VigyanShaala

We are committed to closing the access, attainability and quality gap in STEM education and equipping youth with future-proof skills. We will achieve these by a) Leveraging a Data Driven Approach to identify key barriers and real-time monitoring b) Creating public-private partnerships to influence government policy. c) Developing a 21st century curriculum for independent thinking, inquisitiveness, and Innovation. Our unique approach with scale at its core is bridging undergraduates and school students to facilitate cross-age peer mentoring and nurturing scientific temperament. We created an Outreach Platform for hands-on learning to excite school children from rural India in STEM. For graduates (STEM fellows) from rural India, we have created a Mentoring platform to upskill via project-based learning and to provide extensive professional development support for job readiness. Scaled globally, this approach will enable cross-cultural amalgamation of ideas, entrepreneurship and policy reforms to work in concert for a sustainable future for everyone

VigyanShaala is addressing accessibility, lack of quality STEM education and guided mentoring to prepare youth for the technology focused jobs of the future. With the fourth industrial revolution, over 47% of the jobs will be lost in US alone, 75 Million jobs will be displaced while creating 133M jobs in the innovation sector - Scientists, Data Analysts, Software Developers. Globally, there is an urgent need to re-train the workforce for these highly skilled jobs. The challenge is pronounced for a diverse, populous and developing country, like India. With a young population of ~500M, <5% have formal skills training. Out of those, <1% have the required STEM skills leading to lack of innovation and stunted job creation in STEM. India is ranked 51 in the global innovation Index, lowest in BRICS nations, and has a meagre Gross Enrolment Rate of 26.3% in Higher Education. Over 60% of higher education centres are in rural India with poor technological penetration (<20%), complex socio-cultural fabric and resource starved. Further, a resource intensive STEM education struggles with policy making to attain scale leading to inaccessibility in rural regions. It is therefore a prerequisite to find viable solutions at scale which VigyanShaala is committed to do.

We are bridging undergraduates and secondary school students to facilitate peer mentoring and nurturing scientific temperament at scale. In a year, STEM Fellow receives 24 Mentoring sessions from Vigyanshaala’s vetted global pool of professionals, 150 hours of training thorough our STEM Outreach platform, undertakes 2 research projects and reaches 100+ school students. Hence, building STEM skills, independent creative thinking  and extensive professional development. Our STEM fellow/s acts as local role model/s reaching schools catering to extremely marginalised communities. Hence, attaining scale while remaining sensitive to the local variables. Through STEM fellows, each school will receive ~10 outreach sessions, assistance in learning and support from VigyanShaala in identifying young talent and nurturing early on. 

For a friction-less operation between mentors, VigyanShaala, schools, government, students, we use the Hub and Spoke model to create action centres across the country for a transparent two-way communication system. We use data analytics to identify key barriers locally and provide tailored solutions and Geo tagging to monitor and evaluate STEM-champion’s progress. Our courses are available (offline & online) for free. Each course provides a step-by-step guide to Mentors and STEM champions for mentoring and outreach.

We work with secondary school students, undergraduate/postgraduate adults from marginalised communities enrolled in education centres in rural areas.

Identification of the diverse issues in each community is our first step. We conduct extensive survey and data analytics (over 100 schools, 1000+ students) to map out the local strengths and weaknesses. In our pilot program in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, we recognised the need for special programs for female participation, improved penetration of technology, visibility of role models, support in college curriculum to embrace experiential learning, innovation focused teaching and access to professional network, to bring transformative change.

At STEM-fellow level, we assign local command centres (Hubs) in nearby accessible colleges equipped with Computer Infrastructure and resources from VigyanShaala. An active two-way communication system will ensure that the mentee receives superior mentoring and professional development to attain required skills. 

At school level, we engaged with the district administration of education to facilitate access to the village schools. To encourage women participation in STEM, we launched a program called Kalpana and partnering with Udayan Care for the pilot. Socio-cultural awareness of the undergraduate makes them the leaders of change. Free online/ offline content and quality mentoring ensures accessible quality education.

