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.

The fluid state of mobile technology

The turn of the last millennium witnessed some real challenges. The first was the now infamous Y2K that wasn’t as bad a virus as it was projected to be, and the second was the dot com boom followed soon after by a bubble burst that shook the economy across the globe. On an equal scale is the challenge posed by the market on the mobile technology in the present decade, which unless addressed in the right perspective, has the potential to shake the global economy the same way as dot com revolution did in the late 90s.

Mobile apps have brought about a kind of revolution in the way people use digital technology. It is probably the single biggest breakthrough after internet revolution that took the world by storm about 25 years back. But the landscape for mobile apps is changing very fast in recent years. If the mobile app developing companies do not match the market expectations, it may be extremely difficult for them to survive the onslaught of market dynamics.

·         Mobile apps developers have to focus more and more on improving user experience. They have to ensure that what they develop should work seamlessly across all screen size and devices. Single app for all phones can add value to their brand.

·         App developers must adopt full proof and up-to-date measures to secure their apps infrastructure. Majority of us store important information in our phones, to which many of the apps resting in our phones have access. To keep all kinds of data and information including those relating to transactions safe, we are also willing to pay more.

·         Certain sectors such as health care institutes and banks are prone to attracting cyber criminals, and data security is extremely critical for such users. App developers have to take special care of the security concerns of vulnerable sectors.

·         There is a huge market for apps developed in vernacular languages. In a country like India, where smart phone user population is growing rapidly, there are millions of people who do not understand English. Addressing their need should be the prime concern of app development companies.

·         It’s an age of travelling light with minimum baggage. The same applies to the apps that you carry in your smart phone. People expect light apps with minimum memory space and nothing that starts eating your RAM or makes your phone slow.

These are some of the few market realities that sooner or later the companies will have to come to terms with in the rapidly changing digital landscape.

Mobile Apps: Preparing for Gen-next Offline Ecosystem

Google offering YouTube videos in offline mode in Indian market was a masterstroke. It was like touching the nerve of an average Indian user, irrespective of his social or economic status, geographical location, literacy level or age. Surprisingly, for all kinds of mobile users in India, whether in rural or urban areas, young or old, the price elasticity of demand for data usage is quite high, meaning thereby that the amount of data they use is very sensitive to the price they have to pay for it.

A large part of this high price elasticity is psychological as people tend to minimize their monthly expenditure on data plans they buy by resorting to means which are often not quite understandable. After all, a young student switching off his data on his mobile phone when he is watching a movie does not make any sense given that he does not even think twice before spending 500 bucks for a single show in the multiplex and spending another 200 on his popcorn bucket during interval. But it is also about extremely high cost of data usage vis-à-vis the hourly wages in India in comparison to many other developing countries that explains this kind of behaviour. A comparison with developed economies, on the other hand would in fact make the price of data usage in India appear prohibitively expensive.

Any app, if it has to be downloaded to make it functional, has to be downloaded online. But, how much data an app will use when it is being downloaded or when it is being used subsequently can put apps in vastly different categories, and make an app more or less attractive to a user who is sensitive about his data bill. The first differentiator is, of course the app size; a user is generally put off when the app is more than a certain size, and the size will depend on what kind of phone you are using, whether it’s a high end phone or a cheap handset with cramped memory space. And it’s a reality not worth ignoring by the app developers that a large majority of handsets have low memory space and a user might get put off by an app even of the size more than 8 to 10 MB.

The next differentiator is the data usage when the app is being run for use. There are apps that do not require internet connectivity at this stage or require connectivity for 50% of the time, so that the rest of the time, the application is running on offline internet. This is a kind of hybrid offline-online ecosystem, but it also means a trade-off has to be made between how much data needs to be stored in the handset’s memory to enable it to work to its full potential in an offline environment.

App developers who are economizing on the app size may be gaining a crucial competitive edge here. And there are companies which are addressing the size issues from a different strategy. Anant Computing Platform, for instance, works on this fundamental idea of enabling development of apps at almost one-tenth size of usual mobile applications, and they run smoothly even offline. They facilitate development of apps that run perfectly on low memory space phones.

The gen-next phones are most likely going to be offline primarily, and it’s not an over-statement at all when Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India says that "India will be the world's largest offline internet market" in the context of YouTube becoming available offline in the Indian market. 

There is a great potential here for app developers who can harp on the idea of minimizing on the app size and making it as much offline as possible in a largely hybrid environment.

