There are a variety of desktop/laptop applications such as Camtasia, ScreenFlow (Mac), web applications such as Screentoaster and Apps for iPad such as Explain Everything, Educreations etc. make this really easy to create, edit/maintain. However, given a wide range of features, I would recommend carefully identifying your requirements and review using free trials of some of these before making the final choice. I hope you find this to be useful.

Visit: http://bit.ly/rHXePm for details.

When we approach a learning requirement one has to look at four aspects for developing a solution and ensuring that it delivers what is expected. I would like to refer to it as:

4D Model for Learning Solutions:
Design
Develop
Deliver
Determine

What is done for each of the above Ds affects the final outcomes from a learning initiative.

While this model can be applied to any type of learning initiative, whether its classroom, eLearning, hybrid etc., this article focusses on eLearning solutions.

I have seen that quite a few eLearning solutions focus on the first 3 Ds – Design, Develop and Deliver very well but the solution does not have “Determine” integrated suitably within itself. Even if it is included in form of end of course assessments, its not very accurate reflection of the actual amount of proficiency acquired by the learner in the subject matter.

Moreover, it is widely known that assessments with multiple choice questions are contaminated with guesswork and weak in determining fairly accurately the outcomes from learning.

Activated Learning is a powerful approach to all  4 Ds for learning. Most importantly “Determine”, wherein the personalization of learning process for each learner is driven with a complex set of algorithms that are designed to meet a wide range of learning requirements, one of which is accurate measurement of knowledge mastery of the learner.

It is inspired by the quality management processes in manufacturing, wherein the product quality is determined as the product is being manufactured at every stage. This is to help negate the need to conduct any quality tests at the end of the process.

So when a learner achieves 80% in Activated Learning one can be certain about the level of knowledge mastery achieved by the learner.

If you are concerned about ensuring that your learning solution delivers measurable learning outcomes with high degree of certainty, you must consider trying Activated Learning and experiencing it. Ensure that you have a sound ROI on your learning initiative. For more information you may reach out on – info (at) learningrevolution.co

http://learningrevolution.co

Career Point Coaching Institute has raised Rs 50 crore in equity capital from Franklin Templeton Private Equity Strategy, one of the leading India-focussed private equity funds.

Career Point (CP), which raised funds on July 26, intends to use the funds to set up state-of-the-art private universities in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh and ramp up its K-12 offering Global Public School. The company will also invest part of the capital to strengthen its existing coaching business where it has launched the Syncho School (VSAT- enabled) and Knowledge Lab offerings.

CEO Pramod Maheshwari had established the coaching institute for engineering aspirants in Kota in 1993. As the national preparation hub for engineering entrance aspirants, Career Point gained national footprint with over 40 centers across the country with an annual student intake of over 30,000 students.

For more info click here

FIITJEE provides training for engineering entrance exams, such as IIT-JEE.  The company was created in 1992 by Dinesh Kumar Goel, a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi.

Click here for link to the news.

A clutch of private equity (PE) firms, including BlackRock, Apollo Alternative Assets, Gray Ghost Fund and Sequoia Capital, is looking at investing in India’s education sector, a $40-billion market catering to 460 million children.

Some players, like Sequoia, already have exposures in segments like e-learning, but there is fresh PE interest in the higher education segments like engineering and polytechnic, and even in schools, say industry sources.

Click here for more information.

I welcome everyone’s ideas on what should be done to help create qualified, skilled and knowledgeable manpower that is a fundamental requirement to India becoming an economic super power a real possibility. I am especially interested in hearing about some “out of the box” thinking since meeting the challenges and expectations, and resolving the issues pointed out below will require nothing but just that.

