OVER the last century, the first-order effects of increasing real GDP per capita were captured in several important dimensions of overall progress such as life expectancy, personal security, education and gender equality. Health status (as measured by life expectancy and BMI) and education (as measured by literacy and ease of access) have improved strongly in most countries. The growth in income has led to increased purchasing power which in turn has contributed to a proliferation of options for the spending customer across different value levels. A number of factors have contributed to this trend – from the evolution of stable political institutions and a convergence in international governmental cooperation to increased spending on infrastructure and capacity building.

However, it is evident that technological innovation and adoption has been the strongest enabler of this trend. Technology has created new paradigms that contribute ever-increasingly to socio-economic growth, helped birth entirely new industries from automobiles to the mobile economy, changed how governments interact with their citizens to build institutions and deliver services, and helped create private organizations that can deliver value to their customers in revolutionary new ways.

Global investments in medical research and improvements in standards of living have increased life expectancy from 35 years in 1820 to 70 years. Our industries have created jobs and driven consumption up to change the segment of our population that lives in extreme poverty from 94% in 1820 to less than 10% today. Most important, our focus on basic education has resulted in a literacy rate of 80%, up from 20% in 1820. All of these macro trends have significantly benefitted from the leverage provided by technology, and further accelerated by continuous and relentless progress on its frontiers.

 

Education in India is a blend of government run systems supplemented by a highly regulated private sector. The Indian Constitution guarantees free and compulsory education as a fundamental right to children between the ages of 6 and 14. Given its high priority, education commands a significant share of the annual budget (Rs 99,100 cr between 2005-2012) and attention in policy commitments. Policies like Operation Blackboard, the Mid-Day Meal programme, and Sarva Siksha Abhiyan have resulted in an acceleration in the rise of literacy rates – 74.04% (2011) for adults and 90.2% (2015) for the youth (between ages 15-24).

While most of the budgetary allocations have gone into the foundational requirements of an educational system – building new schools and universities, setting up governing boards, councils, and regulators, providing access to reading and writing material, teacher training, incentivizing the reduction of the gender gap in enrolment, and expanding educational opportunities to disadvantaged social groups – technology has not been a sufficient component of these efforts and thus is yet to unleash its potential as a lever in improving efficiency and delivering value at scale.

We must ideate on what an updated framework for the educational system might look like if technology were to be adopted to improve paradigms horizontally and drive rapid value creation vertically. A new framework must leverage all the existing investments and infrastructure already in place while helping us match the challenges driven by systemic trends in the country.

To project the impact that technology can have it is important to understand the trends and challenges in education today. In India, general spending on education has increased. Precipitating this increase is growth in net income, growing availability of choice in education, and an increased focus on children’s education in households. While spending on education has increased, so have the costs of education and inflation. Recent studies and data show that the inflation in education is running higher than the overall inflation rate. Inflation in the education sector is around 6.5% while overall inflation is at 4% and per capita income increase is 4%.

As a result, even with increased spending on education, many households cannot afford to enrol their children in higher quality private schools and colleges. Families are faced with the dilemma of either enrolling their children in public schools or certificate courses – which are less expensive but seemingly provide a lower quality education – or take on debt and send them to a private school, which is more expensive, in the hope of providing them a good future.

 

While there is a significant demand for quality education in India, the sector faces regulatory hurdles that choke the supply side. Education is placed in the concurrent category in the Indian Constitution, that is, both central and state governments manage regulations in education. This has led to a sprawling system of regulatory bodies starting from K-12 through higher education. The sheer number of regulatory bodies results in three unfavourable outcomes where education quality and costs are concerned. First, the unwieldy system lacks clear communication streams, creating unnecessary delays in and lengthening of students’ education. Second, the large number of regulatory bodies and their operating expenses end up as overhead costs, increasing the burden on households with school-going children as also all tax paying citizens. Matters are further complicated by there being different types of regulatory bodies – ranging from boards to societies to for-profit trusts – with different financial mandates and goals. Third, with such an extensive regulatory environment, any private enterprise attempting to open new institutions or experiment with new services and models is required to go through an intimidating series of evaluations which take years, sometimes over a decade. Such a system discourages any attempts at entering this market, making the costs of entry prohibitive and the uncertainty of going to market daunting.

