Engineering Watch Interactions brings to you exciting and illuminating interactions with various members of the engineering community and we have with us, the Founder and Chairman of CLASSTEACHER Learning, Mr. Rohit Pande, armed with a Mechanical Engineering degree. Mr. Pande graduated in the year 1995 from IIT Delhi. He had a subsequent stay at IIM Calcutta and has worked for a couple of years with Accenture. He subsequently founded CLASSTEACHER Learning for his passion of educational technology. Having served the industry for over 12 years, he can be considered a veteran. He has deployed innovative products and solutions across countries and cultures; and is now focusing his energies on forging global collaborations and partnerships for resource sharing and insights. Mr. Pande is extremely excited about the advent of tablets as a tool for personalized learning. Also, learning games is another such interesting area. We welcome him for what we hope will be an enlightening session.
What prompted you to enter this domain of education technology in the first place?
We were excited by two things: Firstly, I have personally had a very enriching journey during my school education, so, there was a desire to kind of give back to society. What I had personally enjoyed secondly, both the working of computers on the internet as well as the fact that there is a certain intelligence that computers could bring in the education process. Seemed to have a lot of scale and impact possibility for me.
In what ways do you think education technologies are transforming and revolutionizing the teaching learning process? And what has been the contribution of CLASSTEACHER in this metamorphosis?
I think that that was a study recently and people were presenting their studies. There were global thinkers, in education from across the world and there was this whole debate on technology as it inevitably comes. The number one impact, if we study school systems across the world and see the guys who are performing the best, system which respects teachers, where teaching as a profession relative to other profession societies value higher. My point is, whatever you may do through technology, the real revolution in teaching-learning is through people. Having said so, technology has become the revolution in teaching and learning and is merely a catch up because if you see the life of a child, who is natively digital, his life is so fundamentally around the interactive devices, while his teaching world is not so. See, in a culture which comes from hundreds of years back, before it starts revolutionizing teaching and learning, to my mind, technology has to merely play enough catch up so his so-to-say alternate life and his life of school merge. For a larger impact, revolutionizing would only come in systems and societies where teachers embrace technology. I do not think that technology can revolutionize education on its own. At CLASSTEACHER we create new products, and we did that very passionately for the first five-six years of our life. We used to build products around interactive, adaptive learning, around intelligent learning parts, around dynamic simulations and 3D and so on, but in the last six years or the second half of our journey, we have realized that more than creating new products, it’s about how you engage with the community and get them adopted, which is the critical game changer.
There has been a dominant perception as if technology has all the answers and solutions to what all is ailing our education system. What’s you take on that?
My take is “not at all”. Technology can at best be a catch up, it can provide some additional supplements, the answers are in teaching as a profession and incentives, management structures, tools, in reform of the examination system. You have not asked about it, but we think so much about formative assessments, so if you do it for twelve years, and after that if you get into a rat-race which is still numeric, which is still that the top 1% will get anything of a semblance of a career, I think we have to remove these fundamental so-to-say incongruous things.
But somewhere the entire policy regulation in India is revolving around technology as if it’s the panacea for everything, like the one tablet will solve it all. That argument is ridiculous on two levels. One, it is ridiculous for technology itself, but more importantly and more ridiculously, when you start presenting certain chips, which are designed in China, as a solution to India’s education problem, then, any educated person can only laugh about it.
In the Indian tradition, where you know a teacher has been the pivot of all learning, even we remember our fabled teachers when we are at this age and we respect them. Where do the real class teachers fit in an era of digital class teachers and where do you see this equilibrium setting in?
Being fair to teachers, a lot of what I have done in last 12 years has been seen by many communities as threatening to their very existence. But increasingly over the years, I think I have also started thinking like the many teachers. There is a tremendous challenge and struggle going on in the classrooms today, wherein children have access to information, to knowledge from various sources other than their teachers, and so teachers are kind of struggling to keep pace, and of course, as the social structures and traditional respect for elders and society also starts diminishing, try to imagine to be a teacher in such a classroom today. And to transact with those children, earn their respect through knowledge. So it’s a tremendous struggle for teachers, but the only word of caution I would have here is that “embracing technology as their own thing rather than fighting it is in their larger interest.” But of course, teachers will adopt it at their own pace, but broadly the idea to turning technology from a foe to a friend in their own struggle in the classroom will go a long way in making teachers more popular and more effective in classrooms.
So where do you see this equilibrium setting in, because even the students, howsoever their teacher is proactive in use of technology, in a kiddish kind of a mentality, he says that now I have Google, I can just get through any information which is required, so how this equilibrium is setting where the respect of the teacher still remains?
I have heard this phrase, it is an abused phrase but if we try to think through and imagine “how a teacher can shift from being a seat on a stage to a guide by the side”. Many times superficial prismatic thinking will not allow this transition, it’s a deeper transition and person who is a guide by the side often knows the knowledge acquisition process very well and is confident about it. Because you can stand by the side and be a true guide if you have the confidence.
