The education tech sector hopes to offer more personalised services with companies and startups, which dream to create anything from ‘digital learning assistants’ to augmented reality products, creating teams to explore the next big thing in education. These teams are not bound by any quarterly goals or targets and their sole mission is to develop future edutech products.
One of the companies which is working towards making education more personalised and interactive is Xerox Research Center India (XRCI). Manish Gupta, Director of XRCI, wants to create a personalised digital learning assistant for every learner. This assistant can understand the individual strengths and weakness of learners and track him/her from school to college and beyond. It would recommend the right video content depending on the learning preferences of users.
This may just be a futuristic vision, but work on this has already started. A team comprising experts on machine learning, computer vision, text analysis and speech recognition has been formed to make this a workable product.
“The future of education is online, personalised, multi-modal, interactive and immersive. Traditional education has to go beyond classrooms and provide new tools and techniques that teach students in this new, highly connected environment,” said Vaibhav Rajan, a senior research scientist at XRCI. Rajan’s strength lies in machine learning –– a field where programs can be made to ‘learn’ on their own, based on relevant data.
XRCI’s product TutorSpace is already in the market and tries to improve content consumption by building an automatic table of content for online educational videos, and extracts concepts from videos that are hyperlinked to the times in the video where these concepts are described.
The core to envisioning futuristic products is to build a team that does not have set targets to meet. “They (the team) have a longterm horizon. The team can experiment and iterate without worrying about quarterly goals and deadlines,” said Kapeesh Saraf, Director of Product at Coursera, an online provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs).
“It has been nine months since we formed the ‘Next Gen’ team. We took some of our smartest engineers and give them freedom to explore ways we can personalise the experience and over the course of the next two-three years transform learning,” he says.
The Next Gen team is trying to find solutions for two problems –– improving completion rates in courses and making learning more social. For this, a team comprising data scientists and machine learning experts, runs multiple tests to understand what features and changes will work.
“Our hope is to launch a lot of tests and learn from each test and iterate towards a vision of an actual product that we probably cannot imagine right now,” said Saraf. If the social angle and personalisation are the next big goals, edutech is already seeing an influx of futuristic technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. Startups such as augmented reality-based education technology startup Smartivity and publishing house MBD Group, among others, are experimenting with these technologies.
“Education is fast moving now. You have to come out with innovative packages. The challenge is to increase learning outcomes. Virtual reality and augmented reality are the new frontiers of education and present an exciting opportunity,” said Monica Malhotra Kandhari, Managing Director, MBD Group. As part of its virtual reality initiative, MBD will be developing interactive walkthroughs of various monuments and objects.
Source: Economic Times
