Mobile Education Comes to Villages

Mobile Education Comes to Villages is a Mail Today report by Shayan Ghosh, published on 27 May 2011, examining how mobile phones are being positioned as a vehicle for delivering education to rural India. The article draws on comment from Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, alongside representatives of IGNOU, EnableM, Mig33, and InnovateEdu.

Article Details
Full Text
Context and Background

Article Details

📰 Published in:: Mail Today
📅 Date:: 27 May 2011
👤 Author:: Shayan Ghosh
📄 Type:: News Report
📰 Publication Link:: Not available online

Full Text

PEOPLE living in remote villages, trekking many miles to schools and colleges before dropping out, can now look forward to a tech option — mobile education. Education over mobile phones is vital in India, where the literacy rate according to the 2011 census is 74.04 per cent, observers note.

India has 791 million mobile subscribers according to regulatory body TRAI with a significant share in villages. That is the target group several start-ups and educational institutions are looking at.

Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) based in New Delhi, is taking a lead in the matter. "The technology is pretty new in India and we are planning to implement things like SMS alerts to students and course-specific databases," K. R. Srivathsan, pro vice-chancellor, IGNOU, said.

"It will definitely change the scenario of education in rural India," noted Srivathsan.

"All possible components required in a learning cycle including auditory, visual, reading, writing, collaboration, interaction, recording and computing," Amit Zaveri, CEO, EnableM, a company that delivers education through mobile devices, said.

"In rural areas the challenges for delivery of learning content and services are many including physical distances (to institutes etc.), lack of teachers, no or limited access to standardised and branded content, time and cost constraints, limited capability for peer assessments, lack of skills development facilities for employability," Zaveri added.

Mig33, a Singapore-based mobile social network is hopeful that the mobile revolution could actually mean impart education to all.

"Mobile phones have moved from being phone devices to communication devices. With the advent of 3G, this is going to become bigger and better. Also tablets are expected to play very effective role in this," Mohit Gundecha, India operations head, Mig33, said.

"With 3G the video clips can help educate, smart apps can help people learn, good SMS apps can engage audiences about education concepts. We already see a host of companies coming in to take care of the hardware aspects and digital content to match the need," Gundecha explained.

According to Vikram Nagaich, director and founder, InnovateEdu, on one side, with mobile phones the reach of the content could be very wide. However, the efficacy would have to be delivered through extremely innovative and sophisticated content.

"Mobiles can penetrate better as they have things in favour like better battery life and people do not need any training to operate it. This gives it an upper hand over computers," Sunil Abraham, ED, Center for Internet and Society, said.

Context and Background

By mid-2011, India had one of the world’s largest mobile subscriber bases but a literacy rate of just over 74 per cent, with significant variation in access across regions, particularly in rural areas. The gap between mobile penetration and formal education access made mobile-based learning an attractive policy and commercial proposition, drawing interest from established institutions such as IGNOU as well as private start-ups.

The article reflects a broader optimism in Indian technology journalism of the period about mobile phones as instruments of social inclusion. The 3G spectrum auctions had concluded in 2010, and faster mobile internet access was beginning to reach beyond metropolitan areas, lending practical credibility to the idea of video and app-based learning in rural settings.

Sunil Abraham’s observation that mobile phones require no special training to operate, unlike computers, identifies a key adoption advantage that informed much of the mobile-first thinking in Indian edtech during this period. The argument was that the familiarity and portability of the handset lowered the barrier to entry in ways that PC-based learning could not.