 

Education costs are rising without a corresponding and uniform increase in quality. The existence of myriad regulatory bodies has resulted in obsolete curriculum and content. Emphasis is often placed on test scores at the expense of application based learning. Uncompetitive teacher wages have resulted in a dearth of qualified teachers and high student-teacher ratios. Industry friendly skills like critical thinking and basic soft skills are neglected. Links between academia and industry are weak and rely on a pull from industry rather than a push from the education system. Indian workforce readiness is among the lowest in the world and a majority of existing training infrastructure and programmes are irrelevant to industry needs.

With the rise of multinational corporations and global hiring, there is an ever-increasing demand for a highly skilled and innovative workforce. For Indians to utilize this demand, our graduates will have to be equipped with appropriate educational qualifications, certifications and skill sets in an ecosystem where technological advancement is making several jobs redundant while also creating new job roles.

 

A briefing paper on ‘FDI in Higher Education in India: Regulatory Bottlenecks and Options’ by CUTS-Centre for Competition Investment and Economic Regulation points our that, ‘At present, only 7% of young Indians (15-22 years) get any vocational training at all. This compares poorly with 96% in South Korea, 80% in Japan, 75% in Germany, 68% in the UK, and 28% and 22% in developing Mexico and Botswana.’ Future GDP growth will be based on knowledge and skill, and any segment of the population that does not get access to building skill sets will be left out of the growth momentum and get marginalized in the society.

With so many challenges, it is imperative that we turn to new frameworks of problem solving that may allow us to roll out sustainable and future-ready systemic changes at scale. An interesting way to think about the impact of technology is the following: horizontal or extensive progress takes existing things that work and scales them across different solution spaces, while vertical or intensive progress means doing new things with little precedent. Vertical progress is usually characterized as ‘disruption’, and thought leaders from Clayton Christensen to Peter Thiel have explained this in detail.

It is clear that in India we cannot have one at the expense of another. Horizontal progress requires scaling of established best practices that have shown clear transformative capabilities – such as better sanitation in schools to support female students, nutritional programmes to retain students in school, low cost educational material, scholarship programmes, and so on. This is best achieved by public spending, and better execution of such policies is the need of the hour. Rapid vertical progress would come by enabling novel technology from new ventures that can go deep into specific solutions, and that is best achieved by non-public organizations that build on top of the base of public infrastructure.

 

Education institutions must take the long view and ask the highest level questions in order to define the horizontal layers that they must invest in. These questions should help us set the right goals for the educational system and ensure we are optimizing for the most impactful transformations. How do we better understand the competencies and skills of every individual student? How can we help students set personal learning goals with more confidence? How can we help every individual student meet their personal learning goals and educational objectives more efficiently? How can we build an ecosystem so that new ventures can unleash creative and constructive new solutions for students and teachers to improve their productivity?

The most important point for institutions to internalize is that they have to get dramatically better at doing all these things, in parallel, for every student, and at scale. The only framework that allows for the execution of such thinking is a technology empowered one. A marriage of best practices, better execution, leapfrogging iterations, and adoption of new technology can serve as a powerful framework of thinking that we can apply to transform education in the country. This framework is segmented into two parts – the horizontal layers that public institutions must strengthen and open up as infrastructure for its citizens, and verticals of innovation that can leverage this infrastructure to deliver value in new and exciting ways.

 

The institutional stakeholders must collaborate and coordinate by using technology to build and release these new horizontals in education. With ambitious goals in policy packages such as Digital India, these horizontals become powerful catalysts for remarkable progress in the education system. These technology horizontals can be thought of as multiple layers in an infrastructure stack.

