Right to Quality Education- Right Answer Technology Date:   Tuesday , November 29, 2011 There has been way too much hype about RTE (Right to Education) than a substantive debate. The fact that it has taken so long to recognize is more of a reason for shame than hype. The state of education as it stands now is woeful. It has mostly taken monumental efforts from NGOs like “Pratham” to actually quantify the problem and produce hard evidence to this effect. The government though in the know has made ineffective effort. But tragically enough there has been complete tacit admission of guilt within the system. The most tragic and perverse proof of complicity however comes from the systems of assessments and examinations. To take an example: a student who scores even 100 percent in his 12th class exams conducted by CBSE has to take another set of exams for a career in the medical profession – conducted by once again – CBSE through the PMT. The same government body not only acknowledges the redundancy of the 12th class exam but has to create a different one to measure knowledge and aptitude in Physics, Chemistry and Biology – the very subjects tested for in the 12th. The RTE if implemented in its current form with the current mindset will only further the malaise. Rather than quality education for all it will only ensure at best mediocre education for all and at worst bad quality education on a far larger scale! For any education system to have excellence there has to be quality in all the facets – ranging from the curriculum, pedagogy, books, infrastructure, trained and skilled teachers, robust students performance assessment processes and overall monitoring and evaluation of educational programs. For the delivery of quality education on a large scale there has to be an extensive injection of technology as an enabler of change. Technology and technological systems have to aid the design, development, implementation and also the administration and governance of education. For example the use of ICT can vastly accelerate the training of teachers in a relatively low amount of time and in a cheaper way. Low cost ICT solutions in the classroom can significantly improve the quality of teaching and technology systems can address issues such as teacher attendance and student performance monitoring. Overall, the integration of technology will ensure that there is reliable data within the system to help in meaningful long term monitoring and evaluation. There’s a popular misconception that only computers can be the sole harbingers of technology despite the presence of more easily available and relatively less costly technologies such as radio, television and the emergence of new low cost devices such as tablets and mobile phones which can use existing telecom networks or the internet as a backbone for the delivery of quality education. Some of the notable examples are: Same Language Subtitling (SLS) by “Planetread” is simply the idea of subtitling the lyrics of existing film songs (or music videos) on TV, in the ‘same’ language that they are sung in. SLS is delivering regular reading practice to 150 million weak-readers in India. Kikajou Projector –a solar powered projector designed by “Design that matters”. The projector improves and expands access to education by transforming night-time learning environments in rural, non-electrified settings. The pilots have been run for night-time Literacy classes, in Mali, Africa. English is Fun- a Radio based program run by “Bihar State Govt.” Seven million students attending 65,000 primary schools in all the 38 districts of the state have access to a 122-episode English learning programme through Radio sets. The state government has given Rs. 1,000 ($25) to every primary school to purchase a radio set. A Portable tablet based English Learning Lab by “English Edge” - The Lab is a trolley that comes with centralized charging, in-built Wi-Fi device and can house up to 40 tablets loaded with English language content. There is no investment needed for a physical space for classroom/lab and an institute run a complete day’s class without any interruption, even in the absence of electricity. The trolley (with tablets) moves to the place of learning and converts the classroom into an interactive, activity-based learning environment enabled by high quality - user generated video recording and video analysis of group activities, like Role plays, group discussions & presentations. There are other interesting educational technology examples such as collaborative community based learning through Farmville (a “Facebook” application) and newer Augmented Learning based mobile devices applications such as shoot a picture of any monument / Object and get the details about the object instantly. Policy makers in the field of education have traditionally been ignorant about new and emerging technologies and technophobic on an average. While the National Policy on Education has laid out using ICT for teacher training and teacher retraining, its implementation has been very poor. A draft for the National Policy for ICT in School Education was released only in 2009 with the slated objective of promoting ICT in school education. Problems in policy making have been further compounded by the fact that policies on ICT usage in Education in India are implemented through the often uncoordinated and disparate efforts of the Ministry Of Human Resource whose primary focus remains education and the Ministry of communication and Information Technology which looks at the implementation of ICT. While the telecom revolution was spearheaded by the private sector, its inability in providing quality technology led education at affordable costs has been shameful. Many an education company in India has gotten away with both dumping computer hardware which becomes rapidly obsolete with time and providing low quality content and software which neither gets used nor fetches significant returns even when it does get used! Both governments and even private bodies have abetted this by not instituting proper monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms. As a result of this measures of success or failure of a project are never objectively defined. The absence of M&E has meant that most large scale ICT enablement of schools projects amounting to more than hundreds of crores through the Build Own Operate Transfer (BOOT/BOT) model have failed because of a lack of any sort of accountability. There are no easy one-size fits all solutions but surely India needs to create trained manpower by setting up degree and professional courses in Educational and Instructional Technology. Rather than depending on the coordination between two different ministries the Indian Government should ensure that ICT for education is completely integrated into MHRD policy making and implementation. It has to leverage technology to rapidly repurpose content and localize it at the most granular level possible – state, district and so on. It has to ensure that it uses a cascading approach where policy makers, personnel from ministries and regulatory bodies and teachers are first trained and equipped in ICT before students can reap the benefits. India also has to first learn to integrate low cost technologies as a stepping stone to computers centric ICT implementations. While it will be very naive to assert that technology is the only answer to the problem of providing quality education for all it will be equally foolish to state that it’s not a necessary part of the answer.