Rs 37,000 Crore Opportunity

Anay and tanmay are siblings in the Sharma household pursuing education from upscale institutions.

Preparing for his Class X board examinations next year, Anay’s classroom in a tony South Delhi school is smart — the classroom is fitted with audio visual equipment; the smart board is connected with the server (where anything that a teacher writes is stored for future reference); and additional reference material comes from a software vendor.

Tamnay’s classroom in a top-notch management school in Ahmedabad is new-age. The classroom comes equipped with a rotational three-board system (wherein a teacher can seamlessly shift to the next board after finishing on the first, without having to wipe off the content); multi-media content is projected through smartphones; and old-age speaker devices have been replaced with highly effective cordless speakers. A virtual screen on which every student, besides the teacher, can post content, is a recent addition to the classroom.

India is changing the way education is imparted in classrooms. Indeed, the smart classroom is paving the way for virtual classrooms wherein students can actively participate in the class proceedings from remote locations, or their hostel rooms.

Says Aript Goel, who runs Suncity World School in Gurgaon: “Our classrooms come fitted with the state-of-the-art infrastructure. They are wired to the local-area network. We spend 40 per cent of the IT budget on upgrading our classrooms.”

Adds Sanjay Yadav, who’s the principal of G D Goenka Public school in the capital: “Our classrooms are smart fitted with latest gadgets including computers. We have interactive blackboards. To supplement our teachers’ efforts, we have tied up with ExtraMarks, after experimenting with Educomp.”

State-of-the-art infrastructure, wired schools, virtual classrooms, 3-D learning, after-class online tutorial groups and e-learning, combine together to present today’s school students options that were not available to the earlier generation.

True, it’s the private schools that are leading the way, but some states are also doing their bit. In Gujarat, for instance, thanks to the state government, every block has one school with smart classrooms.

The national picture, however, may leave a lot to be desired.

Says T.S.R. Subramanian who headed the committee on the new education policy and travelled across the country to assess schools: “Wherever the committee saw school in rural areas, there was hardly any technology back-up of any sort”.

According to a nation-wide Annual Status of Education Report 2014, the share of government schools with computers in 2010 was 15.8 per cent. The figure improved marginally in 2014, to 19.6 per cent schools with computers.

But are things changing, especially in urban areas?

According to a recent survey undertaken by the Centre For Square Foundation that covered early adopters of instructional technology for teaching and learning, over 80 per cent of all teachers surveyed said they use computers in their schools. They also reported high use of mobile phones with 68 per cent having access to them. Smart board availability in government schools was 12 per cent, but increased to 74 per cent in high-end (high-fee) schools.

According to leading investor and veteran watcher of this space, Gopal Jain: “Less than 5 per cent of government schools have one or more smart classes in their premises”. He further adds: “Less than 10 per cent of private schools have one or more smart classes in the school. And, less than 1 per cent of private schools have 100 per cent of their classrooms as smart classes.”

Subramanian says that Digital India will be a reality in the next three to four years, and will cover over 2.5 lakh gram sabhas, “which provides an unparalleled new opportunity to introduce technology in schools”.

Mohandas Pai, who has invested in ed-tech start-ups, does a quick math and says: “There are 25 crore children in schools up to class 12. One smart classroom can teach 100 children (four classes a day, 25 children in a class). So, we need 25 lakh classrooms. If we consider Rs 1 lakh as the basic investment to make a classroom smart, we would need Rs 25,000 crore to make all our school classrooms smart”. This doesn’t factor in the need for expansion of schools.

The expenditure by the centre and states on school this year has been Rs 6,00,000 crore.

Concurring with the gist, Centre for Square Foundation’s Ashish Dhawan and Namita Dalmia say that in an ideal world, “the school system should spend 5-10 per cent of the budget on ed-tech”.

Presently, the government (centre and states) spends about 1 per cent of the overall school education budget on information and communications technology (ICT).

“Technology has had positive results in K-12 schools where teacher quality is a problem,” says Indian School of Business’s professor Deepa Mani.

So, there’s a huge potential for participation and partnership by the private sector.