We are addressing two interrelated problems a) Lack of scientific temperament and b) unskilled STEM graduates stunting growth and innovation. Lack of quality education at secondary school translates to a poor quality STEM labour market (>100M poorly skilled) and depressed innovation capacity nationally. Instead of focusing on either schools or Undergraduates, an aggressive approach involving a collaboration between school children, educators and Undergraduates will stop the perpetual cycle of poor education. Apart from gaining valuable experience via Outreach, STEM fellows will be job ready via personalised mentoring. A school student will be caught early on to be nurtured effectively.

To create an impact we chose to take a middle out approach bridging the familiar top-down and bottom up approaches to accessible quality STEM education. There are several organizations that provide training to pass entrance exams for STEM colleges and others that provide experiential STEM learning at school level in India. These efforts stumble-on challenges in scaling due to poor quality educators or visible role models.There are no programs in India dedicated to developing independent thinking by fundamentally addressing the change in behaviour towards observation, questioning and reflecting to find solutions. VigyanShaala provides a range of activities, mentoring and hand-holding to achieve this. Learning from the current landscape, a two-pronged approach to work with the undergraduates to upskill, make them job ready and provide platforms to be enablers of change at the school level addresses both issues. This approach can easily be scaled at national level. Mentoring by a professional fills a role-model gap, involvement of graduates at schools ensures sustained engagement in marginalised communities. This unique approach spun a range of unique problem-solving architectures to be developed. During the three years of fellowship, a class of 50 STEM fellows will be mentored by 25 Mentors, will engage in 1500 schools, reaching out to 15000 students. Such a scale requires synergy between novel technological integration modules for coordination, engaging policy makers early on and empowering educators. We also actively collaborate with other NGOs, institutes and individuals to bring the fundamental shift in education. Key achievements are provided in upcoming questions.

At the operations level, our solution is a web-based platform and a mobile application that will map the entire operations, logistics, performance of different nodes and provides a two-way communication channel between the nodes. We are using it to map the entire process flow of our initiative in order to make it rugged, transparent, accessible, leak proof and sustainable. The various key performance indicators (KPIs) of different stakeholders (mentors, STEM fellows, Hubs and Spoke, Gurus) are maintained and reflected in a dashboard. The platform will have features like geo-tagging, real time monitoring, automatic ticket generation and SMS for upkeep and seamless operations. The portal is also intended to work on offline modes and later sync in order to serve the remotest locations where connectivity is a challenge.    

The novelty of the solution is in providing a one stop solution online platform providing mentoring access, advanced project-based-learning research content,  accessed by the STEM mentees and the mentors.  At the education level, we have developed an extensive coursework for STEM fellows involving computational literacy - R, Python etc, project based learning and activity based mentoring for professional development. A step-by-step mentoring guide has also been developed for Mentors. Our coursework is developed in collaboration with various premier research institutes in Science and Technology like the Institute of Physics, Homi Bhabha Center for Science and Education, Indian Institute of Science and Education Research, Royal Society of Chemistry, Pune. The courses will be peer reviewed and certified by 2021.

1. Scalability - with a mere 10 member core group we were able to engage over 200 volunteers to engage 10,000+ students across India over three years, all this alongside our full time doctoral research . 

   

2. Success of the Mentoring Model 

    

   

   

3. Wrote article for a wider dissemination of our modules 

4. Clear identification of challenges through our statewide study

Our operations technology is inspired by a parallel technology developed by Mr. Sagar Sharma, co-founder of Vigyanshala for the Govt of India. The technology is a dashboard for improving the efficiency of Parliamentary standing committees in Indian Parliament. For the performance comparison of different stakeholders we have defined KPIs which are weighted on empirical evidence for each stakeholders. The normalized score of each stake holders  which will be reflected in a dashboard.  The technology is ready to go and is held back for deployment due to national lockdown. The dashboard can be accessed at : https://tinyurl.com/dakshrs

The closest analogy for the technology that we are using for the operations and logistics can be drawn with the typical amazon warehouse, with a fair bit of complexity at different nodes. 

