How technology is set to transform

Pakistan's fragmented education

system



Pakistan has no strategy for technology in the classroom, but entrepreneurs and nonprofits are braving the odds in the sector

Students in a computer studies class at school in Lahore , Pakistan . Photograph: David Gee 5/Alamy

In 2012, engineer Raghav Gajula moved to an east Delhi slum to work as a teacher at a private school for low-income families. Most of his students’ parents are labourers in local factories but have paid 300 Indian rupees a month, about £3, for their kids to attend a school with busy staff and no computer resources. Gajula, who found the teaching position through a Teach For India fellowship, spotted an opportunity. He lent the kids his laptop and started setting up mentoring sessions for them with his friends, via Skype.
Many of the slum kids come from the Bhagwanpur Khera neighborhood where one of the main landmarks is a toxic sewage drain. Yet Gajula's idea meant they were soon scheduling their own Skype sessions with their mentors, and talking about their ambitions in the arts and sports. Gajula now works with two activists on setting up a local after-school centre with the aim of expanding the mentoring programme. They have 25 students and five donated laptops, though they aren’t sure how the nonprofit centre is going to survive financially.
Gajula’s innovation could be transformative for India's fragmented education system, but there is no overarching strategy for how to incorporate these kinds of projects into the sprawling Indian school system. According to government estimates, there are about 254 million pupils in primary and secondary schools both in the private and public sector, but there’s no overall technology policy for schools. Internet penetration is around 12%, and average connection speeds are slow.
Schools aren't using equipment
Recognising the increasing importance of technology in education and employment, the Indian government has a scheme that grants every public school district, regardless of the number of schools it contains, of Rs. 5m [£49,700] every year to invest in educational technology. Districts have to submit a proposal in order to be granted the funds. The government estimates that 22% of primary schools have a computer, but the reality is that many schools aren't using the equipment they have.
“Of the schools I visited, maybe 10% of the computers were working,” says Swati Sahni, a consultant who worked for the Indian government on education from 2010 to 2012. Five of Gajula’s students at a local government school know their school has a computer centre, but none of them can remember using it.
In India's booming private education sector, technology is being adopted much more quickly. As many as 400 educational technology firms have launched in the past 10 years, yet the quality and longevity of their products is far from uniform.
In August 2013, India’s most prominent educational technology company, Educomp Solutions, laid off 3,500 workers. Educomp had done a great job selling digital learning materials and a multimedia whiteboard to as many as 14,500 schools, according to a company brochure. But some schools were unsure what to do with the technology, and critics say the firm failed to train teachers to use the equipment. Some cancelled orders, and in other schools the equipment went unused, according to an investigation by Forbes India. The company’s value dropped by nearly two-thirds between May 2013 and April 2014.
Personalised educational content
“Now, the customer is very sceptical,” says Neil D’Souza, founder and CEO of Zaya Learning Labs, a three-year-old ed tech company based in Mumbai. “You have many schools which have bought solutions or been donated solutions which don’t add any value to their learning.” Zaya has 15 in-school learning labs, where students share tablets and computers that stream personalised educational content.
Companies has previously focused on delivering services to India's high-end private schools, says D’Souza, where teachers were more technologically literate and where the revenue model was proven. But Zaya focuses on the growing number of low-income private schools, where many teachers aren’t regular technology users. “The teacher is the key person to deliver,” says D’Souza, who says Zaya offers teaching assistants and spends hours on training.
But Zaya faces challenges when it comes to profits. Affordable private schools charge fees between Rs. 300 and 1,500 [£3-£15] per student per month. In order for an ed tech solution to be viable in this space, it should ideally be priced at less than Rs. 50 [50p] per student per month, says Shabnam Aggarwal, founder of the ed tech advisory Perspectful. She says that’s a very difficult target for most companies to meet.
Educational philanthropies and nonprofits may be able to provide a bridge, finding ways to make technology interventions affordable and scalable for lower-income students. One such philanthropy is the Central Square Foundation (CSF). It has been developing a library of free and open-source educational content in Indian languages, something that founder and CEO Ashish Dhawan says private companies have little incentive to do.
A product for the low-income segment
A former private equity investor, Dhawan says India is now at an inflection point with educational technology, as internet and hardware penetration are set to explode in the next few years. Inspired by this belief, CSF has also invested money and time in trying to find revenue models for ed tech in the low-income space. “We thought: why don’t we give a grant to create a product for the low-income segment?” says Dhawan.
A year and a half ago, CSF tied up with MindSpark, a company that already provides adaptive learning tools in elite private schools, to test the company’s software on low-income and government school students. The students come to the centres for an hour a day, six days a week, to learn Hindi, maths and English. They spend half their time working with a personalised adaptive computer program, and half working with a teacher.
When the pilot started, the students were about two years behind their age group, says Dhawan. Although they’ve now improved, it’s still a struggle to get them to the point where they’ll perform well on tests. Dropouts are common and the pilot still hasn’t proven a revenue model, Dhawan says. The parents, who pay 200 to 250 [£2-£2.50] hard-earned rupees a month for the program, want results in grades, viewing education as a path out of a life of hard manual labour for their children.
But for the students, technology offers a window on a different world. The students in Gajula’s class type messages and paint pictures, dreaming of the day they will start using the internet. Twelve-year-old Parsunath Sahoo describes his father's long days working in a factory that makes pots and pans, but Parsunath dreams of joining the police. “On the internet, you can do anything,” he says.
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The Indian educational landscape is fast-changing with technology gripping the nation in an unprecedented fashion. A lifestyle comparison between current times and half a decade ago shows us how the general scheme of things has metamorphosed. Today, as we go on shopping sprees without visiting the nearest mall, have a face-to-face video conversation with a distant friend or even complete bank transactions without ever visiting a branch, we realise that we have undoubtedly travelled a great distance into the realm of technology. The education sector has not remained untouched by this development.
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An ultra-modern mixture of education and technology is also coming to the surface.
Academic Challenges Faced By India

