I read today’s The Hindu Op-Ed ‘Beyond the Pass-Fail Binary‘ with interest. It talks about why discussing No-Detention Policy in isolation is a disservice to RTE act, and what the real problem is.

A paragraph there hit me particularly hard:

[…] Exams have a tendency to become the only motivation for learning. All educated Indians are thoroughly conditioned to believe that “no exams, no learning”. This belief is easily transferred to children in a system that has almost no idea of the joy of learning in itself.

My elder daughter wanted to skip the school today, many of the students had done the same the day before in her class. We refused, and she was visibly unhappy.It is exam time in her school, and everyone in her class is preparing for it, and she wants to do the same by skipping school! 

For my younger one (she is in Grade 1), it is business as usual (it is exam time for her as well) – spend time playing around, complete her homework, and play some more. However, the teacher inserts pieces of ‘homework’ in this routine that makes her prepare for the exam at the school the next day – a list of questions around common knowledge which she has to mug up, a list of vocabulary words she has to prepare, etc.

She is being trained in the art of exam prep that is so prevalent in schools today – get hold of the super-set of questions that are likely to be asked, prepare it well, ace the exam, get good marks, and everyone is happy because the kid is an ace learner. She will soon get used to this style of study and exam prep and the undue attention on the exam, and will keep acing the exams, whether or not she learns the concept.

For my elder one (she is in Grade 6), it is a bit more challenging and formal. She has been given a window of 2 weeks in which formal Summative Assessments (half-yearly exams) will be conducted, she gets days off during the exam weeks so she can prepare for them better.

Basic premise still is the same: get a superset of questions and prepare it well in order to get good marks. And it seems good marks are important, not only for students, but also for teachers. Some teachers have been creative and have made the students solve last year’s questions since questions get repeated. Since this test is so ceremonial, there is an additional pressure generated on kids; many of them don’t come to school a few days before the exam starts because they need to ‘prepare’. School condones this behavior, essentially reiterating that this ceremonial exam is a serious business and is more important than coming to class and learning. Many teachers have spent time preparing the students for the exam in the days leading to the exam, reaffirming that exam is more important than learning.

I am sure performance of school teachers will be getting measured by the performance of the students in their class (which in turn is measured by their scores in tests), so they have a vested interest in making sure students get good marks. Usually, it is much harder to ensure good marks through good learning, it is much easier to ensure good marks by preparing for exams. This means that all incentives are aligned to secure good marks in exams, often at the cost of learning. This not only is leading to this obsessive focus on exams, but also to this tendency of doing whatever it takes to get good scores, by teachers, students, and parents.

Given that this same obsession continues into competitive exams for entrance into professional courses (engineering, medical, law, etc.), I wonder where is this leading us to – a generation which is so focused on the end, and not so on the means; a generation which knows how to crack an exam, and not how to acquire and apply learning?

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1. Teachers who gave me space to learn at my own pace
2. Curriculum (NCERT)that aroused curiosity and provided means to satisfy it
3. Mentors and guides who taught without teaching – teachers, parents, seniors, friends, well-wishers

When I look at my child’s education, I find all 3 are missing:

1. Teachers are under too much stress to complete the prescribed curriculum in the midst of myriad of activities a modern school gets involved in (song and dance competitions, events to generate PR, programmes to woe new ‘customers’) for a classroom with 40-60 students!
2. Curriculum is replaced by content of mediocre quality (at least in lower classes) and misplaced focus on grades and competitive exams of all kinds (there are more olympiads in Indian schools than you can count)!
3. Social connect with people is shrinking so much that there is no opportunity anymore to interact and learn, from your neighbor’s dad, your doodhwala or rickshaw-wala, ever-enthusiastic dadaji, or that ‘bhaiya who studies in IIT’!

So what am I doing about it? Nothing I guess.

• I haven’t tried to find a school for my kids which can give them space (assuming such a school exists)
• I haven’t argued enough with the school authorities about quality of book and lesson plans.
• I am still pursuing my career goals and don’t have the same amount of time for my kids that my dad had for me

I am letting the education eco-system fail for the next generation. I guess I am not the only one doing so, but that doesn’t change a thing. Education is dying as this eco-system fails – slowly first, then rapidly.

15 years hence, when my daughter writes about her experience of her education, I wonder what she will write.