You have being saying that digital learning platforms make learning enjoyable, enriching and interactive. So far so good. When you go on saying that it promotes critical thinking as well, somewhere it goes a bit overboard. Can you site an example from your long drawn academic stint, as to how the availability of this digital learning platform would have evoked that process of critical thinking, which you could not have in the absence of it?
George Bernard Shaw has talked about wisdom and knowledge, so it says, “As human kind increase his knowledge, unless that increase in knowledge is accompanied by an increase in wisdom, that increase in knowledge will only bring about more misery.” The equivalence that I find over here is unless as you increase the intensity of technology in classrooms, unless it is accompanied by innovation and critical thinking, the increase in technology will only make people less prepared for the creative workplace. They may be prepared for a clerical workplace of future, a digital clerical workplace of the future, but they will be less prepared for the future unless the increase in technology is accompanied by an increase in critical thinking. Now, to your specific point on examples, Indian schools for example, where we work, there are about 30-40 thousand schools, they are using screens to give lesson animations towards children, and they increase a bit of visualization and a little bit of interest they create through the music and the sound, but we find this to a) start losing appeal soon in a school, and b) not having long term implications on learning because children are not engaged, you are still a passive observer to a phenomenon. As an example, if you are throwing a projectile on a screen and you actually throw that say a football at say 50 degree angle, and then again at 40 degree angle, then a 45 degree angle, you will see that the ball will travel the maximum distance when you hit it at 45 degree, and you will see it for yourself. That will allow a much greater attention and also a better absorption of the phenomenon. So technology has to innovate on critical thinking.
You are fascinated with the emergence of this tablet scenario, the personalizing learning will take a new dimension. How would you like to define your CLASSPAD, which is your flagship product which is being offered? How do you define it? Is it just a digital tool or a well refined digital product which can evoke emergence of the higher cognitive skills which you have been talking about?
When a CLASSPAD or any such device or even a Apple-iPAD is deployed in a school setting, it is the teachers in school who will determine the fate of the tool in that school. So, I should not think any such technology should ever claim that it will be able to do anything independent of them in the school. Now, having said that the CLASSPAD comes full of creative learning, simulation, critical learning parts, continuous learning environments where a part of the work is done in the classrooms, a part is done at home, parental involvement, where parents get snapshot analysis of what the children have done in class and if they want to intervene they can intervene at the right time. It’s also about right time, because when you get the report card in school its already too late to make an interaction in time. So from a teacher’s perspective, you get insights, which if then the teacher wants, she can use to personalize education, to teach the child next morning when she comes to the classroom. I would say that in a school setting, these devices will work only as well as the system adopts them and it comes with a million creative learning possibilities. And as we deploy more devices and train more teachers, we will have very good results.
What will be your prescription mix for the principals and the key decision makers in the schools about the due adoption of technology in the teaching and the learning process?
I think the panacea over here is that either school owners trust the consultant or a particular teacher in the school, who is ready to take a roadmap for school for digital technology, for five and seven years and put their faith behind that thought. Or they immerse themselves and understand issue that are involved here which lead to pedagogy, teacher training etc. So it’s a complex project. Half knowledge is dangerous, so whether they learn it themselves or they trust somebody. So it’s the synergy between the faith and the understanding.
What would be your message for the knowledge hungry kids of today and their parents so that probably the country can produce the next age Ramans and Rumanujans leveraging power of education technology because lot of things have been said that technology will evoke a lot of innovation in the school system which somewhere India in its post-independence era has been at quite a stand still?
I don’t think the kids either need to wait for schools or parents to embark on their personal learning journeys. I think there is enough opportunity for every child under the guidance of friends, mentors, or that good influence in their lives to embark on personal learning journey, because knowledge and it’s constant adaptation is happening all around us. It’s the frameworks that sometimes school systems and frameworks can give you, but the thrust has to come from inside and can be seen in the students who have it in them. Although of course there are children on the other side of the digital divide, where all of us need to be a little more conscious of giving them opportunities, there are enough children on this side of the digital divide who have that opportunity right in front of them in their own hands today.
Having been a veteran in this stage, how do you see the Indian education system converging somewhere with the rest of the global pedagogies?
How do you visualize things coming up in this time frame, a future scenario?
I think the big change is, oasis of private excellence, is at one level, and I am not wanting to read your question as when will the oasis become world class, I am wanting to read your question as when will the mass system become world class. I think that once again over here my thing is not as optimistic as my answer to the last question was, I think as educational governance improves, when the government wakes up, when the government creates simple panacea in terms of vouchers, in terms of voice to parents, in terms of grading of schools, in terms of technology of course since we have talked about it, in terms of incentives of teachers, in terms of the evaluation systems, breaking free from some of the trade unions…so there are issues and then finally how we take teaching as a profession in society, I think we can’t do much until we start attacking, debating these issues.
