Edtech is Bridging the Gap in Content Mobilisation The future of the entire education industry lies in personalising learning for every child and this can be achieved with edtech, using advanced technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning
By Zishaan Hayath •
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One of the biggest challenges in India is making high-quality education easily accessible to all children. India currently has over 250 million children of school-going age, and they're spread out across a very vast area. State of the art schools is restricted to certain urban areas. Even after grade 12, the number of government institutes offering high-quality education at an affordable cost is limited. This increases the competition for cracking entrance exams and scoring high enough to make it into these premier institutes.
For example, in 2018, over 15 lakh students registered for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). These students fought it out for the 66000 seats available for MBBS courses, in government and private colleges combined.
Competent Environment
Since the environment is so competitive, parents have no option but to turn towards coaching classes in the hope to give their children an extra edge. However, even though coaching classes were highly regarded a decade ago, parents are now more aware of their disadvantages. Coaching classes pack large batches of students in a single class. This prevents teachers from personalising learning to match every student's individual strengths and weaknesses. They use a blanket, one-size-fits-all approach that hampers a student's learning curve, and demotivates those who struggle to grasp concepts using conventional methods.
Over the last few years, parents had been looking for better learning solutions for their children. They were looking for something that crossed geographic boundaries, and personalised learning for their child. This very need gap is now filled by edtech apps. With the ability to customise their syllabus, students can learn what they want, wherever they want. They can watch thousands of bite-sized, high-quality video lectures at the click of a button, and start learning better. In recent times, learning content has now become easily accessible, but the edtech industry is still very young and has a long way to go.
The Future
The future of the entire education industry lies in personalising learning for every child. This can be achieved with edtech, using advanced technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning. In fact, apps offer adaptive practice - where students solve practice questions designed for their individual learning needs. They start off at a level that they're comfortable with, and using AI and ML, the difficulty of questions is increased at a pace that the student is comfortable with.
Edtech apps are also making strides when it comes to solving student doubts. Students had to wait for days before their tutor can answer their questions. Live Doubts is a chat app where students can ask their questions and get them solved instantly, 24x7. This app banks on a vast community of experts and an AI-powered bot that "learns" with every doubt answered by the experts, and answers similar questions itself. This goes a long way in boosting the learning journey for each child.
With the internet becoming more easily available with each passing day, edtech apps are moving closer to solving the problem of content mobilisation. However, the need of the hour has now progressed from the accessibility of passive content like video lectures to adaptive, personalised learning that significantly helps a student learn better. When it comes to personalisation, the edtech industry still has a wide range of student problems to solve.