We visited World Book Fair 2015 at Pragati Maidan yesterday. We spent about 4 hours there, and while we bought tons of books, I didn’t feel excited the way I used to feel a few years ago on the sight of books. Something was missing from the fair. I remember I had a similar feeling in the last Delhi Book Fair, which was similar but in fewer halls. This set me thinking.

I think these fairs are a big waste of time as they are structured today and not worth visiting. I think that is the reason why attendance is dwindling every year (in addition to the obvious reason that less people prefer to read these days than before).

These book fairs have more than 90% of space occupied by stalls selling books of all kinds. This was great for me 10 years back, because it was so hard to find books in bookstores around me. Things have changed a lot over last 10 years though. Book purchases have moved online and continue to do so rapidly. Bookstores are disappearing but no one is noticing. In fact, people are getting used to not seeing bookstores around them and seem to have adapted to it. I am getting used to it too.

So when I see rows of book stalls in a hall, and halls full of such stalls, it tires me very quickly. That is what happened in this fair as well. I was exhausted by the time I finished visiting the stalls in 1R (children’s books) because I would see similar books all over, and the only thing I could do in a stall was to select a few books and buy them.

I did stumble upon an NGO called Eklavya from Bhopal which publishes children’s books (primarily in Hindi), and got to know about them by talking to one of the persons in the stall. This was refreshing and different than what I did in other stalls. I wish there was a way to discover some more such stalls, but there wasn’t any.

I also visited the stalls from other countries. My goal was to see what kind of literature they produced and I was hoping to pick something interesting, like their folk stories. However, books available in those stalls didn’t seem to be chosen to satisfy such a curiosity. In Pakistan’s book stalls (there were many), I couldn’t find anything in Devanagari script, or in English language, everything was in Urdu. In Nepal stall, there were hardly 50 books, on some random, uninteresting topics. In Indonesian stall, I did find some bilingual stuff. Of course, many countries don’t publish much books in English, but I would think they would select well for a fair outside their country.

I think the value a book fair like this should no longer be just access to books. It should be about helping readers discover the world around books that is hard to discover otherwise – like the story around Pitara from Eklavya I found. I think they need to stop having such a large space occupied by booksellers, and instead be creating in selecting them. They should make the event much more activity oriented – Hall 7 was primarily activities – another hall had Author’s corner or something, but few and far between. I think they should give spaces to people who are willing to have activities in their stall – book reading, kids’ activities, launch events, etc. round the clock. Visits to a stall should give you more than just the books, only then a book fair of this magnitude and prestige can live up to its name.

This doesn’t mean I will stop going to these fairs; this just means I will temporarily change my expectations from them, and try instead to find how I can influence them in my small way. Any thoughts on how to influence this are most welcome.

अपना तो है पढ़ना काम।

छोटी इ से इमली, बड़ी ई से ईख,

मुन्ने राजा कुछ तो सीख।

छोटा उ से उल्लू, बड़ा ऊ से ऊन,

दिन में सूरज, रात में मून।

ए से एड़ी, ऐ से ऐनक,

ओ से ओखली, औ से औरत।

अं से अंगूर, अः से अः,

सीख गए हम, हिन्दी के स्वर।

A se anaar, aa se aam,

Apna to hai padhna kaam.

Choti e se imli, badi e se eekh,

Munne raja, kuch to seekh.

Chota u se ulloo, bada oo se oon,

Din mein sooraj, raat mein moon.

E se eri, ai se ainak,

O se okhli, au se aurat.

Ang se angoor, ah se ahh,

Sekh gaye hum hindi ke swar.

I also visited couple of huge bookstores, which obviously carry all the books in mandarin. I am much more enthused now about the language, hopefully I can learn to read it so that I can have the joy of walking in those big shops and picking some books to read (even the largest Barnes and Noble I found in US was comparable to these shops).

Here are some tools I found on the web which are useful:

Yahoo Babelfish – useful when someone writes something to you in Chinese but you can’t understand; or when you want to wow someone by writing in Chinese. Supports many language translations.

English-Chinese Dictionary – I like the English and pinyin search because it gives pronunciation of the word which is extremely helpful. Note how many different meanings exist for each word.

Pinyin on Wikipedia – As usual, this is a great reference for those who want to know all about something in one go, with rules and all.

