How we helped over 200,000 low income students start learning online in 10 days — #GharPeSchool
By: Akshay Saxena
Tags: Edtech, Social Enterprise, Covid 19 Crisis, Gharpeschool

The single biggest reason that we are seeing such tremendous uptake is the comprehensiveness of our local-language content.

Despite the tens of billions of dollars that have been invested in ed-tech in India, there is an almost complete absence of comprehensive ed-tech products focused on serving the >60M Hindi Medium students in grade 6–10 who are also the most vulnerable members of India’s public education system.

Over 40% of all learners in India’s schools study in Hindi-medium schools run largely by the government. The majority of learning resources on the internet aren’t built for them.

A concerted effort is needed to develop local-language content that is comprehensive (covers the entire curriculum) and designed with government school students in mind. Avanti’s content was developed as part of a five-year partnership with the Government of Haryana for use as part of a 219 school transformation effort (Sankalp Haryana).

TicTacLearn a channel focused on basic literacy and numeracy has also seen similar traction, gathering over 7,500 subscribers in 10 days and over a million views.

The top performing videos on both Avanti Sankalp and TicTacLearn have a very similar format. The extensive use of animations, contextualized storytelling and a teaching plan that accounts for learners who may be struggling in school.

TicTacLearn content for basic numeracy

Avanti Sankalp content for Grade 10 Math

A multi-modal approach to content dissemination is working

In addition to putting content online through Youtube and the free Sankalp app, our primary thrust during these times has been as part of a larger collaboration being led by friends at the social impact practice of BCG as part of the NITI Aayog SATH-E education transformation project in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand and projects funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation in Rajasthan and Haryana.

As part of this collaboration, a vast digital library of content is being curated from various existing sources for every grade, subject, and competency. The curation effort in collaboration with various partners and SCERTs of several states was necessitated because while various content creators have created excellent content in various forms and shapes, there is no single source library that is comprehensive in depth, scope, and coverage across the K-12 continuum for both students and teachers. This curation effort has been made possible because of the involvement and contribution of several partners such as MSDF, Central Square Foundation, Pratham, Khan Academy, Akanksha, Akshara, Education Alliance, Teach For India, Samagra, FSG and the use of free and open educational content from BodhaGuru, Tic Tac Learn, Learn Fatafat, Pebbles, Splendid Moms, Goyal Brothers, LLF, NCERT, and many more.

Jharkhand, MP, and Rajasthan all launched their digital learning programs on 13th April with the support of The Piramal Foundation for Educational Leadership, who has been implementing a range of engagement strategies to enhance field implementation through middle management capacity building. We have seen significant field uptake in the first two days itself and a 90+% positive feedback rate (15k+ feedback received on Day 1) from teachers and students. The content library is also open for all and is being shared with several other states such as Delhi, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh among others, who are also leveraging it for similar programs. The curated content packaged according to grades and competencies is also publicly available on the DigiSath YouTube channel and is being dynamically updated every day.