PraDigi Open Learning

In India, the overall enrolment of children aged 6-14 years in schools is currently over 95%. Despite this, India has been experiencing a learning crisis. As per the National Education Policy (2020), an estimate of 5 crore children have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy. Further, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2017 also highlights that even after 8 years of formal education, the youth are not equipped with the requisite skills to join the workforce in the future.

The onset of Covid-19 only exacerbated the situation and added more pressures to the already strained system. With remittent lockdowns, closure of schools, and shutdown of all education institutes, around 1.6 billion learners (UNICEF) in India were affected by the pandemic. This disruption has resulted in significant ‘learning loss, which has accentuated existing educational inequities. For example, ASER West Bengal 2021 shows that while students at ‘grade-level’ basic reading and arithmetic was increasing slowly between 2012 and 2018, there has been a drop in percentage of students at grade level from ~36% in 2018 to ~27% in 2021.

Furthermore, the shift towards increased digitization of education during the pandemic has not been equitable. A large number of students in India do not have access to any digital devices - even if accessible, smartphones are usually not personal but household items, and only a limited amount of low-speed internet is available. This demographic was already relatively under-resourced prior to the pandemic due to existing socio-economic inequalities, but since the surge of increased reliance on EdTech platforms the digital divide has widened, further excluding marginalized learners and increasing their risk of falling behind.

Additionally, while learners were now forced to remain at home, there was a lack of human connect and children were distanced from their community impacting their learning and development.

PraDigi Open Learning aims to bridge these gaps by bringing digital learning right in the hands of the learner and create an collaborative learning environment within the village, that enables children and youth to be better prepared for school, work and life.

PraDigi Open Learning follows two principles: 1) it takes a village to educate a child, and 2) children are naturally inclined to learn. By raising awareness about the status of education and creating ownership amongst community members, PraDigi works in each village to create a technology-enabled learning environment for children and youth. Available in 11 regional languages, the content is designed for online and offline access. The tablet is placed in the hands of children, who, in groups of 4-5 each, voluntarily come together to learn and create. Children are supported by youth, parents, and other stakeholders. The youth have access to digital courses in exchange for their support. In a study conducted internally, children in the program performed 12% points better than control groups in school-based subjects. The program tracks student engagement based on their interactions with online content, which is 55-60 minutes per day, adding an additional 7 hours of learning per week per child.

The program is designed around three pillars:

i) Social structure of student groups, youth, parents, and other community stakeholders to facilitate learning. Pratham works with communities to create a learning environment by interacting with different stakeholders, raising awareness on education, and creating ownership amongst them for their children’s learning. The crucial component of the social structure is the cadre of  youth volunteers, aged between 14-25 years, who act as coaches and facilitate learning experiences for children. 

With self-organized and choice-based learning at its core, the program encourages children to form their own groups and decide the group-name, place and time for learning. They engage with their group members, their coach and the community at large to support them with learning projects. Pratham has assigned one person for 10 villages, to pay regular visits, and monitor the program on a fortnightly basis.

ii) Shared digital device library: Pratham has set up digital device libraries with tablets, Raspberry-pi units and offline content within the villages and encourages children to use the devices in groups and rotate individually. These shared devices contain preloaded content on the PraDigi for School, PraDigi for Life, and Pradigi Assessment apps which allow for self-organized learning that takes place individually and in groups, both in online and offline modes. The coach assigned to each group ensures all children get access to the device and also supports the maintenance and regular charging of the device.

It is pertinent to note that the digital devices made available within the communities are not just a means of delivering exciting and engaging content but rather are tools to increase community interactions as well. Children and youth don’t use the tablets or Raspberry-pi to just consume content but create their own videos, learn new activities, and go beyond their ‘academic’ learning. Moreover, the youth also use these devices to foster community participation by taking up activities such as creation of PAN cards, registration of village grievances, applying for colleges, booking train tickets, learning coding or beauty techniques, and much more. Through this hybrid mode of learning, they become more creative, collaborative and confident as they experiment with technology and digital resources. This model gives their aspirations wings, agency voice, and drives social change in their village.

iii) Contextualized learning content: Pratham creates, curates and translats learning content that is engaging for the target demographic and contextualized to rural India. The content packages cover three major domains - learning for school, learning for work, and learning for life. The content is a mix of videos, games, PDFs and other interactive mediums such as WhatsApp Bot and YouthNet Portal to ensure that learning is fun and interesting. The content, available on the Pratham Open School website and the PraDigi apps, allows for self-paced experiential learning for students of all learning levels, and is available in 11 regional languages.

