before we got funded earlier this year, we had developed in-house technology to create content, which can be used in a bandwidth-constrained market like India,” he adds. The business plan hinges on finding the “best of breed” teachers, creating content for various levels and subjects and also making them stakeholders. “Because teachers have a stake in the content they create with us, the motivation pushes them to create better content overall,” explains Mehta.
The three-year-old startup today works with teachers from some of the prominent schools in New Delhi and plans to launch its CBSE class XII content in November. With funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) in April this year, Catura has created low-cost studios to record content with teachers. The videos use the teacher’s voice only and the content is presented on a whiteboard in a standardised font. Content is put online and also given to teachers in schools for more effective teaching. “Teachers can now be better mentors for their students,” says Mehta. Their monetisation will be through students who can access content for a nominal monthly fee, per subject. The company is looking at breaking even some time next year. Mohanjit Jolly, executive director at DFJ who joined the board of Catura after the funding, sees education as a hot sector. “Personally, edutainment, using the Internet and mobile applications to make learning fun would be big in the future,” says Jolly. Ashish Gulati’s Ash Edutainment does exactly that. It addresses what he refers to as “math phobia” in children across the world. Gulati says his experiences with the subject were similar when he was a child, and now his sole objective is to help others overcome this fear. Ash Edutainment teaches math through games. “We work on building curricula and games, which will transform the way math is taught and learnt. There is an immense need for such solutions,” says Gulati, an IIM-A grad. The five-year-old company has designed Maths Fun Weeks, wherein a team of around 15 people visits schools to teach math to the students. Gulati and his team are putting together a Maths Gaming Curriculum where students will be taught the subject using games. They are also developing digital content for online gaming focused on math to be sold on subscription. In 2007-08, the turnover of the company was Rs 40 lakh. For many years education and businesses around them did not provide commercial returns that motivate a business to grow. “With the explosive growth in the Indian middle class and improvement in economic status education too has become a lucrative segment,” says DFJ’s Jolly. The idea of social networking among students is something Jolly is excited about these days.
Maybe he should take a look at uniLrn, which hosts virtual schools on the Internet. In this model, educational content for all classes is customised according to the school’s requirements and hosted on a website. “Our personnel based in the schools help students, parents, teachers and school administrators to interact online,” says Anil Sharma, director, uniLrn. With the website, students can login and interact with other teachers and students, juniors and seniors, creating a community feeling. Parents too are kept up-to-date about the student, his homework and progress through email or SMS.
In Delhi, uniLrn is working with three branches of the Heritage School. Each of these will get their websites and then the plan is to connect them with each other on a network to create a larger community. The websites will also provide online multiple-choice testing modules, which teachers can deploy. Interestingly, the schools won’t need to pay for the websites but it has to be compulsory for each student in the school to get a login, which is where the money will come from. Students will pay only for what they use (in the range of Rs 50-300 per month). “Presently, we have six schools running and we plan to scale to 25 schools by next year,” says Sharma, who hopes that uniLrn, which received funding recently, will break even by end-2009. “The core idea is to transform education. The ways might be different,” he adds.
Sridhar Rajagopalan’s Educational Initiatives offers assessment and digital adaptive learning systems for students
Anil Sharma of uniLrn is building virtual schools online to connect students, teachers and parents Ashish Rajpal’s idiscoveri trains teachers to become more self-aware, reflective and better at what they do Dinesh Mehta’s Catura Systems ensures best-of-breed teachers create content, turning them into motivated stakeholders |
