Elearning for school students in India

Being a father of two growing children, learning and education has been a matter of interest to me, like it is for most other parents. There is something about the whole education system, which has always bothered me. We have entered an era where, thanks to Google, information is always free and instantaneous. So “knowing” is no longer a competitive advantage. Well… I stand corrected … it can be a competitive advantage in the way exams are conducted today in schools. But in my view that is a problem with our examination systems! In real-life, that has stopped to be something that differentiates you from others because everyone can “know” whatever they want immediately!

So the world of tomorrow is going to belong to those who go beyond just “knowing” to those who really understand the layers of concepts involved in various things, know how to apply them, and figure out how to synthesize various fundamental concepts to create something innovative and imaginative.

One big obstacle in achieving the above objectives is the small number of quality teachers. One way to circumvent the problem is to meet the above objectives through internet on an e-learning site. This would be scalable, would reach any number of students irrespective of their geographical locations etc. However, the challenge is to design an offering that affords interactivity beyond mechanical key-clicks. So, for every key click on the web-site, the student will be made to think.

Also, today, most e-learning sites use computers for presenting the pre-existing educational material in a better manner using multi-media etc. So, the core remains traditional, the teaching method remains traditional, only the presentation is modern. If we could use the computers for response-based branching - ie, each student sees a different learning track based on how he or she responded to the questions in a lesson. This, to me is a much more powerful use of computers in education.

Elcues.com, a site we recently launched, strives to do the above. It implements elements of Mastery Learning, Formative Learning and Adaptive Learning in its self-learning aids offered on the internet. We are currently covering a small segment of students, but, will soon expand our base.

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