Bringing Down the Barriers in Education

Date:   Wednesday , May 04, 2011

What is the education scenario with in the country today?
In the next decade, India plans to introduce 100 million people in the workforce. But today, the biggest challenge lies in educating the children is to make them fit for main stream employability. Currently, India has 435 million students that need to be educated; but probably only half of them are able to receive a decent education. This is due to the disparity in infrastructure. At one end, you can see a city with 10-15 schools where several thousands of kids are enrolled while in villages there might be one school for 10-15 villages. The distribution of resources is a critical factor here. The easiest way to do this is to set up a $500 PC in a school with all the content aggregated and have a roving faculty, which has to monitor and help them at Pengala, we want to be a stepping stone to achieve this.

How does Pengala solution work?
The Pengala Learning System improves learning by combining the best elements of classroom and self-study, delivered in a way that students study at their own pace and schedule. The new system enables students to get access to great teachers, full video lectures, engagement, tutor interactivity, assessments, personalized feedback, and peer learning. The solution is designed to work on any PC at home or in a shared computer lab with or without broadband Internet access. The product takes a platform approach that helps partners securely distribute courseware and scale their business while making it easy for students to learn.

The company has already forged partnerships with four of the country’s renowned education groups; Pearson Education (formerly Edurite), Brilliant Tutorials, FutureVISTA and Akash institute who will leverage their content/courseware on the Pengala platform. With this, the company hopes to target a wide audience including school students in 6-12 classes and those taking Test Preps and K12 classes.

How does Pengala stand apart from competition?
Pengala’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it addresses the infrastructure gap. Most digital learning solutions are web based that require high speed broadband connectivity. This is rather a challenge once you move out of cities since the speed gets lower and requires a long buffer time. As a result the value of the solution gets dissolved. Students need rich media to learn and not just a monotonous video/study material. At Pengala, we have pop quizzes in between a course to ensure that the student is following the content. Apart from that, we have a large online community where in a student can post his queries and get response from the best in the respective field.

What has been the biggest challenge?
The challenge lies in the acceptance among the players. Evangelizing about our product is going to be tough but luckily our early partners have been leading players in this space. This is a big step from what one has been learning till now and now we have to leverage this experience. A child in a metro is used to the computer, but to take this to rural areas and make it intuitive and accessible. How do we make the element of interactivity at a faster pace? Should it be done through a chat window, a voice chat or over a phone? These are the questions for which, we need to find a solution. The journey has just begun and the challenge is to understand the needs of different markets and see how we can address it.

What is the future outlook?
The education sector is seeing a huge change due to the government’s initiative towards this sector. Government is serious about education and putting up PCs and other technology in to schools. There are charities like the Azim Premji foundation that is putting money to solve this problem. What Pengala will do is bring the best content available to students to the remotest areas so that they learn from the best, interact with them and get their feedback. We will bridge the gap between demand and supply. Not only will the students have a choice of whom one wants to be his coach, but this will also mitigate people to go out and volunteer to educate people by joining the discussion forum.

2009 founded Pengala Learning Solutions, a player in learning technology arena, recently launched its new learning system to help students learn better and faster. Backed by industry visionaries like Pradeep Singh of Aditi technologies and Will Poole of NComputing, the company hopes to break the barriers in education and educate the million students out there today. In a candid conversation with the SmartTechie, Navin Thangiah, CEO, Pengala Learning Solutions talks about Pengala plans to achieve this.