Digital Education: Is It Really A Panacea to All Cures?

The number of students attending schools in Indian villages is rising, but another shocking study shows that the majority of the students of class sixth in rural India cannot read even a class second text book and are unable to solve simple mathematical problems.

The statistics is a clear indicator that even though the education sector has witnessed a significant horizontal growth at the national level in the last few years, yet the access to quality education is confined only to urban and semi urban population. There are reasons for this state of affairs. The poor infrastructure, lack of committed teachers, lack of good study materials and textbooks and an extremely high students-teacher ratio are some of the main factors responsible for this state of affairs.

The issue is - how to address this problem! It’s a huge task given that it’s not easy to solve some of the basic challenges confronting this sector. Is there some out-of-the-box solution for this problem! Technology is often seen as the panacea for all the problems and this has been the focus of the policy makers in recent times for addressing development related issues in various sectors including education. The government is putting in a lot of effort to make technology-enabled schools in villages to improve the quality of education, but without a clear vision and direction, this is yet to translate into some positive and concrete results. As a result, huge amount of government fund is going down the drain.

But implementing digital education in villages has its own sets of challenges. Some of the main deterrents are poor Internet connectivity and limited exposure of technology to rural teachers given their low to average level of exposure. Language is also supposed to be a big barrier as teachers as well as students are not comfortable with English language which is the main language in the digital world.

There is probably a big opportunity waiting to be uncovered through some path-breaking innovative technology to address these basic, yet fundamental problems facing the rural spectrum. Can digital technology firms, companies involved in developing digital learning apps, mobile apps rise to the occasion to meet the challenge? Only time has the answer whether digital technology can help bridge the gap between urban and rural education, which is more of a haves and a have-nots divide.