Issues

• Poor quality of graduates – lack skills for employability
  • Only 10% of graduates are directly employable
  • Only 25% of engineering graduates are directly employable (Infosys, an IT giant, last year sorted through 1.3 million applicants only to find that around two percent were qualified for jobs.)
  • Quality of education delivered in most institutions is very poor. While India has some institutions of global repute delivering quality education, such as (Indian Institute of Management) IIMs and (Indian Institute of Technology) IITs, we do not have enough of them.
  • Very narrow range of course options are offered
  • Education is a seller’s market – lack of competition – no incentive to provide quality education.
  • Increasing number of students going abroad for higher education which is a drain on foreign exchange resources and also on the students and/or their parents’ finances.
  • Lack of attractiveness in teaching as a profession – there is clearly a lack of educated educators – Teaching is not an attractive profession – it’s a last choice in terms of career.
    • Number of Ph.D.s produced each year is very low – those required by academia is far higher. In fact, at many institutions fresh graduates are employed to teach, leading to poor quality of classroom instruction.
    • Industry having to invest a lot of resources in training new hires – not every organization is in position to set up requisite training infrastructure
    • Most of the education institutions esp. in states such as Maharashtra and states in South India are owned by politicians – Education system which is highly regulated by the government has been set up to benefit politicians.

Challenges

• Huge demand supply gap – not just in terms of number of seats available but more so in terms of seats available in institutions who offer quality education
  • Eg. 290000 applications received for  CAT – 2008, entrance exam  for admissions to IIMs – only 1700 get admission – only 1 out of every 170 students who take CAT will make it to the IIMs.  Number of applicants went up by 28% in 2008.
  • IIT-JEE – > 3.95 applicants in 2009 competing for ~7000 seats – average 56 students competing for 1 seat.
  • About 2 lakh students compete for the 77 seats available at AIIMS – a premier medical education institution in India
  • 9,500 seats in National Institutes of Technology (NIT) invited more than two lakh applications

(if you factor in seat reservations, the students in “open” category face much stiffer competition than indicated above)

• India has birth rate of 25 million per year – developed countries have 1/3^rd of students going to college. If India were to meet the same standard, it will need 8-9 million graduate seats in college and it has only 4.5 million today.
• Regulatory framework – antiquated, “not for profit” requirement to set up educational institutions – major obstacle in attracting serious players and investments
• There is huge obsession with capacity creation – but emphasis should be much more on quality – how is it that we can create quality capacity?
• Parents only treat engineering, medicine as only choices for graduation – they are unable to appreciate attractiveness of new specialized industry oriented programs that are launched in the country
• India has a very large number of talented students but many of these feel dejected for not making it to IITs and IIMs due to lack of capacity – they end up going abroad for education

Expectations of/from various stakeholders – Students, Industry, Educational Institutions, Parents, Government

• Need to double capacity – not just in terms of seat count but “quality” seats count
• Deregulate education in India
• Remove the “Not for profit” requirement to facilitate the investment from private sector
• Industry and Academia connect necessary to ensure curriculum and skills in line with requirements.
• Skill building is really very crucial to ensure employability – Academia to understand and make sure – knowledge + skills+ global professional skills = good jobs
• Industry and students are expecting specialized courses to be offered so that they get the latest and best in education and they are also industry ready and employable.
• Too much power vested in single institutions that regulate e.g AICTE – eg. policy, licensing, funding, curriculum etc.  Need to disintegrate to perform specific key functions.
• Some industry-academic connection programs not working out as expected – eg. summer training for MBA students – most of them given dummy projects and are avoided while on board. Industry needs to get involved to support institutions.
• Vocational and Diploma courses need to be made more attractive to facilitate specialized programs being offered to students

I have put together this information from various sources and my own knowledge and experience in this domain. And, it is also from a show  I recently saw on TV. You can view a video of this show :Tubaah: Why do Indian students leave? in another post on my blog here.  This discussion, as the title suggests, was on a different yet related topic and covers many points presented above.

