4 Learnings for Connected Learning Education Design from India

We would like to highlight our Learnings from a Practitioner’s Point Of View regarding Connected Learning Education Design in India. We would illustrate this with the experiences of an EdTech Company constantly battling real time challenges and resource constraints while operating in India – a country with enormous diversity and entrenched status quo school education systems.

SACHETISATION OF CONNECTED LEARNING: We often ignore the existing structure and context while proposing new solutions and may go overboard with magnanimous solutions. This learning highlights the developing world’s reality of successfully selling shampoo in small sachets in far greater numbers than in bottles!
ENABLING LEARNING ACROSS CONTEXTS: How to create solutions that can break limitations of place and time – from classroom , School and rare field visits to almost anywhere including home and neighbourhood; and anytime (weekends, holidays)? This limitation was keenly felt during the physical lockdown of schools due to Covid19.
DO NOT PRESUME and PREJUDGE WHAT CHILDREN CAN DO and CAN’T DO before posing challenges to them: Most problems are never discussed because of underlying presumptions or pre judgements that they may be difficult to solve! The highest motivation for children comes from their peers! We realized that the limiting factor is the “Gatekeeper attitude” itself, and this was even more in our last learning.
CONNECTED LEARNING IS FOR EVERYBODY
Covid19 posed some of the most agonizing and unanticipated challenges to the whole world. From the context of high population density in India, it multiplied the risks and challenges very differently. Coming up with innovative solutions to problems never faced before, with a diverse set of stakeholders – Doctors, Medical School nursing and support staff, Maker Lab Technicians, Designers, Teachers and Children and that too when physical movement was highly restricted is a classic example to demonstrate that Connected Learning is going to be for Everybody!