In 2017, over 1 crore students appeared for class 12 exams. These students are expected to grow up to be successful doctors, engineers, lawyers, or chartered accountants. In fact, right from school, they have faced relentless pressure to shine in their exams and secure a seat in ivy league colleges. However, a very small number of these students have had access to a quality education, knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, modern infrastructure, and up to date reference material.
Over the last decade, technology has seen unprecedented growth. Apart from social media apps, better mobile phone cameras, faster laptops, technology has solved problems that seemed unsolvable just a few years ago. One of these problems is providing access to high quality, personalised education to every student in India.
Over the last 5 years, edtech apps have been harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, and Natural Language Processing to completely revolutionise education. Here is how they do it:
1. Personalised learning and feedback:
We believe that every child is unique, and has a unique set of learning needs. If these needs are addressed, the child’s learning process sees a sharp, positive growth. However, a classroom teacher cannot teach a class of 60 in 60 different ways.
Advanced technology can be used to adjust the pace of learning content to suit the learning speed of individual students. Due to this, students will neither get bored by slow teaching nor will they play catch up with a fast-paced lecture.
Moreover, instead of simply awarding a grade, it can also be used to provide in-depth, insightful feedback to students at an individual level. It can provide a subject wise strength and weakness analysis, along with highlighting topics where they have been going wrong more often than others. It can also show classmates where they stand amongst their peers.
With enough time, it is capable of providing qualitative feedback for more complex answering formats like essays, long answers, and opinion articles. This will provide a big boost to their overall learning curve.
2. Adaptive learning paths:
Advanced technology can observe the learning pattern through the app and test the behaviour of every student. Through this data, it can gauge concepts that a student finds difficult or easy. It can use this data and various insights to restructure the learning direction based on the abilities of a student. It can create unique learning paths customised for every child.
This technology will also be capable of creating personalised improvement approaches to help students plan for competitive exams. It can personalise learning across any and every age group, IQ, and interest. Due to this, children will always learn in a format created for them, instead of trying to fit their learning technique into a predefined box.
3. 24*7 support to students:
Natural language processing (NLP) combined with optical character recognition (OCR) among other algorithms can solve any and every doubt raised by a student instantly, round the clock.
All a student has to do is click a photo of the doubt and send to a chat on the doubts app or helpline. The bot will then scan through millions of data points to either give an exact solution and explanation to the student, or that of a similar question.
The advantage of having such a bot is that it is steadily developing. It will understand and collect more information with every doubt and query uploaded by its students. This reduces the dependency of the availability of expert tutors. Advanced technology can provide reliable and precise answers in just a few seconds at any point in time.
Technology is set to dominate the way education is addressed. With its team of engineers and entrepreneurs, India can become a leading powerhouse in this field. It can use technology to ensure that within a very short span of time, high-quality education is available for any and every child in the country.