Through this article and those that will follow, I try to present my observations from yesterday, and I hope to open your minds and show what is happening today. Most importantly, I want to identify and discuss long term transformational trends in use of technology in schools in India.  And of course, I do have a strong desire to come up with and contribute novel ideas and business concepts to fuel this revolution and help shape a bright tomorrow for technology-enabled education.

Yesterday

80’s – I was in school and there was close to no use of information technology.  The information revolution was limited to UGC‘s educational programs being transmitted by our state television network – Doordarshan.

90’s – The IT revolution had already begun and implementation of technology in business was on fire in the country. Many IT training schools mushroomed and the business reached its peak in this particular decade.  The drop in PC prices, the lure of bright careers in IT, etc. made schools introduce computer training as a subject. Children from Std. 1 to 12 started learning various applications and simple programming languages – Logo, MS Office, etc.  Schools soon realized that there was too little to teach in the form of computer applications that could be spread out over a teaching span of 10 to 12 years. At the same time, educational content in the form of CDROMs that were imported made some of these institutions yearn for content that was designed for the local market. Many IT companies jumped on this cue and began content development. However, most of this contribution was in the form of electronic versions of text books and creating question banks.  Seeds for Computer Aided Learning were sown in this way.  Access to the Internet also opened windows to view what the world was doing to support teaching and learning using information technology.

2000’s – Our current decade. I was already in the business of Computer Aided Learning (CAL) for kids to be a part of this revolution. Computer centers such as Boston’s Cyberkids, Fourth R, NIIT LEDA, FutureKids, etc. mushroomed all over India. I learned with many others in the industry that local content for children will transform that market. At the same time, the use of IT in schools increased not only for teaching computers but also in conducting operations. Desktop applications for accounting, fee management, library management, etc. were being implemented in schools. IT had just begun to transform Indian schools.

According to me, the  critical mass or the point of inflection for the role of IT in schools began around 2003, when we witnessed explosive growth in content and applications designed just for schools. CAL content offerings were introduced by local Indian companies. There was a shift from generic, standalone applications to applications designed just for schools, that is, School Management Systems that integrated many of the schools functions, and there was increased readiness of schools to take technology to classrooms.

To add fuel to the fire, IT companies introduced many programs that would set the foundation for this growth. The INTEL Teach to the Future Program was launched in February 2000 and has spread to more than 35 cities nationwide. A total of 9,47,798 teachers have been trained under this program so far. A Microsoft-sponsored educational initiative called Project Shiksha created a unique milestone by training more than 240,000 government school teachers since 2003. Governments (Central and State) too introduced many initiatives to provide impetus to Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) and CAL in schools. The Central Government introduced education cess to fund various educational initiatives and programs including promoting use of ICT in education and invested several thousand crores in the past 2-3 years through the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) for promoting ICT and CAL in government schools. The demand thus generated has resulted in the birth of many companies who wanted to tap this opportunity. Early movers such as Educomp have successfully ridden this wave to become front runners. 

With ICT and CAL penetrating both public and private schools in a big way along with computers and broadband Internet in Indian households growing by leaps and bounds, there cannot be a better time than NOW for companies to build their vision and plans to tap the immense potential that this explosive growth in use of technology in education is bringing.

Today

Technology in education is buzzing with activity. Companies such as Educomp, NIIT, Everonn, CORE, Aptech, GTT, Merittrac, MindLogix, Shloka (Birla Edutech), ExcelSoft, Manipal Universal Learning, Zee Learn, ILFS-ETS, Tutor Vista, VETA and Hurix of course are working aggressively on their plans for products and services aimed at Pre-School, K-12 and Higher Education markets in India.

Every other day I hear of a new offering: a CAL product solution for schools, an educational assessment program to help students know about their performance, distance learning programs in various disciplines with online content and synchronous and asynchronous learning systems, television programs based on knowledge (KBC, Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain, Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain) sent to Topper Channel that is focused entirely on education, new websites that offer personalized and adaptive learning content, online tutoring, mobile learning concepts, etc. Scores of start-ups are thinking creatively and coming up with path-breaking and innovative concepts. 