World is going Small and so should MobileApps

When the feature phones dominated the mobile phone market, people needed just enough memory space to store their contacts, a few pictures, and maybe some audio files. But the smart phones changed the whole landscape. It was a change whose enormity is yet to sink in completely in the market and the market is yet to achieve the point of saturation to reach the potential capabilities of the phone.

With smart phones overtaking the market, there is no end to what people want to do with the small device that fits in their palm. They want to have lots and lots of pictures, audio & video files, even full length movies, and most of all, lots of apps.

Talking of the apps, there is simply no end to the list of useful apps. There are apps for entertainment, gaming, shopping, reading, learning, information, and for every category of use that one can think of. Any age-group, any socio-cultural profile, geographic region, linguistic background, literacy level, nature of profession one can think off – there are not one or two but hundreds, if not more apps just appropriate for the user.

The market for apps user is huge. There has been a drastic increase in smart phone users in India in the last few years. As per a latest statistics, the number of smart phone users by the end of the year 2016 is estimated to reach around 204.1 million, with the  worldwide number likely to exceed 2 billion users by that time. It’s a readymade market for the app developing companies, which have dotted the market space everywhere across the globe.

Yet the biggest bottleneck to downloading and keeping all the useful apps is the insufficient memory space of the phones, and it’s a real problem that not many app developing companies seem to be genuinely concerned about looking at the huge MB size of some of the apps hitting the market. They don’t realize that the moment you cross a threshold size barrier, which could be as low as even 30 to 40 MB, you are losing out on a big chunk of customers.  

While it’s true that people are spending a lot of money on buying expensive smart phones these days, yet every user doesn’t have a high end device. In a country like India, where a majority of smart phone users come from the low income level because of high concentration of population in rural areas, the market is flooded with inexpensive smart phones and one can get various cheap buying options under Rs 5000 to 6000 bracket.

Now these low cost smart phones have their own challenges and create various problems for app marketers. Some mobiles run on older Android versions, while others just don’t have sufficient memory space, which means that consumers very quickly reach a point when they need to begin uninstalling an app so as to make space for a new one. Naturally, choosing the right apps to keep in one’s phone is a difficult choice and a user has to be constantly struggling with this issue as more and more apps keep flooding the market.

Companies are coming up with large apps making them suitable for high end devices. They are adding more and more features and flashy interactions to attract those users and in the process are losing out on the low-end smart phone users. But, just because your phone does not have enough free space does not imply that you cannot have good apps in your phone.

App developers need to target the low end smart phone user by developing good apps that occupy less space in the phone. If they do not focus on making light apps there are high chances that their apps may get deleted immediately after downloading due to space constrain.

Making light apps may be often a trade-off between memory space and the app features. But there are companies that are addressing this issue and trying to figure out how to have the best of both. Anant Computing Platform is actively marketing itself claiming to help businesses develop light apps without compromising on features and quality. It claims reducing the size of a rich and heavy app to as much as 1/10th of a usual mobile application. You can have apps that can rest in your phone without taking much space but have all the functionalities of a rich and heavy app.

The punch line of the company says – “With Anant Computing, no more compromising on rich features because of the ever growing app size.” The idea is indeed revolutionary and has the potential to change the landscape of app development market!

Adult Literacy Initiative Through Mobile Applications

This is an age of “segmentation”, and as the marketing gurus call it – the “one-size-fits-all” strategy does not work. A company has written the script for its own failure if it does that. But segmentation based marketing strategy is never easy and as put very bluntly by Steve Jobs – “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time, you get it built, they’ll want something new”.

It can’t be more true especially in the digital market space. People have different level of digital literacy based on myriad number of socio-economic factors, age, profession, gender, and so on. The segmentation that is required is often too expensive a choice for firms, and is a difficult trade-off decision at the top.

For mobile apps, targeting adults and segregating them from the younger generation is not a choice; it’s more of a compulsion. Mobile apps are emerging as new learning tools not just for children and teenagers but for adults as well. However, app developers have not realised the true potential of adult literacy apps and there are not enough apps that cater the targeted audience in this category.

For an app to become successful, it is a very important that its design must focus on its target audience. Apps made for younger students cannot cater to the needs of adult students. Younger students have been growing up with this technology and so they have different expectations from learners of advanced age. Adult learners require ease and convenience of use, which is a lot more demanding need to fulfil as compared to the requirements of the young learners. Targeting this group means meeting the high expectations that they have from their mobile devices.

