"On days when you are down and low, remember that what you are trying to achieve at Drishtee is extremely difficult. Hopefully, the degree of difficulty, will fill you up with energetic feelings towards your job and our mission. I would like to share with you the "difficult” process of launching a new course i.e. spoken English classes."
The easy part
We knew that there was a shortage of qualified teachers in rural India. This was especially relevant for subjects like English. We also knew that connecting teachers in cities like Delhi with rural students and thus delivering the instruction remotely was one clear way to solve the problem.
I got lucky in this case as the insight mentioned above can be very difficult to attain. In fact for another course, Computer Teacher Training, this insight took almost 3 months to materialize. But I was happy that we knew the problem and a possible solution.
Bring on the difficulty
Skype
One way to connect students in rural India with a teacher in Delhi, I thought, was over the Internet with tools like Skype. I also looked at Google Talk which offers better performance when compared with Skype, but Google Talk currently doesn't allow a user to make conference calls. So I decided to go with Skype.
“Pick the lowest hanging fruit” - it makes sense doesn't it. If we could find kiosks with a broadband connection, and a volunteer teacher (and we did, got lucky again), we could easily deliver instruction remotely and would have very little in costs. I was excited!
Fact: Broadband connectivity in rural India is not persistent.
On some days classes would run without a hitch, but on others the following sentence would be repeated a million times: “Hello, hello, can you hear me, hello?” I felt sad and low, as I knew the solution was more elusive that I had originally thought.
A difficult conversation with a participating kiosk operator added to my misery. Arjun Pandey, kiosk operator from Sultanpur, called me one day and said, “This course is in a total loss, am I a fu**** working with you guys.” I was startled at his use of expletive language. “Every time the class does not run due to poor connectivity, I loose money on the diesel generator – Rs 50 per hour, ”he added.
I knew that I needed to find an alternative fast.
Speaker Phone
“Mobile phones are pretty pervasive in rural India,” I remember thinking to myself. So I decided that the students would gather around the kiosk operator's mobile phone during classes. The kiosk operator would turn the phone's in-built speaker “on”, which would allow all students to communicate with the teacher.
“This would eliminate the use of the computer, and would bring down costs,” I said to Nitin, my boss at the time. Also, connectivity would not be an issue any more as cellular technology delivers better performance than broadband in rural India. Perfect!!!
Wrong again! The output produced by the in-built speaker, I found out, was not loud enough for all the students in the class. Additionally, the phone would catch all surrounding noises in the kiosk, including the honking motorcars, and the chatter within the classroom.
Disillusioned, our volunteer teacher threatened to quit.
Nitin and I brainstormed an alternative and came up with the “Knowledge Device”.
Gyan Yantra or the Knowledge Device
THE GYAN YANTRA : Speakers and Mobile Phone
“Connect one end of the hands free device to the phone, and the other end to external speakers,” I said to the electrician we had hired for the job. The solution worked! It produced sound loud enough for a class size of 50 students.
I conducted a pilot study in Sultanpur and Munger and delivered 20 hours of instruction through this device. I also kept a log of the issues faced during each class. I look back at that log now and realize that we continued to face several niggling problems. For instance, when calling rural India from Delhi, the Airtel landline did not produce the level of quality with the “Gyan Yantra” that a cell phone would. But by and large, the classes ran smoothly. So I decided to ignore these niggling issues.
I priced the Gyan Yantra at Rs 700 and sent a demo machine to Assam. We started marketing the device and the associate spoken English course. At the time of this writing, 9 “Gyan Yantra” orders have been delivered to different kiosk operators from Assam. This is equivalent to 90 students signing up for the spoken English course.
After experiencing many disappointing days in the last 5 months, I was glad to have put some closure on the pilot.
In the end
Prior to joining Drishtee, I worked as a consultant for a software firm called Appian Corporation in the U.S. An equivalent effort at Appian - leading a new project for 5 months - would result in the successful deployment of software which could handle 114 different loan processes and manage over 2.5 million loan documents.
The stakes were clearly higher at Appian, and surprisingly, so were the rewards. Why, you ask? Because the market (deploying software for financial services industry) and the processes (investment loans, retirement loans, line of credits) were better defined than at Drishtee.
This poor definition or uncertainty makes our jobs at Drishtee extremely difficult, which in turn can lead to several days of discontentment. Hopefully, this degree of difficulty, will fill you up with energetic feelings towards your job, and our mission. It has that effect on me.
Annexure – Lessons Learned
In case you are not bored yet, the following is a list of lessons learned that I documented while developing the “Gyan Yantra”
- Lesson Plan in addition to the book needs to be scanned or emailed to KOs
- The teacher's laptop should always be plugged in
- Skype ids should be added and confirmed before the first call
- Student mobiles should be switched off during class
- The teacher should keep an eye on class participants to see if some one is offline
- Ensure that the books reach students before the first class
- The teacher should always specify who she is addressing while teaching
- Need to make one student in charge of the microphone
- Time spent for attendance should be reduced from class time.
- Ask the students to take notes during the class
- Skype requires a KO to run a computer and thus a diesel generator. This increases his/her cost of operations. Phone, if works, is preferable
- A volunteer teacher might not want to come to Head Office, which makes it difficult to conduct conferences over the phone.
- There is too much background noise from KO with speakers on phone
- Non cooperative volunteer teacher is worse than no teacher.
- All students should go through an initial assessment test. This will help us in determining the baseline.
- The progress of students can be measured through their final test. This way one can prove if the students are learning on the phone.
- The KO should be responsible for holding the class on time. No excuses to start the class late for other businesses and for navratras or holi etc.
KUNAL CHAWLA
AVP, Education Services, Drishtee
f15d5b74-0896-4d89-8b50-5a6c6fbfb246|0|.0