The access layer – improved connectivity: Install free wifi access in all schools and colleges in the country; provide a tablet to every student in every school and college in the country and enable every teacher and school administrator with a smart device. With this planned expansion of the installed base of smart and connected devices in the hands of students, teaching staff, and administrators, we can create the first universal platform for educational innovation in the world. We will be leapfrogging the ‘smart classroom’ model and launching a mobile platform that is always with the student, instead of a fixed asset low utilization model that is limited to stationary classrooms. The possibilities for technology companies and public institutions to deliver services over such an install base are infinite, and can serve as the foundation for every other layer of innovation in education.

The content layer – open and reusable content as a platform: Public institutions must invest in and establish incentives for the development of high quality educational content that is multilingual and multiformat (long form text, short form videos, multi-chapter video lectures, and so on), with a focus on accessibility for differently-abled students. They must also develop and open-source a national knowledge map and an ontology of subjects and skills. Such a taxonomy can serve as a universal graph that everyone can use to understand how subjects link to each other – from accounting and logic to machine learning and zoology. This can serve as a foundational tool for students to understand how different subjects add up to usable skills in the real world in domain areas that they want to focus on.

Such an ontology will also be critical in everything from setting learning goals for students to career counselling. An open alternative to copyright (such as creative commons) must be applied to this content so that it can be reused and remixed by anyone in any way and becomes part of a collaborative national common knowledge base.

 

Access to this content must not be bound to a specific platform that is under government control – allow for public application programming interface (API)-level access and detailed machine readable annotations such that the knowledge base truly becomes a platform for innovation and teachers become curators of content, rather than gatekeepers of knowledge. This opens up the universe of knowledge to every student on their personal tablets so that they always have access to supplementary content in a language and format that they are most comfortable with.

There has already been an encouraging push for more accessible high quality content from public institutions in the country, such as the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). These are steps in the right direction, and these institutions must aggressively expand the scope of such efforts to cover every subject area in the major syllabi in the country so that every student in every state benefits from this rapid expansion of content availability.

The services layer – identity and data abstractions: Using the Aadhaar, we must ensure that every student in every school and college is enrolled and empowered with a unique identity. All other data associated with a student’s journey throughout the educational system – from examination results to extra-curricular achievements – can be authenticated via and encapsulated with their UID, and secured with the necessary permissions.

A universal data locker must be made available to every student to store their digitized documents – from their birth certificate and immunization history to their grades, transcripts, marks cards, and certifications. Standards for recording grades, exam performance, attendance, and certifications will contribute to the reusability and machine readability of all of these different dimensions of a student’s education.

 

Giving all students a UID-linked bank account when they reach high school is another powerful enabler. This opens up the entire student base to directly receive financial incentives and subsidies, both public and private, while building a digital history of their financial activity from earlier on so that it becomes easier for them to access credit later. Everything from student loans to scholarship programmes will benefit from a richer financial history of the student population.

The combination of universal identity, digitized data, and permission-initiated access is a powerful enabler in education today. Everything from student authentication at entrance exams to daily attendance in the classroom becomes far more efficient. This also makes the data highly reusable in every aspect of the students’ lives in their future careers. We need to step forward from the age of paper photocopies, constant duplication, and manual fraud detection. Making one’s data portable and communicable through a digital life cycle is a game changer.

 

Education technology often gets misinterpreted to simply mean the delivery of static content like webcam recordings of lectures and multiple choice assessments. But with the public infrastructure horizontals detailed above, the universe of possibilities in edutech expands rapidly to allow for innovation at a much larger scale. Dozens of value propositions will start to find convergence with sustainable business models to enhance the learning experience and help match students to career opportunities in new and exciting ways. Most importantly, as the addressable slice of the education market becomes larger and simpler to access, we will see companies truly leveraging the economics of the internet and the mobile ecosystem to unleash creative solutions.