To appeal to adults, any educational app has to have an intuitive design and easy interface. Often a short tutorial on navigate within the app could prove to be very helpful. Adults can learn quickly but can also get frustrated easily and quickly.

These are basically issues of designs. There are various other issues as well that may trouble the adult learners. For instance, the need to update apps could be a nightmare given the speed at which apps are updated these days. Then, the sheer number of apps residing on the mobile phones today is at times scary even for the well initiated.

Imagine the plight of someone who isn’t too comfortable, and then having to organise his or her apps on the mobile devices. The auto update and the app bundling feature of Anant Computing Platform could prove to be a winner for your firm.

The ease with which Anant provides vernacular support in different Indian languages also means that this platform is capable of addressing the adult learners coming from different geographical and linguistic regions. The more segmentation you go for, the more your development cost is going to be. But this feature combined with the portability of apps across different OS will certainly compensate for the additional cost of development for different linguistic segments and different mobile devices working on diverse OS. Add to it the minuscule memory space required for apps bundled into Anant AppWallet and you could just be on the way to a real deal clincher.

Digital Education: Matching the Supply with Demand

There are a few recent studies that tell a lot about the changing landscape in the education sector:

• Education is the third most popular category in the downloaded apps from Apple's App Store.
• Mobile learning market worldwide is projected to touch $37 billion mark by 2020.
• Accenture 2014 Global Value of Higher Education Survey, based on a sample size of about 1500 across UK, US, Singapore, Australia and India has reported that about 70% of recent graduates and higher education students want institutions to use more and more of digital tools.
• By 2020, 98% of students are expected to use blended learning consisting of classroom as well as online components.
• Gaming has become a major learning technique. Whether you call it educational entertainment or academic game play, it has become a popular trend.

All these are indicators of the changing scenario of the way education is imparted to students at various levels. In fact, not just students, even companies are realizing the power of digital learning for corporate trainings. As per Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, the corporate digital market is set to overtake the learning in the traditional conference room settings of corporate headquarters.

While there is no doubt that there is huge demand for digital learning apps, the challenge before the apps development companies is that digital learning tools should be made more interactive and fun to enhance retention. Digital education is still a relatively young industry and it requires new and breakthrough models to make it exciting and interesting.

First of all, there are very few players who are offering course content catering to the diverse needs of learners. Then, there are issues of enabling technology that can address the hurdles like affordability, accessibility, mode of delivery, etc. AppWallet feature of Anant computing platform is remarkable in many ways in the sense that it allows different learning tools to be bundled for different customer groups based on their educational and socio-economic profile and needs. Low memory space, automatic update and auto app discovery are a few other features that the fast paced student community of today would be willing to embrace with open arms.

Bringing Rural Women into the Digital Fold

There are clear signs of a significant demographic shift in the internet users in the last few years in India. According to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group, a large proportion of the new internet users consist of female, rural, older, vernacular speakers and the mobile phone users. This demographic shift means that there are clear signals for apps development companies to reposition themselves by realigning their business and marketing strategy, and rural women, are now a critical link in their whole business plan.

Healthcare apps

Public healthcare is not very efficient in rural India and women are often the direct sufferers, as they are the primary caregiver for the family. Issues which could be easily treated are often left untreated leading to more serious health issues subsequently. Health apps that offer useful information on pregnancy and child care as well as common prevailing diseases like tuberculoses, malnutrition, and diarrhoea could be of great interest to rural women. Needless to say the features of organizing apps within AppWallet and the auto update feature of the apps contained inside are big plus points for such health apps.

Literacy apps

There is a rising level of aspirations among the new internet user groups, including rural women. The illiteracy rate is quite high among rural women and girls; they have either not attended the school or dropped mid way. But today, this group wants to be not just literate; it wants to go beyond the basic level of literacy to acquire knowledge which has been so far beyond their reach. The vernacular app development tool facilitated by Anant Computing Platform can prove to be the clear winner for getting rural womenfolk into the digital mainstream in a big way.

Entertainment apps

The changing landscape of rural economy has also meant that the rural women are no longer engaged in the routine mundane daily chores all through the day and are looking for doing other things as well such as listening to music, playing games, or doing such entertainment stuff. Apps developed through Anant Computing Platform, once downloaded do not require internet connections for running, and it is something that could prove to be quite an interesting proposition for this group of customer who may be a little concerned about the data download charges.