The days of students lugging heavy bags to school are passé. In fact, in a couple of years, a good number of students in the country could be carrying a much smaller parcel to school. The prime ingredient of that parcel is likely to be a tablet computer.
We have come a long way from the days when a projector or a desktop PC was the only IT equipment residing within a school’s premises. Education was considered to be a field that had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with teachers and books.
The advent of the Internet and the notions of interactive learning that it led to have begun altering these perceptions. As a result, India is brimming with opportunity for the use of ICT in education.The market for digital classrooms was estimated at Rs 3,000 crores in 2011 and is expected to grow at over 25% this year. The Indian education sector is amongst the fastest growing in the world. There are close to 15 lakh government schools and there are a lakh private school in the country. Of this, only 7-10% of the private schools have tapped the potential of multimedia classroom teaching. On the other hand, in the government sector, ICT has hardly made any inroads into schools.
Abhinav Dhar, Director K12, Educomp Solutions, remarked, “The overall education market’s potential can be gauged from the fact that India has over 550 million people below the age of 25. According to census figures, over 32% of the country’s 1.1 billion population is in the age group of 0-14. The number of people needing primary and secondary education alone exceeds the entire population of the USA.”
Little wonder then that the education vendors are placing their bets on India. Right from backoffice applications, to content for digital classrooms, to devices for students, there is no area that is being left untapped. The market is flooded with products and solutions and there’s choice aplenty for schools that are looking to embrace technology. What is lacking is strategic intervention and a concrete roadmap.
Scattered opportunity
Although the market is huge, education as a vertical is yet to go whole hog when it comes to utilizing technology. While the private schools have started opting for connected classrooms, the 90:10 (almost) ratio of government to private schools means that a large part of the market is mostly untapped.
In response to this burgeoning opportunity, global vendors specializing in the field of education and delivering ICT solutions for it such as Smart Technologies have entered the market while the existing players have been aggressive about revving up their portfolios.
The numbers also reveal some impressive growth in this segment, though the growth is on a rather small base. According to Adil Jehangir, Country Head- Marketing, India & South Asia, SMART Technologies, “The entire digital learning (across primary and higher education) opportunity in India for 2011 was pegged to be at $450 million. It’s expected to grow at 60-70% annually.”
Digitized classrooms are clocking in a good chunk of this growth. For instance, Educomp has established digital classrooms at over 13,000 schools spread across 560 districts in the country and that number is growing by close to 20 schools per day. Analysts expect that the digital classroom market will grow ten-fold over the course of the next five years.
Interactive whiteboards lie at the core of these digitized classrooms. A good number of schools are experimenting with smartboards in their classrooms and exploiting multimedia and video as learning mediums.The situation at government schools is quite different. Although some government schools are running pilots of digital classrooms, for the vast majority, anything beyond a vanilla computer lab is still out of reach.
At the bottom of the pyramid
So far, only the top-end private schools that are piloting digital classrooms. However, this layer hardly forms 7-10% of the overall pie. The other 90% consists of state-owned or government-aided schools. This segment is largely deploying vanilla computer labs.
What’s worse is the fact that a lot of computers in these labs are gathering dust, thanks to either lack of connectivity or paucity of electricity. Dhar said, “Today, almost every private school in the country has a computer lab but only about 6% of government schools have computer labs for their students. Currently, only 36% of the rural schools have electricity connections. Before attempting to bring technology to rural classrooms, it is essential for the government to provide the basic amenities.”
While the lack of infrastructure might be a primary cause for this lackluster show, experts believed that policy makers had to pull their socks up too.
According to Hemant Sethi, President, School Learning Solutions, NIIT, “For government schools, it is essentially a lab policy so far. Technology adoption has to be policy driven in that segment. For instance, RTE puts a huge emphasis on infrastructure. That mandate has triggered investments in government schools. PPP could also improve things in this sector.”
There are other issues plaguing government schools beyond policy issues. According to Aditya Malik, CEO, TalentEdge, “Most education projects in government schools suffer from delayed payments from various state governments and that tends to discourage vendors. Apart from that there are several entry barriers in a government school such as teachers feeling unsure about how to use ICT.”
Though the uptake so far is nothing to boast of, the government has recognized the potential of technology in education and, once the floodgates are opened, vendors could end up with their hands full. The market is already evolving with the Central government’s move to fund Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan for the ICT@Schools program with a Rs 15 lakh per district per year budget. This was announced last year. Under the government’s Technology in Education initiative, of a total 10,00,000 schools in the country, the program will cover 6,42,600 schools at the primary, upper primary and secondary levels. Every school will have a server, five PCs, printer and Internet connectivity. State governments will outsource installation and maintenance of hardware, content and training to a private party.
Malik of TalentEdge revealed that baby steps towards technology were already visible down the pyramid. “Many state governments including Gujarat (4,075 schools) ,Karnataka (1,000 schools) , Jharkhand (206 schools), Andhra Pradesh (1000 schools), Orissa (600 schools), Uttar Pradesh (251 schools) and West Bengal (1000 schools) have successfully implemented the smart school and ICT-enabled training for the majority of government run schools.”
The adoption of technology could percolate into rural schools provided that policy makers take proactive steps starting small with a computer lab and connectivity for every school.