These innovation verticals can work in parallel to enhance the overall system, and the network effects of multiple solutions at work simultaneously can give rise to new sub-categories and solution spaces in education. Some verticals of immediate interest are:

Tech-enabled pedagogical models to enhance formal education: With mobile computing and network access, students and teachers will be able to engage in hybrid pedagogical models that can supplement the formal education system with new forms of content and assessment. These new models include the waves of blended learning and the flipped classroom model that are already showing improvements in student engagement and better lecture time utilization in higher education systems the world over.

Personalized and adaptive learning: This bold idea involves teachers customizing instruction to meet every student’s individual needs and interests. To do this at scale and not only in expensive private schools that can afford a high teacher to student ratio, technology will be the key lever. Technology will help teachers to set personal learning objectives for all students with their parents, adapt to the student’s progress by continuous tracking and calibration, and help find supplementary content to augment the experience. Every slice of the student’s educational journey – from kindergarten to postgraduate education – will benefit enormously from such systems.

Group learning and collaboration: Several thought leaders in education have demonstrated the benefits of group learning models. Corporate jobs are also always screening for an individual’s abilities to work within teams and collaborate on multiple tasks. While the corporate world has a plethora of communication and collaboration tools and processes – from Agile and Product Life Cycle Management frameworks to Slack and Google Docs – we have not seen the same productivity gains in the education space that is upstream to the professional world. This can be an exciting space for innovation that can change how students learn from each other to how parents and teachers communicate and work together for the benefit of the students.

Multi-format content and experiences: Educational content will also evolve aggressively to engage the learners in deeper and more impactful ways. We have seen one large wave of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that show a real hunger for quality content online, with some courses seeing enrolment above 2,50,000 a class! New formats of content will only push this trend further, and plenty of models will compete for the learners’ attention. These formats will have support for accessibility and multiple languages to engage a larger audience, and use everything from short-form discrete concept-laced videos and interactive tutorials and demonstrations to immersive simulations using augmented and virtual reality.

Improved assessments: How we evaluate each individual’s competencies and skills will also improve dramatically. Generalized multiple-choice and essay-type evaluations may continue to persist, but natural-language processing and machine evaluations will help reduce the amount of time spent manually assessing such answers. New technology will also enable built-in interfaces for solving challenges and problems into the lessons themselves, allowing for continuous practice and evaluation. These feedback loops will help students and teachers both improve the productivity of the time spent learning, and the efficacy of the practice sessions and examinations.

Recruitment: The key link between an education and a career is still ridden with manually driven hiring processes, whiteboard evaluations of technical skills, and chaotic group discussions. Hiring managers across multiple industries are clear that recruitment requirements must penetrate earlier into the educational cycle, and are already working with universities and edtech companies to enhance the pipeline of industry-ready talent. New technologies in personalized job searches, data driven career counselling, automated technical skill assessments, and data empowered candidate searches are going to change how recruitment works and this will be a very impactful vertical of innovation in the ecosystem.

Continuous/lifelong learning and training: With accelerating innovation and technology lifecycles, every career option now requires an individual to constantly stay up to date with the improvements in their domains. Education does not stop when a career starts, and a majority of public and private organizations are opening up learning and training options for their employees. The productivity gains that arise from a culture of continuous learning and micro-learning are clearly apparent, and technology is becoming an indispensable way for these organizations to engage their workforce this way. All aspects of large organizations – from HR and marketing to sales and R&D – will invest in continuous learning for their teams, and this is a massive market for disruption.

 

From a societal perspective, the scale of the challenge in education must alert us enough to make this one of the highest priorities for policy execution and innovation. With 300+ million students in the system over the next decade, if we can blend technology into a wave of transformation of the system in both the public and private sectors, the population base over which the impact will be felt will be the largest in human history.

Technology is driving entire industries to change how they create and deliver value to their users and customers. There is no question in my mind that more work being done to leverage technology to improve education will result in a better tomorrow for all of us in India.