Here are some points to keep in mind at the outset of planning and implementation:

1. Depending on bandwidth, course content should be created so that it utilizes least amount of bandwidth, think about a caching server located at each site to cache the content which will improve response time. This is critical if there are multiple sites connected via VPN (and hence bandwith availability for e-learning can be quite less, and content launches typically consume large bandwith if not planned correctly).
2. The content you create (and LMS that you use) should be localized; sooner or later you will need it. Check the support of the tools you use (LMS, LCMS, content authoring tools), as well as make sure the content you create is either globalized or is created in a way where creating seperate version for a language manually is easy (think of pictures and animations without text for example).
3. Do you need to create content that requires multiple authors or single author is enough? That puts requirements on your content creation tools. Multi-author generated content requires collaboration across authors and you might need authoring environment that supports such scenarios. Single author is easy, but if your authors are truely distributed, it may not work out.
4. Especially for multi-site deployments, there are  two models to use
   1. All training and content is common, shared across all sites seamlessly and by default, without any control on hiding any content from any site. This is suitable for cases when e-learning initiative is to manage online training only and sites are only recepients of the training and not creators, and there is no notion of local training.
   2. Each site has its mini-LMS within the LMS, where some content (and other details) are local and some are shared explicitly by administrators of the site with other (some or all) sites. This allows most flexibility. For example: instructor led training are mostly local (because of costs involved in travel to attend them) but they can be tracked using the same system and remain hidden to other sites. LMS vendors call it domains or groups.
5. If you require online training delivered through instructors (virtual classroom, like WebEx, Microsoft Livemeeting), you should make sure such an option is available within your budget, and integrates well with your LMS. These integration can be tricky at times.
6. Make sure your content is standards-compliant, but more importantly, works with the LMS you have chosen. Self-created contents are painful to make them work with a given LMS vendor and care must be taken at the beginning to pick right standards and interoperable pieces.
7. If you outsource content creation (it is always a good idea to do so if you have significant amount to create since it is highly specialized activity), so it will be good to understand the technologies, process and subject matter expertise of those guys, as well as what LCMS they plan to use. Custom-created content and their working with LMS are  biggest painpoint in any e-learning initiative.

Here are some articles you may find useful to go through. These are from ASTD (Americal Society of Training and Development) learning site: http://www.learningcircuits.org, this site is a great resource by the way.

Buy Versus Build: A Battle of Needs http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/jan2002/elearn.html

Evaluating E-Learning Developers http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/dec2002/elearn.html

Managing the E in E-Learning http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/nov2002/elearn.html

E-Learning Maintenance Strategies — Why You Need One

Driving Higher Ed Institutions to an Enterprise Approach

Pitfalls of LMS Implementations

Basics Of CMS Implementation

Another way of learning is to to get a peek into what other problems you might encounter and what to look out for, it will be good to look for LMS case studies, almost all LMS vendors have some case studies and success stories (ASTD has also listed some); however, since these are mostly vendor written, they may hide more than they will reveal, so it is good only for starting point.

http://www.moodle.com is a great open source LMS, there are tons of open source CMS out there, so if you are on shoe-string budget and have some techies in-house, exploring all open-source solution may be a good idea.

Overall, e-learning initiative design and implementation is a complex activity, hopefully this writeup helps somewhat. drop me a note if you need any help and I will try to write more.

• http://www.wiproapplyingthoughtinschools.com/ – Azim Premji Foundation’s work with education.
• http://www.pratham.org/ – Pratham works in the area of education.
• http://www.aksharafoundation.org/about_us.html – Akshara foundation, Banglore-based, involved in primary education, is a part of Pratham Education Initiative.
• http://www.smilefoundationindia.org/aboutus.htm – Smile foundation, involved in health and education

And here are some directory of NGOs, not particularly good I must say:

• http://www.idealist.org/
• http://indianngos.com/

I will keep this list updated, and if you know of other major NGOs in the area or directories, do let me know.

• Support some students around you, monetarily or otherwise
• Work with an NGO
• Start your own NGO
• Help NGOs to be more effective

I got introduced to some sites in Seattle who do the last one: help NGOs be more efficient by provide them help with their business plans, fund-raising, campaigns etc. NGO to help NGO seems an interesting concept and organizations like http://www.netimpact.org/ and http://www.indianngos.com/about.htm want to make a difference. Maybe this is indeed the most efficient way of helping the cause, but it still remains to be seen how much Indian NGOs are actually leveraging such organizations, and how much of Indian industry leaders are willing to chip in.