Making it possible: role of digital technologies in managing outcome orientated education systems

• In Event: Educational assessments: insights from using various digital and quantitative approaches

Proposal

India has made huge strides in terms of making access to elementary education (age 6-14) a constitutional right (Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education, 2009), ensuring almost all children in primary school going age are enrolled in a government or private school in the neighbourhood of all habitations (within 1km for primary schools and within 5 km for secondary schools), schools are staffed with a qualified & trained teacher and children are provided certain entitlements such as free textbooks (and other TLMs), free uniforms and hot, cooked school meals to improve their retention in schools. This necessitated a large and expansive education system at state and sub-state levels which have enabled India to deliver the challenging goal of universal access to primary schools over the last two decades.
To manage this large, expansive and federal education system, the Ministry of Education, Government of India and all the state school education departments have leveraged many digital technologies for programme planning, budgeting, implementation, reporting and monitoring. India has a large school census system led by the central Ministry of Education U-DISE (set up in 2012-13; continuously upgraded) which collects information from 1.5 million schools every year and many management information systems that state governments have developed to manage their large workforce (~10 million) of teachers and other staff at state and sub-state (district block levels).
A large number of users in this system including teachers, Head Teachers, block, district & state officers are required to use and access many information systems such as student-teacher attendance, availability of infrastructure & facilities, teacher capacity building systems, tracking of resources meant for children (textbooks, uniforms, meals), HR matters (service matters, leaves, pay, transfer), budget & fund utilisation (central and state schemes) regularly for data collection, reporting and use. India has had a distinct ‘Data & Device advantage’ whereby the the high & affordable smartphone penetration along with one of the cheapest data rates in the world has helped the system-actors even in the most remote schools, regions of the country to leapfrog across the digital divide and be connected to their state technology systems through their mobiles and tablets.
India now has a progressive, learning-focussed National Education Policy (NEP, 2020) and laid down ambitious aspirations to build future-ready learners for the 21st century, by ensuring foundational learning and achievement of skills of the large, complex and diverse student population it serves. At the heart of this outcome orientation of the system is the holistic, consistent and regular measurement of student learning outcomes at different stages of the school system through reliable and robust assessments conducted by the teachers for learning who are then able to use the data to provide personalised instructions to the children and by the system of learning which is able to use the information for better programme design and implementation support. The sheer number of students, the diversity of languages and the complexity of tracking learning trajectories of students require the system to leverage digital technologies for undertaking fit-for-purpose assessments, capturing and storing data (in off-line and on-line modes) using devices that are available and accessible across the digital divide and high-end data processing, analysis and visualisation technologies to make the data more usable and actionable. The system would also need to leverage digital technologies to measure intermediate outcomes such as effectiveness of teaching and learning process in classrooms, usefulness of support provided by mentors or coaches and quality of teacher capacity building measures. Yet again, the sheer scale of such exercises, even at a sub-state (district) level would not only make use of context appropriate technologies desirable but also mandatory to even capture, process and make sense of the humongous amount of data collected through the process.
The system would also need to juxtapose the evidence on achievement or gaps in achievement of the outcomes against the provision of resources such as availability of adequate classrooms, teachers, adequate TLMs and other resources to establish relationships between the inputs-outputs and outcomes. That would also require intervention of technologies that help different data/information systems to speak to each other, interoperability of platforms and advanced data mining systems. All of this would require significant investment in terms of setting up these processes, systems and technologies. In addition, it would require us to democratice the access, simplify the operation of the systems and make the use of information extremely intuitive to meet the varied capacity of the users across the system for data and technology usage.
Central Square Foundation has been supporting the state education systems to leverage the power of digital technologies to achieve this outcome orientation particularly for foundational learning. Some examples across four broad categories are:
1. Technology for governance: Helping monitor provision of basic resources such as timely and adequate delivery of textbooks and TLMs, tracking learning profiles of teachers. Using simple query based data dashboards and automated report generation for stakeholders at different levels to monitor attendance, learning resources etc..
2. Technology for teaching: Helping middle management cadre of state governments to observe thousands of classrooms through a variety of apps (state classroom observation apps and other data collection forms etc.); exploring use of Teacher Coach AI tool to provide feedback to teachers based on structured pedagogy aligned lesson plans.
3.Technology for assessments: Conducting state achievement surveys of early learning skills by using Tangerine for EGRA, EGMA assessments; use of state apps (such as in states of UP, Telangana and TN) at census level to track progress on grade-appropriaye learning goals and building the capacity and ownership of the states.
4. Student facing technology for learning: Personalised instructions and adaptive learning (PAL) models in classrooms; supporting at-home learning through direct messaging, assessment and content support to students and parents and creating a library of digital regional Indian language content aligned to curriculum
This paper intends to articulate the experience and learning from the use of digital technologies in different states of India and scope for further development including the integration of AI.

Authors

• Parthajeet Das, Central Square Foundation

• Shaveta Sharma, Central Square Foundation