The solution currently serves 300,000+ children aged 10-14 years and 7000+ youth volunteers (coaches) aged 14-25 years across 3000 villages and urban communities through 25000 tablets.

PraDigi Open Learning provides digital devices and content related to school and life to children aged 10-14 years. With the support of an established social and digital infrastructure, Pratham staff members facilitate learning around foundational skills, school-based curriculum, creative projects, and more, for individuals and groups. Students learn key skills related to self-paced, self-directed learning, as well as skills related to communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. 

Youth volunteers aged 14-25 support student groups from their communities in their learning journeys. PraDigi Open Learning uses an ‘Education for education (EfE)’ model; in return for helping facilitate children’s education, the youth volunteers are provided with short online courses focusing on vocational and life skills. These are introductory courses on topics including spoken English, electrical, automotive (2 and 4 wheeler), personality development, and more. Youth are encouraged to use these courses to explore their interests and build new skills.

Pratham is an innovative learning organization created to improve the quality of education in India. Established in 1995 to provide education to children in the slums of Mumbai, Pratham has grown in both scope and scale, with programs today reaching children and youth across the country.

As one of the largest non-governmental organizations in the country, Pratham focuses on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the education system. Working directly with children and youth as well as through large-scale collaborations with government systems, Pratham programs reach millions of lives every year.

Central to the PraDigi Open Learning program’s success is the field implementation team; the Cluster Resource Leaders (CRLs). Pratham CRLs implement the program on the ground and work directly with the target communities. They spread awareness about the program, mobilize youth volunteers from each community, conduct orientations for guardians and assessments for learners, and visit each community on a regular basis. CRLs are usually from the targeted communities or neighboring areas and thus act as the voice of the needs of the children and youth. They constantly provide input on content requirements, technical issues and the overall design of the model based on their own experience and from direct interactions with learners and the wider community. 

CRLs work closely with the youth volunteers in the communities they are responsible for. The youth volunteers who help facilitate the learning for younger children also provide valuable feedback on the program content and design. In fact, many of the current youth volunteers are alumni of the program. Along with guardians and other stakeholders, their involvement increases community ownership of the program.

Pratham wants to collaborate with funders, researchers and partners working in the space of EdTech for low-tech and under resourced communities. It would be a unique opportunity to collaborate, learn, gain technical know-how and share knowledge

PraDigi Open Learning provides innovative solutions designed for areas with low digital penetration and internet connectivity. Children learn in a hybrid format (though digital devices and in-person activities) and their community is encouraged to take ownership of their learning. This helps boost both scalability and sustainability.

A few PraDigi innovative approaches are listen below:

1. Low-tech: Pratham works in each village to create a technology-enabled learning environment for children and youth. In addition to tablets preloaded with offline app content, content is also prepared and delivered through low-tech resources such as TV, SMS, WhatsApp, and radio to support continued learning in remote communities. 

2. Community-driven: Significant time and energy is put into spreading awareness of the program in the community, orienting guardians and students on the program, mobilizing and training youth volunteers, and visiting and contacting communities on a regular basis. This builds trust in the program and creates a robust social structure of coaches, guardians, and prominent community stakeholders, for community-driven learning.

3. Entirely voluntary approach: The tablet is placed directly in the hands of children, who voluntarily come together in groups to learn and create. Learners make their own groups, decide group names, how to rotate the tablet amongst themselves, and when to meet. Through the PraDigi apps, they can choose what to learn and set their own pace.

4. Accessible, contextualized content: Content provided to learners is suited to the target demographic and the Indian context. Resources are available in 11 regional languages, and the apps are designed for both online and offline access. Content available through the PraDigi apps and the Pratham Open School website are open access. 

Based on our learnings over the years, Pratham will continue to focus on the following goals: 

1. Develop and scale the model of PraDigi Open Learning to create educational opportunities based on the pillars of digital infrastructure, social structure, and experiential content.

2. Design and develop content, apps, and programs as independent learning tools for learners across the ages of 3-18+ to prepare them for school, work, and life.

3. Develop partnerships with nonprofits, governments, and EdTech organizations for the generation of know-how and solutions, and the implementation of programs.

The next steps include expanding the program in other middle and low-income countries, because our model is easily replicable in remote and rural low-tech contexts.

Pratham digital’s analytics efforts strive to understand how students engage with the apps and how engagement impacts their learning outcomes. 

