Exclusive | Interview with Dr. Abhinav Mathur on Technology and Empowering Teachers in India

Educating for sustainability is being recognized as a key priority and integral to quality education globally but there is little shift in classroom practices.There are close to 10 Million teachers in India teaching over 300 Million children in 1 Million schools. Almost 90% of teachers are not trained regularly; they remain unaware of innovative pedagogies in both scholastic and co-scholastic areas and are either unaware or find it difficult to integrate increasingly critical concepts, such as Life Skills, Sustainable Development Goals, Social & Emotional Learning, Gender Sensitivity, and Digital Citizenship, within their classroom teaching. ChalkLit, developed by MillionSparks Foundation, provides a comprehensive capacity building and lifelong learning programs for teachers, school leadership and administration at scale through partnerships with state education departments and school bodies. The platform also allows other content and training organizations to host their content and run blended or completely online programs.

Dr. Abhinv Mathur

Chin@Vator sat down with Dr. Abhinav Mathur the Founding Director and Chairman of Million Sparks Foundation that is developing ChalkLit, a Mobile App centered platform, to learn more about how he is using technology to empower the teachers in India. Abhinav has worked for twenty-four years in leadership roles in large Multi National Corporations. He ran cutting edge innovative global businesses in areas such as Mobility, Telecommunications, Financial Technology, Entertainment, Health Care and Education. He has co-founded Million Sparks Foundation in 2016 to give back to society by contributing to the Education Space. Abhinav is a PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, an MBA from Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, and Bachelors in Engineering from NSIT Delhi.

Chin@Vator: Could you briefly introduce yourself and Million Spark Foundation for us please?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: I had a very fulfilling career, and during which I was exposed to a lot of businesses in education. I saw a lot of gaps in the way the education was getting structured. In fact, very specifically, I got alarmed with the type of education that children are getting.We decided to explore opportunities to contribute to improving the overall education across the country. So, we did a few things, but we realized that if you really want to do something which can impact education at scale, it has to be done working with the government and it has to be done in a not for profit model. And that is how we decided to actually set up this foundation.

Education in India has a multitude of issues, from the school buildings, availability of teachers, toilets, to the availability of books and money to buy them, you have to choose what exactly you want to do. Because both my wife and I are technologists, whatever approach we thought we could take, to create a meaningful impact on the life and learning outcomes of children,   it will have to have technology behind it. But the availability of technology with children and their families requires a certain minimum amount of money and a kind of infrastructure at home. The other alternatives, and probably the broader alternative, is to enable the teacher. We believe that a teacher changes the world one student at a time. So that is where we started from.

If you look at the gap which exists globally, essentially there are two large problems: one, teachers in the best schools use methodologies which are extremely superior in comparison to the teachers in schools which are not as advanced. It points to a gap between the best and the worst schools in the country, in every country. The second thing, is that there is a huge skill uncertainty with regards to what skills will enable children today to succeed in the future workforce. Critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative team efforts are skills that are required for succeeding in the future workforce.

Out of these 10 million teachers, one can simply assume that sixty or seventy percent of them would have been taught maybe twenty years ago when they got certified. They may be getting trained from time to time, but what is required now more than ever before, is that these teachers have to be taught on a continuous basis, so they acquire skills which they can use in the classrooms to prepare students who have very different work profiles waiting for them in the future. There is a need to focus on teacher training, so they can deliver better and comprehensive classes.

Not only do we train teachers on scholastic topics, but wealso expose them to co-scholastic topics such as life skills, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, sustainable development goals, and gender. The appreciation for sustainable development goals, everybody says it’s so important, but if you look around the developing countries, around 900 million to 1 billion students will come out of schools by 2030. Nobody is telling them about in what ways they, their families and their communities can act responsibly towards the environment and contribute to solve each of the SDGs. If by 2030 they do not have such exposure, they will continue to create the havoc that our generation created. And we will not achieve the sustainable development goals. We want to equip the teacher, not only with academic knowledge, concept, pedagogy, so that they can teach students better, but also equip the children, so that they are better equipped for the uncertain future and also able to acquire the skills to be better citizens of the world and become catalysts of this change as well.

Chin@Vator: So, how do you use technology to achieve that goal? How do you empower the teacher?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: We have an app called ChalkLit, you can download it for both iOS and Android. There are currently 220,000 active users.

The objective, first of all, is to focus on the SDG for education, which says there should be equitable and inclusive education and life-long opportunities for all. While we talk about lifelong opportunities for students, we are not providing life-long opportunities to our teachers. For the 10 million teachers of India, and the 70 million teachers around the world, perhaps only 10 percent would be very well versed with technology so it becomes important to ensure that our product should be easy to use and should use elements from the apps like Whatsapp and Facebook which are popular with teachers.

So we came across three things which we have put on a product.

The first intervention is Trainings, which we partner with the state, the governments so that they can offer these trainings to their teachers and these teachers get certificates from the government once they have completed this training.

Our trainings are both scholastic and co-scholastic topics. About 200-300 topics in which teachers have a lot of conceptual gaps in their understanding and knowledge are identified. The objective is not to create a textbook but to help a teacher gain conceptual and pedagogical insight so that they can deliver that particular topic in the class better.

Image from http://www.millionsparks.org/chalklit.html

There are trainings on probability, menstruation, number systems, but there are also training on how do you integrate the sustainable development goals in classroom teaching and what are the responsible behaviors towards the world, understanding and prevention of child sexual abuse, elimination all forms of corporal punishment in classrooms through positive reinforcement, and a digital literacy for teachers, etc.