Say Dhawan and Dalmia: “There are two distinct opportunities — a) selling to schools and, b) selling directly to parents and students. The business-to-consumer model could be quite promising with the growth of the Internet as has been demonstrated by Byju’s and MeritNation.”

It’s not just the smart classroom that has contributed to smart learning of the Indian student. According to a NSS survey, one out of every four students takes private tuitions with the number becoming three out of four in metros.

According to an ASSOCHAM study, the Indian private education market was $ 11 billion in 2014, and offline tuitions captured 95 per cent of the market growing at a rate of 35 per cent a year.

It’s in this space that players such as Eduwizards, Vedantu and Urban Class have made a splash.
“The new and emerging tutoring trend in India is app-based by-the-minute live online tutoring, available 24X7,” says Eduwizards’s Ashish Sirohi.

The canvas for smart and new-age classrooms has been wider in higher education in India, with greater participation from the private sector.

Real growth in this sector will come when edtech companies and other public institutions provide e-learning in regional languages. A recent NASSCOM report says that of the almost 800 million smartphones and Internet users by 2020, 70 per cent would be in rural India and a majority would be using regional languages.

Players like Unacademy, offering free quality video tutorials, are trying to replicate the popular Khan Academy model of free video tutorials here.

While massive open online courses (MOOC) and small private online courses (SPOC) do offer an option, it’s interesting to see how attempts have been made to reinvent the classroom in higher education space.

Says Bennett University chancellor Vineet Jain: “Technology is revolutionising the manner in which education is being structured and delivered.”

Says Arun Pereira, executive director, Centre for Learning and Management Practice, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, “We have technology (smartphones, tablets, or laptops) which ensures that every student is involved every time a teacher asks a question. Student responses can be displayed on the classroom screen in real time.”

He adds: “Today, we have technology that provides teachers with specific knowledge of students who have completed a homework reading or watched a video assignment, before they arrive in class. This technology enables the teacher embed questions inside a homework reading (or inside a video assignment).”

Says IIM-Bangalore’s professor P. D. Jose, chairperson, MOOCs Initiatives: “Our classrooms are state of the art with live-video conferencing facilities. This means that we can ‘virtually’ bring in management experts or business leaders from across the world into our classroom. Our faculty can also record their live sessions and make it available to students through the learning management system (LMS) used in the campus. In terms of hardware we use white boards, digital boards, and are now experimenting with light boards also.”

Adds IIM-Bangalore dean administration G. Shainesh: “Technology enables the possibility of running sessions even when the participants are physically not present.”

Around 30-40 per cent of the institute’s IT budget is spent on classrooms.

Shiv Nadar University vice-chancellor Rupamanjari Ghosh says, “Our in-house LMS (blackboard) integrates webinars, discussion forums, quizzes, wikis, quick polls and open-book exams on a single interface.”

Nirma University’s Anup Singh says that the university also uses blogs for teacher-student interactions, besides using social media tools like Twitter for educational needs.

IIT-Delhi’s M. Balakrishnan says that flipped learning and flipped classrooms are the latest rage in IITs and several campuses across the country. Pioneer in this field Jon Bergmann says he is not surprised that flipped learning (a new teaching approach) is getting popular in India, because “it’s the future of learning”.

IIM-Ahmedabad’s Anil Gupta says that Rs 10-15 lakh may have to be spent for a smart classroom in a university / institution.

If, however, one were to go by AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabuddhe’s estimates — Rs 5 lakh to make a smart classroom — a sum of Rs 12,000 crore would be needed to make at least five smart classrooms in the existing 35,000-odd colleges, and 12,000 standalone institutes. Considering that public expenditure on higher education in the country is a paltry 0.6 per cent of gross domestic product, the private sector has a big role to play.

Tanmay is lucky that he’s getting world-class education in an Indian classroom. Anay doesn’t consider that as his good fortune — he considers it as his fundamental right.

As a new generation of Indians takes to education in wired classrooms, smart learning is set to gain currency. Clearly there’s a huge window of opportunity for the private sector to expand, educate, and make money.

suman@businessworld.in, @skjsumankjha