VigyanShaala aims to Create Novel Ecosystems  through an active data driven approach  in partnerships with colleges, schools, teachers, corporates, research institutions, STEM professionals, community organisations, and policymakers to equip youth with quality STEM education and skills. Following infographics describe our theory of Change in details. 

Prior to VS registration as an official Non-Profit (2019), we engaged with over 10,000 school children via various sponsored, fellowships and volunteering outreach programs. We informally mentored around 10 STEM graduates collaborating with NGOs, institutions and the University of Cambridge. Our success stories are mentioned above. Our first cohort of STEM graduates are now students at leading Indian and Global Universities. 

Post registration, we are working with ~500 school children, 10 STEM fellows in the Pithoragarh district of the Himalyn State of Uttarakhand, India. Over the next few months we will be expanding to 10000 school children from Pauri and Tehri districts in Uttarakhand State, Mentoring 50 STEM fellows. We have already had discussions and go-ahead  intent from the 7 district administrations in Uttarakhand. Once our technology to provide seamless communication, real time data analytics and formal certified Mentoring coursework is fully ready (end 2020), we will be mentoring 200 STEM graduates from Kumaon, Gharwal and other regions in Uttarakhand making the total STEM mentees to 200 by Nov 2021. In the next five years, we will add 5000 STEM mentees to VS who would be engaging with 1000000 children by 2025.

In one year: The Pilot program at Pithoragarh and Dehradun will mature in 2022. We are engaged in creating partnerships with other organizations to prepare our first VS batch from Pithoragarh to seek employment by 2022 or provide support for further education. To this end, we will tap into our mentoring pool of international researchers and STEM profesionals. 

Next we are launching the DECK program to facilitate quality STEM training to educators. Educators are vital links for bringing transformational change and engaging them is essential.

Finish certification of our courses and bring our operation technology live.

In 5 years – Make VS an integral part of public Education fabric of India in providing quality STEM education.

Launch PotDoctoral Fellowship in partnership with the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India

Create collaborative teams to roll out the courses in all 14 official languages with deliverable content for each state.

Matured Data analytics platform to Monitor progress of various stake holders in real time and provide tailored solutions.

We seek funding to address the following key barriers at present

a)     Financial support to recruit more STEM Graduates, build various teams, hire a full-time software engineer to integrate various modules of the technology and get it live by 2020.

b)     Existing efforts in technology development currently requires integration of five key individual working modules - quantitative indicators, qualitative indicators, Finances, Communication and evaluation.  These modules are created to map operations (Spoke) to the portal (Hub), facilitating Geo-tagging to ensure continuous monitoring of STEM graduate and school outcomes, raising tickets and providing an eco-system for healthy competition between various Hubs.

c)     Since 2020, Govt. of India has changed policies for foreign support for NGOs through the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, (FCRA ) . To be able to raise capital through FCRA, demonstration of successful grants from International Organisations is mandatory. Solve is our effort to secure our international grant post VS registration and hence opening doors for building credibility to raise more international investment partnerships.

d) Over the past year, 2/3 founders of VigyanShaala have been working dedicatedly without any financial remuneration. This is also challenges their financial viability.  

e) Also, upcoming changes in the Corporate Social Responsibility  laws threaten the financial sustainability of social ventures in India. Hence, building long-term sustainable International partnerships is going to be one of our key challenges.   

E)     Other barriers include cultural and accessibility to resources and identifying local leaders who would aid in scaling of the programs to previously unreached groups.

Our mentors and collaborating organisations are supporting us in crossing these barriers. We are also applying to several Indian incubators and were finalist in two such applications from the N/Core Incubator and NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore. We are also working to identify experienced people on our advisory board for the same.  