Image from http://www.millionsparks.org/chalklit.html

The second intervention is teacher tools. Every teacher is typically told how to do lesson planning in an abstract manner, and is expected to do so and then come to the classroom. How many teachers would have the motivation to do lesson planning every single day 365 days a year? What we also do is to prepare materials, lesson plans for reference for nearly every topic for every grade in multiple languages. From how much time they should spend on this topic, to the learning outcome, purpose, teaching methodologies, common misconceptions, reinforcing learning, assessment and assignment to make sure the learning happens and stays etc., it is this kind of framework that we have created for every single sub topic.

The third intervention is on the app, where home screen is actually a feed. It's a wall just like a Facebook wall or on a Twitter page.We push daily contents through channels like best practices of teachers, interesting ideas that they can try in the classroom, education news both in India and globally. Teachers can reference these when preparing for class.

ChalkLit Content Development Framework- Image from http://www.millionsparks.org/chalklit.html

Chin@Vator: How did the name ChalkLit come about?

Image from http://www.millionsparks.org/chalklit.html

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: Though ChalkLit may sound like chocolate, the idea was far more invigorating. So our belief is, the sun comes up it lights up the world, and it is the same in the classroom when the teacher uses the chalk, it lights up the class. Teachers are the sparks that ignite the fire in children’s mind so when we say million sparks, we are saying we want to enable millions of teachers and they will in turn spark a billion fire in the next ten years.

Chin@Vator: Online learning, without adequate supervision, self-motivation and drive, can be hard to implement and see results. How does ChalkLit address this problem? And how do you assess the results of their learning?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: Take an online learning platform like Coursera for example. It has a completion rate of 4 percent. The problem is that I go to a course, register and enter the class. There is no competition, and a very easy exam and there is no reason for me to complete it necessarily. We can’t afford that with teachers. We can’t have teachers come in and not complete the courses. So how we are structured is we have a set of processes and a call center to remind teachers to complete. We also have an AI system to see which teacher is most likely not to complete the course and we reach out and encourage them to complete their courses by sending them emails, remind their principals to encourage them. We create online events and discussions to engage teachers during the training programs. We have close to 85% completion rate across our trainings.

As for measuring the impact of ChalkLit, we have teamed up with Mission Measurement that is based in Chicago. They have helped us develop classroom observation tools, which we use to observe classrooms to ensure that teachers are using the methodology that we have trained them with. The government also does independent evaluations, once or twice a year.

Chin@Vator: What would be your advice on the operation and management of this education foundations or platforms as yours?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: My advice is that it is a very difficult thing to do first of all. And raising capital for something like this is not going to be easy. You have to be very clear with regard to the kind of talent that you hire because it requires extremely talented and experienced people, it is not always easy to find such people. Otherwise it is a very fulfilling experience when you see so many teachers doing trainings on your platform and students starting to benefit from our efforts. My advice from the very first day is that you should try to focus on what would be your measurement and evaluation strategy and how will you ensure the impact you are trying to work with is delivered to the students.

Chin@Vator: What do you think about those initiatives that bring the content and technology to the classroom instead of empowering the teachers? What are the limitations to this approach?   

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: Students, in their initial years of learning up until their reach secondary school, are usually not very self-motivated to study and in fact even later only 10-20% students are motivated enough to study regularly. If you think of putting technology to the classroom, maybe as a supplement, it’s not going to be very effective in ensuring equitable learning, The second thing is that with technology, the world is getting is becoming lonelier by the day. If you force the technology into the classroom, that loneliness and the depression will only increase. There has to be a peer to peer and elder to minor interactions. Unless those interactions happen, we will not have a society of functional people, it will become dysfunctional.

I am not against technology in the classroom, but what I am against is that you believe that everything can be taught by games, by content, by multimedia, I don’t think everything will be taught. Try that, and it will create lots of problems.

If a child has played a prank on or bullied another child, how will you handle that? A child will also have very different doubts, it could be very weird doubts, which technology will not be able to handle. Technology may come ten years from today that will be able to do it, but if you take things like ethical behavior, respect for the girl, all those you can’t teach these through technology.

If all our teachers are restricted to just being people who will press a button and then sit and just listen to that, then the class stop and may be ask two questions, people will not respect teachers, that’s also a problem. See, there are multiple things which will happen. Is technology ready today, to take care all of that and is that the right thing? I am not sure. I am not an ethics professor, but I’m a person who knows well that human and technology interaction should be structured if it is being employed for learning.

Chin@Vator: What is the future plan for ChalkLit?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: We’re going to reach one million teachers by December 2020, around ten million teachers by 2025, and then we'll hopefully reach 70 million teachers by 2030. With the adequate resources and money, I don't think this will be a problem.

Chin@Vator: What is your understanding of this trend of using technology to solve social issues?

Dr. Abhinav Mathur: I think technology is inherently very capable. If WhatsApp could reach a billion people all over the place, why can’t teachers be in their rooms and receive all the relevant information? If you deliver a great-quality product, why not?

Not every social problem can be solved by technology. But slowly the possibilities are emerging with the fact that everybody will hopefully have a smartphone in about 10 years' time will be a huge opportunity for several other problems such as the lack of information, lack of access, lack of feedback mechanism.