The space of edutech has seen a lot of action in the past few years. Most interventions, however, have been targeted at student learning. Coursera, EdX, and Udemy have become household names and learning is no longer a privilege of elite. Where such student centered technology breakthroughs are fantastic, resolving the issue of quality education, which in my mind is the path to resolving larger social and economic issues in the country, requires knowledge givers to be empowered as much as knowledge receivers. In this quest for discovery, I stumbled upon the Guru-G learning venture that seeks to make teachers “empowered, inspired, and happy”. With availability of capital, this venture has recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Indian Educational Investment Fund (IEIF) – which is backed by Michael and Susan Dell Foundation – to speed up its product development and spread its tentacles across the breadth and width of the country.
The reason I find Guru-G wonderful is because it is essentially a marriage of education, technology and social impact. Their model is simple – it aspires to create a technology platform to create guided lesson plans by assimilating content from diverse text books and teachers. Teachers can use this gamified guidance to deliver lectures in their classes, and then relay feedback to further improve and fine tune it. Personalized training requirements can also be identified and eventually the teachers doing well can create and sell their own classroom content. The Guru-G app works without an active internet connection – so scalability across the country is a possible reality – and can be used across various platforms.
While we are still in the early stages, I’m definitely hopeful that change is imminent in the way we teach and deliver content. It’s probably high time that teaching in approached as a serious academic and business problem — one that is tackled using technology and sharing.