Akshay Saxena, an Ashoka fellow and a Harvard Business School MBA graduate, is the Co-Founder of Avanti Fellows, and member of the Bharat EdTech (BEI) Advisory Council, which aims to improve learning outcomes for one million Indian students, particularly those from low-income households, by leveraging proven EdTech solutions by 2025. 
Recipient of the Draper Richards Kaplan Fellowship and Echoing Green Fellowship in 2012, Saxena is passionate about helping build organisations that create an equitable world.
In this opinion piece, he highlights the urgent need for BEI initiatives to bridge the digital divide between different income groups. He also emphasises the importance of defining clear outcomes, reliable data collection methods, and co-creation with teachers, students, and policymakers to generate good evidence. He believes that successful adoption and impact of EdTech in India could surpass that of the rest of the world.
To know more on how collective action and innovation can bridge the digital divide and ensure equitable access to digital learning, read the full article below.
India has close to 300M school-going children. A majority of these students lost more than a year’s worth of learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. In the absence of a change from “day-to-day” classroom instruction, it is very unlikely that this learning loss will ever be recovered.
EdTech has the potential to help solve this challenge. Estimates suggest that close to 1 in 3 students are currently engaged in some form of online learning. India’s EdTech ecosystem has never been more diverse and better funded. Over $4B in venture capital flowed into EdTech in the years since the pandemic and the commercial EdTech market is projected to grow to over $1.7B by 2025 (Redseer, 2021).
Unfortunately, there is very little large-scale evidence today that shows whether or not investments in EdTech lead to meaningful learning gains. The studies that exist are small-scale and often conducted in settings very different from the typical government school in India. In the absence of this data, policymakers continue to be wary of large investments in EdTech infrastructure (smart classrooms, devices for students, internet facilities).
What outcomes matter?
When evaluating new technologies it's important to be thoughtful about what outcomes matter. The goal of an intervention may range from continuous assessment, bridging learning gaps, and mastering foundational competencies to teaching critical life skills. Students in varied settings and of different ages are also likely to learn at different paces and respond differently to new interventions. Being sharp and clear about the outcome measured is critical to generating useful evidence. For instance, we may want to measure participation rates in continuous WhatsApp-based assessments where we expect students to interact for a few minutes a week. On the other hand, we may want a more comprehensive assessment to evaluate the impact of an online live class program. In other interventions, we may want to measure increased collaboration, confidence or information-seeking behaviour.
Reliable data collection
Another key consideration is the sanctity and reliability of the data being collected. When working with 3rd party providers we need to design ways to collect data independently and reliably. This could be through independent assessments, qualitative research or other methods where the provider and evaluator of the intervention are separate. It is equally critical to make raw datasets available to researchers so that they can be validated and findings reproduced. These practices, especially when combined with external evaluations, are what separate scientific evaluations from marketing claims.
Co-creating the future of EdTech
India’s context is unique. The majority of our student population is rural. Most share mobile devices with their parents and continue to have limited internet access. For many, finding a quiet space to study at home is also a major challenge. Classroom time remains limited and most teachers are not trained to effectively incorporate EdTech into their classrooms.
It is unlikely that most existing EdTech solutions will work out of the box for this audience. Solutions will need to be iterated upon with teachers, students and policymakers over multiple years. This process will be effective only when the evidence we gather is digestible by these co-creators. Building in data collection and sharing as part of the day-to-day implementation of ed-tech is perhaps the most important of all. Teachers who can see student-level progress are more likely to provide feedback to EdTech solution providers. Students who can see their own growth are also more likely to take greater ownership of their learning. Adoption and ownership for EdTech will need to be built ground-up.
Key Enablers
We need to align incentives among EdTech companies, government payers and policymakers to generate good evidence. At this point, the burden of evidence generation has largely rested on the companies themselves. As the past decade has shown, this rarely results in the quality and quantity of evidence generation we need. Evidence generation needs to be prioritised in government procurement and charitable grant-making and frameworks like EdTechTulna need to be strengthened and propagated. We need to tackle this with a sense of urgency, especially in the aftermath of COVID learning losses. If we succeed, India could leapfrog most of the world in both the adoption and impact of EdTech.
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