Education in India still exhibits significant regional disparities. Observations show us that a majority of Indian educators employ traditional teaching techniques which have, by far and large, failed to meet student requirements; especially in the modern landscape. Despite this evident drawback, the status quo is further affected by the number of teachers allocated to students. The ideal Pupil-Teacher Ratio for schools is 1:30 for primary and 1:35 for upper primary sections.
In reality though, this number is skewed to 1:65 or even 1:70. Not only does this decrease a teacher’s capability to focus individually on students, it also significantly deters a student’s academic progression. Every student has a unique set of requirements. One, who is good with retention, might need a teacher’s help to better their analytical skills; while another, who understand topics easily, might need constant revision.
A student might even require a specific teaching pattern to understand and retain a specific concept better. The sad reality, is that meeting individual student requirements – within a class of even 30 students – is nearly impossible. In addition, every student has to follow the average classroom velocity – which differs considerably from the individual learning capacities of the highest and lowest scoring student. Most regions are also affected by the inconsistent quality of teachers deployed. Students often have to travel a great distance to acquire quality education.
This not only exhausts them considerably, but also poses a security concern for their parents. Students worst affected by this problem, are those living in remote regions. Unlike their urban counterparts, they have access to neither decent schools nor state-of-the-art learning pedagogies. Acquiring the desired study material is also a big challenge in these regions.
Changing The Academic Landscape
To address these problems, new-age digital platforms are using technology to enhance the academic landscape in our country. By leveraging evolved multimedia formats, these platforms are allowing students to grasp academic concepts better.


The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence gives them the ability to adopt a personalised approach that considers individual unique learning patterns to further enhance a student’s learning experience. This is done with clinical precision so that students don’t have to mandatorily follow the average classroom velocity and can instead learn concepts at speeds they’re most comfortable with.
Digital platforms also offer better insights into the academic progress of a student. Their proprietary algorithms are often capable of analysing student-generated data to precisely evaluate individual skillsets and academic weaknesses. They then make the best use of their skills while also extending a superlative strategy to counter their limitations.
This gives students an ideal learning environment which meets their specific needs and allows them to achieve the most favourable results. By leveraging technology, adaptive practise sessions assess students’ strengths and weaknesses, for each particular topic, to give them an efficient way to progress in their academics. Another aspect that students benefit from, is the ability of digital platforms to provide consistent and good quality content anytime, anywhere. These platforms also guarantee the availability of academic experts for doubt resolutions throughout the day. This ensures that a student’s preparations are never held back at any point in time.


The availability of educational content on-the-go also saves students from lagging behind the average academic pace they need to follow, even when travelling. All these advantages are bettering the prospects of students across the country. Edtech platforms are actively making a qualitative and quantitative difference to education in India. They are unlocking advanced learning methodologies for students, across regions, in the comfort of their homes.
When plugged in with regular classroom courses, such platforms can greatly enhance a student’s performance. With the constant evolution of technology, a problem that has long since plagued independent India for far too long is being alleviated. The emergence of edtech platforms in the Indian landscape is eliminating barriers to quality education in favour of a brighter, more learned future.
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Note: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views held by Inc42, its creators or employees. Inc42 is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by guest bloggers.


AuthorImportance of Computer Education in Pakistan
January 23, 2013
Here in this essay we try to put some light over Importance of Computer Education in Pakistan. Computer education is always considered as the essential part in the run for success and growth. In the modern era when the usage of technology is getting more and more prominent and people and organizations are getting more dependent on this technology of computers, has even enhanced its significance. In the developing country like Pakistan the computer education carries immense significance and importance. The organizations and the businesses in Pakistan have shifted from manual work to the work on systems which have reduced the need of the excessive workforce but at the same time have increased the demand of skillful labor as far as the computer education is considered.
 Computer Education in Pakistan
Computer education and the education in IT is very needful in Pakistan, in the past one or two decades almost each and every organization has developed its own operating IT department which monitors the usage of the computers and its applications with interconnected as well as externally connected operation. This department consists of people who are trained and are having the educational background of computer information and are well aware of the process and operations of computers in all the forms, so there is always a need and deficiency of such people who are highly trained in computer education which ultimately provides them the best opportunity for a better job and career as compared to the other professions.
This could be the strongest motivating point in convincing the students to get involved and indulged in the computer education as by doing this very qualification they might be able to conquer attractive jobs and can establish their careers. People having the computer education are being hired immediately and are even given handsome packages just because of their worth and their need in all the organizations no matter of what nature they are; they are dependent on the person having the knowledge regarding the computer usage and its applications.
So in the modern era the people having the computer education are acknowledging and appraised so this should encourage the youth of not only Pakistan but of the entire world to get themselves inculcated in the vast fields of computer education all over the globe. In Pakistan it is more significant because still Pakistan is a growing nation and it is not long before when the organizations in the country started to shift from manual work to the computer based activities so they are more in need of such skilled and computer education qualified students to assist them and to carry out the activities concerning this modern technology.