Benching technology
Travel to smaller cities and it’s clear that infrastructure is the first and foremost among the potholes on the road to ICT education nirvana. However, there are a multitude of other challenges, right from cultural stigmas to connectivity that are relegating technology to the bench in this sector.
According to Shethia of TIS, 40% of sites visited by his company’s field force faced access issues. Some sites did have connectivity but that is often insufficient for multimedia education. “On the one hand there are connectivity issues and on the other there’s the issue of quality of bandwidth. Many technologies like the Cloud and mobility can work in schools but connectivity challenges need to be addressed first.”
The cost of technology is also a big barrier for schools that are looking to impart virtual lessons. Though the costs are often unspecified, some vendors operate on per classroom fees, while others take service charges. For instance, while Educomp charges between Rs 155 and
Rs 200 per student per month (for an average class of 40 students), Everonn charges about Rs 15,000 for one classroom. Digitizing a classroom, on the other hand can cost anywhere between Rs. 50,000-100,000. On top of this is the cost of the devices that have to be doled out to students and teachers.
Ameeta Mulla Wattal, Principal, Springdales Public School, Pusa Road, Delhi, explained that cost was the core challenge. “One of the greatest challenges is the financial crunch, which schools in India are facing. As technology evolves, devices are extremely expensive and hands on learning can only take place if students have their own computers.”
The other big barrier is the fact that schools, even private ones, are still running their back-ends using Excel sheets. In the absence of core infrastructure such as an ERP, deploying connected classroom solutions could lead to a buggy implementation.
Training educators is the other big impediment that schools are facing. Teachers are often unequipped to handle the technology assets of a classroom and that cascades into the problem of limited or no usage that many schools face after the implementation is over. Wattal of Springdales believed that, “Failure of technology in education is poor alignment between learners and teachers.” She was also of the view that traditional methods of training and development for teachers had to be covered into the deployment cycle of new technologies.
Fears of technology lying underutilized leading to slow RoI have hindered schools from going all out on the deployment of smart classes. Explained JC Jhamb, Honorary Manager, Lawrence Public School, “Technology in schools is a matter that needs to be thought over by every school taking the plunge because it involves so many parties. Schools must exercise caution and evaluate how can tech yield the right RoI while at the same time enabling new learning methods.”
Courting the Content
Content forms the bottomline of all education-related technologies. All the whiteboards and tablets in the world are toothless without the proper content. As hardware is beginning to make inroads into classes, institutions are grappling with their content needs. Experts agreed that, so far, digitized content continued to pose a conundrum for schools, though it had become freely available to higher institutions.
Players in the domain are trying to bridge this content crater. In a traditional digital classroom solution, hardware is often bundled with content and software. This content is often interactive in nature and it includes things such as quizzes and visual depictions. However, the content is often standardized and, in most cases, not in sync with either the textbook or the teaching method.
There are solutions on the horizon that aim to address issues related to the lack of suitable content in this sector. Rajlani believed that e-books that were in sync with textbooks but more interactive in nature could be one possible solution. He added that the content puzzle would be solved gradually as tablets became pervasive in schools and developers had little choice but to provide content on various screen sizes.
Schools too are innovating to evade the content trap. For instance, Springdales is creating all of its digital content in-house. “Though interactive boards have been installed across the school, we have not taken in predefined content that is offered by a variety of companies. Modules for all subjects are designed and developed by our own teachers. This method has helped them constantly upgrade their skills and stay in touch with developments and learning sites in the cyber world,” revealed Wattal.
Sethi of NIIT believed that integrating IT in a school environment entails a huge amount of change in culture as well as curriculum. “IT has to be more relevant to the curriculum in order to be holistically adopted in education. Live skills and multimedia training being embedded in digital content could also evolve into effective learning media.”
Regional language content is the other unfixed block in the content square. Most digital material that we have today is in English. Although that fits the bill for most private schools, the government schools looking at imparting vernacular skills are left scrambling for apt content.
Some players however, are working with state governments to produce content in vernacular languages. NIIT is doing some work with Gujarat and TIS and Pearson are also working with some states on this front. There are other states like Haryana that are utilizing the VSAT technology for their content needs.
The consensus appears to be that, once the content issues are resolved, digital classrooms will become more pervasive even in low end private and government schools.
One on One Future
Abhilesh Guleria, Head, Multimedia Product Group, NEC India was of the view that the future of technology in education is going to lie in interactive packaged solutions. “Students should be able to feel the content. Once interactive solutions become popular, they are going to revolutionize the way that students interact with technology in classrooms.”
Analysts believed that the future of education lay in one-to-one interaction, which implied one device per student. This device, which in all probability is going to be a tablet, is going to be loaded with relevant content, and it will actively interact with the smartboard in the classroom. Jehnagir of SMART remarked, “In the future, the trend will move towards individual devices for every student.”
Beyond the devices, or before them, schools are also expected to do some bracing up by spending on core technology that includes ERP, connectivity and projectors et al.
This proposition is fueling a lot of hopes for both the hardware and the software vendors. Players are gearing up to exploit the tremendous potential of this vertical, which is expected to grow ten-fold in terms of tech adoption by 2014.