mindIT

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mindIT

Wednesday, 12 February 2020 | Akhand Swaroop Pandit

Education in every sense is one of the essential factors on which the growth and sustainable economic development of a country depend. It enhances people's understanding of themselves and the world. By raising people's productivity and creativity, education facilitates entrepreneurship and technological advances, which further helps in securing the economic and social progress of the country.

But, while it is easier for the students in urban cities to access education through schools/colleges that are complemented by state-of-the-art infrastructure, facilities, and teachers, schools in rural areas of India struggle with necessary facilities like toilets and lack a proper teaching staff. Needless to say, this results in a reduced sense of motivation among students and becomes a significant cause of poor quality of education in rural areas.

Cracking competitive examination a distant dream for small-town and rural students: In India, admissions in a majority of prestigious colleges and selection for most of the Government jobs are decided by competitive exams like GATE, SSC JE and others. Unfortunately, only the students from big cities and financially sound background can afford coaching fees to be able to crack these exams. A significant number of aspirants in tier II and tier II cities, as well as the rural provinces, have no access to quality and affordable training to appear for such examinations to secure dream jobs that can take them ahead in life and make them capable of improving their living situations. They also lack the motivation on the back of cut-throat competition from students of metro cities preparing through the assistance of coaching centres.

Dawn of ed-tech platforms making quality education accessible to all: To battle this imminent problem, there are a handful of coaching institutes that are taking the online route to deliver high-quality learning to the underprivileged students of the country. Their motive is to facilitate every economically-backward student to live their dream and achieve something big in life through the provision of quality education at subsidised rates. The online education platforms get highly-experienced and educated faculty onboard to deliver online lectures to students from rural areas at a minimum cost, compared to offline coaching institutes. This enables the students to not only get access to the quality education they lacked but also get taught by teachers who are enthusiastic about teaching, which goes a long way in boosting their morale.

Stressing on vernacular content: While online education enhances the learning outcome of students, language poses a barrier when it comes to teaching in rural areas. Since India is home to a huge population of multilingual individuals that speak and read in different languages, other than English or Hindi, educators need to craft vernacular content to effectively cater to this segment. This reflects in the lower CAGR at which English users are expected to grow by 2021, which is only 3% as compared to 18% of the regional language users.

Understanding the magnitude of vernacular content in online learning platforms, edtech players have started rolling out fresh content in various languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Malayalam, among others, thus making learning accessible, especially to those students who fail to crack various competitive exams due to poor command in English or Hindi languages.

There are 300 million students in India and a huge chunk of residing in villages and small towns where quality learning material is not easily accessible. Considering every student is born talented, all they need is the right guidance. As per KPGM Google Report, the size of online education in India will be $1.96 billion by 2021. However, it is now the Government's responsibility to pay more attention to this area by creating a highly scalable Internet network infrastructure in rural India to avoid any hurdle in the process of delivering unmatched learning experiences to the student community in India.

The writer is Akhand Swaroop Pandit, CEO-founder,Catalyst Group

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