How Technology Is Bringing Quality

Pratik Pradhan wanted to become a doctor. For that, he had to clear an all-India examination that is attempted by more than 600,000 aspirants every year.

Solution? Visit the city of Kota in Rajasthan and enroll in one of the several institutes that sell dreamsPratik’s story is not uncommon. The education market in India is thriving and millions of students like him go through the same process each year, in an attempt to get into India’s top educational institutions.

But as technology has made its way into making the world smaller, education too has begun to take note. The online education market is expected to grow to $1.96 billion by 2021, a 52 per cent compounded annual growth from 2016, according to a 2017 report published by Google and research firm KPMG.

Fueling this growth are start-ups that are leveraging technology to take education straight to the homes of students. The likes of Byju’s, Unacademy, Toppr and GradeUp have come up with massive repositories of online content in recent years, trying to bridge this gap.Speaking to Entrepreneur India, Gaurav Munjal, founder and chief executive officer of Unacademy, said one of the fundamental ways in which technology was transforming education was by bringing learners very high-quality educational content, something that would not be possible traditionally.

“For example, there are students sitting out of villages who are watching classes of some of the best teachers in the country sitting out of Kota, and that's powerful because earlier it was not possible,” said Munjal

Children learn better when learning is personalised for their academic needs, according to Hayath.

“This is impossible to achieve in a traditional classroom set up, and that’s where digital classrooms come in,” he added.

It helps that teachers are more accessible in tech-enabled classrooms, and provide undivided attention, said Divyanshi Raturi, a 17-year-old student based in Pune. Raturi has used Byju’s for three years.

“The level two is building a personalized experience for every child,” Sharma said.

That's where artificial intelligence and machine learning is playing a massive role, he added.

“At a granular level...according to what you're watching, you will get recommendations and then the whole adaptive learning platform where you can participate in these tests and you will get...to know where you stand,” said Unacademy’s Munjal.

There are algorithms in place on Unacademy’s platform that help it solve small but significant problems. If a teacher is not speaking properly or their voice modulation is not correct, the algorithm can send them a notification about the same, he saidWhen Toppr noticed a constant increase in the number of students using this, the team developed a smart bot. This bot scans through the student's question and checks the database for similar questions in the past,” said Hayath.

Over 25 per cent of all student doubts on Toppr’s platform today are solved using this bot, he said.

Sharma of Byju’s believes content is fundamentally getting better as the computational power of mobile devices continues to improve drastically.