Full time (Unsalaried) - 2

Part time (Unpaid) - 8

Volunteer - 20

Contract - 2 

We are a diverse team of Scientists, Lawyers, Policy makers, Educators and Consultants. All of us have come from extremely marginalized, civil war-torn districts in India and have been able to make a successful STEM career by attending best in Class Universities like Cambridge University. Each of our unique journeys to overcome obstacles to make it to this stage has provided us a first-hand experience in facing challenges in attaining quality education. In all our experiences inaccessibility, lack of mentoring and encouragement to think freely and independently surfaces as common denominators. Our learning has provided us the passion and drive to not let the future generation face the same challenges.

Darshana worked closely with the Cambridge University administration in her role as the president of Graduate Union, secured several international fellowships and has access to a brilliant network of social development and scientific professionals. She has successfully brought the senior-pro vice chancellor of Cambridge University on our advisory board.  

 Sagar Sharma works in Government Policy making with direct reporting to the Union Human Resource Development (analogous to US Department of Education)  minister’s office of Government of India. His top of the line education from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), and experience in building policy and  software solutions/ models at scale for the government is valuable at Vigyanshala to facilitate govt engagement and developing technology. https://www.sites.google.com/site/researchersagar/home 

 Vijay's  research acumen and working with Undergraduates closely have been key parameters to develop VS cross-age mentoring platform and collaboration with policy makers.

Presently, we are partnering with Udayan Care, a Delhi based NGO’s Udayan Shalini Fellowship (USF) program for girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds (of which Darshana has been a beneficiary) to launch our pilot of project Kalpana with 20 aspiring young girls, to nurture them to become tomorrow’s leaders. Over the next three years we would like to extend our support to all the 2000 girls in the USF program from STEM disciplines. We are also talking with the district magistrates of Almora, Tehri and Pauri (Himalayan districts of Uttarakhand) for covering their government girls schools with Project Kalpana

 We are partnering with the Vigyan Pratibha project,COOOL STEMGames at HBCSE Mumbai, IISER Pune and RSC India  for co-designing project based learning modules. 

Partnering with MHRD and various district administrations and Uttarakhand Government's Education Department for evidence based policymaking

Incubatees of Centre for Global Equality @ University of Cambridge towards international collaboration for spreading awareness about SGDs

The STEM Belle and LotusSTEMM for documenting stories of inspiring women who broke barriers to inspire young girls in school to pursue STEM disciplines as a part of project Kalpana

WE are working on a not for profit business model. Looking at raising funds through HNI, CSR partnerships and Government Funding. Over the past year we have made progress with various aspects of the program whereas. However, there is a clear gap in our team and training to address the business and financial sustainability aspects. We have been engaging with mentors at Dasra, IIM Bangalore and other leading incubators in the country  

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VS is currently working as Not-for-profit organization. We are actively seeking funding  via grants, investors and crowdsourcing to scale, support more STEM graduates and staffing. As innovation and upskilling are key primary goals of the government of India, there is tremendous scope and market opportunity (how many millions?) for a profit-oriented Ed-Tech company. Once our curriculum is certified and the technology becomes fully live by 2020, we will develop a for profit Integrated model to sustain operations. Our initial avenues will be a) fee based expert consultation in establishment and content distribution to educational institutions, Teachers Training Institutes.  Other avenues in this space would be a free-for-service scheme where we will work on a subscription-based content distribution. As a part of this, we will provide our tried and tested coursework focusing on developing scientific temperament and job readiness to private well-funded educational institutions. C) Our end goal is to make policy changes to bring such educational practices to every community in India. To this end, we will be open to negotiating with the government for optimal paths and strategies for incorporation or development of such ecosystems as required at minimal fee.

A reputed funding such as SOLVER will unlock tremendous funding opportunities and overcome government red tape. In addition to opportunities at home, MIT SOLVER will open numerous doors for VS to pitch to various other investors and connect with various stakeholders. As passionate STEM graduates ourselves, the value in getting first hand expert advice and mentoring from MIT to bring our mission to accessible quality STEM is invaluable. A dedicated Business focused networking opportunity will provide a rounded approach towards sustainable growth of VS platform.

Organisations - NSF , MRS, APS,ACS (USA) , IOP, RSC ,(UK)

International Foundations for financial and organisational support in expanding our model to varipous other developing countries.