Gurumurthy Kasinathan

The government is fiddling, as children are losing foundational literacy and numeracy. The Karnataka government has opened schools fully for grades 9-12 and partly for 6-8. However, lower primary schools (LPS) consisting of grades 1-5 remain closed and may have a zero year (a year of no school). Most states seem to favor keeping LPS closed.…

The report is a critical review of IFC investments in EdTech with recommendations to IFC, Union and state governments and civil society on EdTech funding, policy and program.

EdTech 1 in India got funding of 3.8 billion from venture capitalists in 2021 and has a future valuation of USD 30 billion. Accordingly, this…

Visual Coding camp

One highlight of our work in the “Teachers Communities of Learning” program during 2019-20 was the camps conducted on visual programming at St Euphrasias Girls High School during January 2020. The objective was to strengthen STEM capabilities in the students, and we…

Translation is seen as a high-skilled professional activity, which restricts its reach. Three members of an NGO, that works with government schools, attempted to translate text from English to Kannada, using easily accessible digital tools; the NGO also supported teams of student-teachers and teachers to use these tools for translating…

Schools and educational institutions have tended to use proprietary software applications: software that is not sold, but ‘licensed’, by the vendor. Here, the institution is only a ‘user’, and neither owns the software nor has any control over it. Over the last decade, however, the Indian public school and higher education systems have made…

A virus may be apolitical but our response to it reveals biases and inequities in our systems. As we all adapt to the new “normal”, it is critical that we look at the stated and unstated assumptions, and implicit and explicit changes being made to our social welfare systems, which impact people differently.

Millions of children have been…

In the past, Open and Distance Learning (ODL)  was primarily conducted through snail mail where institutions sent reading and other materials to learners. With the advent of Internet and related digital technologies, this has gradually changed. This paper explores how a free and open digital technology like MediaWiki, and Wikimedia open…

IT for Change, in collaboration with Foundation for Education, Ecology and Livelihoods (FEEL) has designed an e-learning course for Mathematics teachers which is currently being offered for Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghathan (KVS) teachers. KVS is the Central Government institution that runs schools for…

Recently, IT for Change (ITfC) conducted the Student Digifest 2020 aimed at providing a platform to allow students from government and government-aided schools in Bengaluru to demonstrate their learning through the use of digital technology. The outcome was an array of presentations and artwork by nearly 100 students from eight schools across…

The percentage enrolment of children in government schools overall, is declining every year and that of private schools increasing, as the statistics collected by the Government of India indicate. ‘Private’ has become a buzzword for ‘quality education’, or at least to making a claim to be better than ‘government’.