Students’ engagement is defined by 3 metrics- 

1. Regularity: How often they use the tablet, measured by average days per month

2. Duration: How long they use the tablet for, measured by average app time per day

3. Exploration: how much content they explore, measured by average resources accessed per month and assessments

Using K-means clustering, students are divided into categories based on their engagement levels, namely, High, Medium and Low engagement clusters. Pratham also analyzes students’ resource engagement patterns to identify what content is ‘popular’ among students based on their age, class, and geography. Videos & Games are clustered based on 4 metrics - 

• Complete views - The proportion of times the video was watched completely (at least 95% of its duration)

• Repeat views - The proportion of times the video or a game was watched by a student more than once

• Average viewing duration- The average proportion of the duration of the video or game that students watch

• Average users per month - The average number of students that access the video or game each month

Pratham’s learning content is aimed to improve student’s learning outcomes. Tracking student’s assessment results and correlating that with their app usage is a key feature of Pratham’s analysis. The validity of Pratham’s assessments is evaluated using Item Response Theory to understand the ability of each question to accurately measure student performance.

PraDigi Open Learning Programme works under two basic assumptions: 1) it takes a village to educate a child, and 2) children are naturally inclined to learn. These two premises underpin the design of the Programme. By raising awareness about the status of education in the village and creating ownership of learning interventions among community members, Pratham works with each village to create a physical learning environment for children. 

It provides the digital infrastructure for these spaces, as well as the learning content—consisting of play-based approaches to learning—to be facilitated by volunteers in the community. There are no teachers in the programme. Instead the programme taps into children’s natural learning curiosity to enable entirely student-group-led activities, with volunteers acting as supervisors and facilitators. Children form their own groups of 5–6 students, choose the projects they’d like to collaboratively work on, and present what they have learned in front of a live audience. Project focus areas include health, environment, creativity and education.

The programme leverages several technologies to deliver learning. Speech-to-text technology, for example, is used to support children’s reading practices. With the support of private-sector partners, volunteers, Pratham developed its own customized products, which includes games, quizzes, reading material, assessments and other resources for children, families and volunteers. To ensure accessibility to their content, the programme also partners with other NGOs to help translate resources into 12 regional languages in India. The programme provides families with tablets to enable them to work with their children on activities at home. Resources are made available offline in the case of unstable internet connections.

Going forward, Pratham would like to expand the program in 20,000+ communities of India through partnership leveraging the smartphones and devices present with parents and community members. 

The program makes use of multiple technology stacks to support the various modes of learning design and delivery - 

1. The PraDigi android applications support intuitive HTML5 and Android games. Videos,PDFs and Audio file support is also available. 

2. A content management system has been developed in Microsoft Dot.Net with relational database support of Microsoft SQL Server to reinforce this.

3. All API projects that push content to the apps and pull usage in JSON are developed in Dot.Net. 

4. The usage data is again maintained in MS SQL Server.

5. The mobile app has an Assessment module which also has an independent management system to create question banks and exams built using the same tech stack.

6. Once the content is downloaded, the app functions offline and records usage of the content consumed and assessments given whenever there is internet available.

7. To leverage cross platform sustainability, web-based versions of these modules are also available.

The program includes members who belong to the community itself. Central to the PraDigi Open Learning program’s success is the field implementation team; the Cluster Resource Leaders (CRLs). Pratham CRLs implement the program on the ground and work directly with the target communities. They spread awareness about the program, mobilize youth volunteers from each community, conduct orientations for guardians and assessments for learners, and visit each community on a regular basis. CRLs are usually from the targeted communities or neighboring areas and thus act as the voice of the needs of the children and youth. They constantly provide input on content requirements, technical issues and the overall design of the model based on their own experience and from direct interactions with learners and the wider community. 

 Further to ensure gender diversity, a sincere effort is made to include female CRLs so that they can engage with female members of the community and ensure their participation within the program.

Pratham raises money in the form of grants, funds and donations issued by foundations, organizations, corporations and individuals. The PraDigi Open Learning initiative is currently being supported by Sarva Mangal Family Trust (SMFT), Adobe, Google amongst a few.

The financial sustainability of the program is not just ensured through these grants but is also embedded in the model itself. Being a low-touch model with low set-up cost, the program provides tablets to the community instead of an individual. The community ensures the upkeep of the digital devices and ensures that it is accessible to all. Over the past 7 years, the average percentage of devices that are damaged annually has been less than 4%.

Additionally, the human resources dedicated to the program are also minimal. While initially, the program was supported by one Pratham staff member for 5 villages, now the ratio has increased to 1:20 villages. This model of limited hardware and infrastructure is also being tested in close to 20,000 villages across the country.