Innovative business models, rapid changes in government policy, the availability of serious investors for solid business plans and rapid growth in market demand are all adding up to build the formula for this dramatic change: the implementation of technology in education that will change the way our children learn tomorrow.

Tomorrow

Based on the developments taking place today, tomorrow will potentially be very different for all the stakeholders in the Indian school ecosystem.

Introduction and/or high levels of adoption of the following trends will be seen:

1. Technology enabled teaching – use of digital teaching aids, interactive white boards, Classroom response systems etc.
2. Technology enabled learning for students – digital learning libraries, online practice tools, homework assignments etc.
3. Online examinations/tests
4. Satellite driven virtual classrooms
5. Technology enabled education process management
6. Networking between stakeholders  – management, teachers, students, parents
7. Institution management and academic performance analytics

I intend to follow this article with more details on what tomorrow might be like.

I will also present my views on factors that will determine the companies who will be torch bearers and who will bring in major transformation in the education industry.

 Meanwhile, I would like to invite inputs and comments from all the readers about introduction of new products and services in the education space in India that you perceive to be innovative and transformational whether they have been listed above or not.

With this new post, I want to carry that forward to explain how the proposed roles for ID, their specialization and the ID team structure, will affect overall learning program development.

There are three key entities that currently develop learning programs according to me. There may be more types, but these are the largest, most common and relevant to this discussion.

a. Corporate Learning and Development Teams
b. External Vendors – custom learning content development
c. Off-the-shelf learning content developers.

So here’s what my recommendation of two types of specialization in the IDs (Domain Experts and Mode of Learning Delivery Experts) should lead to:

a. Corporate learning and development departments:

The principal ID who is a domain expert in terms of thorough knowledge of target audience, familiar with content types and learning needs, will be the only kind of IDs that these departments should retain. These IDs must analyze the requirements and design the learning program and then detail it with the help of external vendor(s), who have established expertise in development of program components using variety of learning interventions such as web based training, classroom training, mobile learning, performance support systems, game based learning and so on.

Such structure will facilitate best utilization of principal IDs’ time. They will need to just focus on program design and then review if the development is consistent with it. And they must also focus on program implementation with the intent of gathering feedback from learners and program stakeholders. This will allow identification of opportunities to improve the programs that are implemented as well as those that may be developed moving forward. This will ensure that the principal ID is involved in the full cycle of the ADDIE model and is continuously raising the standard of the learning solutions.

b. External learning content development vendors:

The external vendors will build a team of IDs specializing in several areas of their interest such as web based training, classroom training, mobile learning, performance support systems, game based learning and so on, as a part of the development team.

Successful engagement of these IDs with their customers’ principal ID and the SMEs will lead to effective transformation and/or development of learning program components. And this structure will facilitate the use of valuable feedback and learning from past programs into new development.

Again, this will allow IDs with specialization in various modes of learning delivery to focus on content development based on their expertise and also devote time to keep pace with rapid changes in technology that influence their area of expertise such as mobile learning. Vendors may also invest in research and development of special tools and templates for each of these modes of learning delivery to lead to more efficient development.

c. Off-the-shelf learning content developers:

These companies can again follow the same model as corporate learning and development teams as mentioned above.

With this type of structure and framework for engagement between Learning and Development departments and external learning content development vendors, I believe the best learning programs can be developed in the most efficient manner in terms of cost, quality and time.

Applying this viewpoint further to Indian Offshore eLearning course development companies (and for that matter all external learning content development vendors around the world), I would recommend that these companies bring about strong focus on building expertise in various modes of learning delivery and invest into research and development of tools and processes that lead tomost efficient production of learning content.

At the same time, organizations that are consumers of learning programs must not set up and manage complete learning development teams to build the learning and development programs, but only engage in their design, review and implementation. And therefore they should outsource the development of programs to expert development companies and get the best results from their investment.