A forest is a library but a library is not a forest!

For those who can read it, a forest is like a library. From 1986 to 1992, I lived in a tribal village. Among the most fulfilling time I spent was in the forest, especially in the company of children I taught or those who lived near my home.

As we moved into the forest, I saw them look alertly at the bushes, trees and much else around them. They knew which of these presented opportunities (a fruit or a berry or a leaf that could be made into a whistle), which presented a threat (an insect that bit or stung or a danger such as a snake), or where you might fall and hurt yourself, or which was a good spot to sit and take a look at the world around you. They anticipated phenomena – which parts would be more interesting or more treacherous or dangerous after a shower or when it got too hot or after leaves had fallen and it was difficult to see the ground. They noticed changes, they commented on how something had been earlier and how it was now.

 

Children would accurately point out holes on a slope to say whether a scorpion was inside them or not, or would be able to pluck a particular leaf that could be crushed and put on a scratch or a wound, and acted as an effective, medicated bandage.

 

They navigated on paths new to them to find their way or set a general direction. They knew if an area was good for their purposes, such as when herding a group of cattle during a given season or when collecting forest produce. They made sense of sounds from different types of crickets or a truck lumbering through the forest track a kilometre away. They sensed when water was near or when not to mess with things.

 

The alert look that seized their faces, the searching eyes or ears or nose or hands or feet as they moved about expertly and casually, were all signs of persons competently reading the environment around them. That pause, curiosity and exploratory actions showed something new was being encountered, processed and recorded. The reaction, of moving urgently away from something or towards it, was instant reading that you and I might not conceive.

 

Very often, children would learn not just from their own experience but that of others too, by asking questions or being told about something at an opportune moment. As a novice, I was enabled a glimpse into this world by my expert guides and often left feeling inadequate by their quickness in reading the world around them.

 

In contrast, the kind of reading I taught them using books was too basic. It helped them read texts, maybe even make sense of those and occasionally enjoy or appreciate some pieces. But I doubt it could make them alert to ideas, concepts or new information in the way in which they were in their native forest environment or capture shifts in meaning or explore excitedly in search of a prize (e.g. a new revelation) or make their life more interesting or worthwhile or just plain rooted. No, we teach reading as an act to be performed, perhaps to satisfy some assessment, not as an enriched and enriching life to be lived.

 

In the end, as our children go through schooling, they move away from their enlivening forest but never reach that lively engagement with the written word and the vast windows of meaning it ought to open. In the end, the forest may be a library, but a library is not a forest.

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality - 2025-27

NITI Aayog – National Workshop on Quality Education

28 February, 2025

 

 

Getting Back To The Basics –

Key Focus Areas for Improving Education Quality

 

 

Subir Shukla

Ignus Pahal

 

 

In terms of getting back to the basics, in order to improve quality of education and learning for each child, there are three areas we need to focus on.

1. Increase the teaching learning time.

2. Improve the quality of processes and relationships that take place within that time, and

3. Prepare the ground for all children to attain higher order learning and not remain just at the basics.

 

Now to go into these in some detail.

 

1. Improving teaching learning time

While it is well understood that teachers are now burdened more than ever before with many other tasks than teaching, including filling in forms on WhatsApp or undertaking other activities, teaching-learning time is now also deeply affected by climate change too.

 

In a survey conducted in four major states of India last year, it was found that around 15 days on average are lost due to school closures resulting from climate events. However, between 20 to 30 days were also affected by near extreme climate events – i.e., when school was not closed but it was too hot or too cold or too wet to learn. And then when school does start after a gap, it is not as if momentum continues from before. Thus, we are losing around 40 to 50 days of teaching learning time every year, apart from all the other burden that we already have.

 

This requires us to do an audit and have some stronger data on exactly how much teaching learning time is actually there.

 

We also need to assess whether all the other tasks we are asking teachers to do lead to improvements in learning or not.

                                                                                                             

And then, given climate-induced disruptions, school needs to be seen not just as a space where we learn but as a state of learning – one in which learning continues beyond the physical building in order to overcome the effects of climate change.

 

Overall, our objective should be to enhance the time on task, within which there is engagement time and academic learning time, as much as possible.

 

 

2. Improving the quality of processes and relationships

Here, our first step would be to work towards a have common agreement on exactly what we want to see happening in our classrooms. Policies have always asked for active learning on the part of students, starting with activity-based learning in NPE 1986, followed by constructivism in NCF-05, ‘activity, exploration and projects’ in RTE 09 and now ‘experiential learning’ based on activity and constructivism within the NEP.

 

However, your notion of experiential learning can be very different from mine! And at present, different people are doing different things under this. Some believe experiential learning happens only if you take children out of the class. Others believe that some action inside the class is enough. Yet others believe that without serious reflection and application or cognitive engagement on students’ part, it is not experiential learning, or at least the learning part is not there.

 

Schools are now getting inputs from a wide range of sources, including many different NGOs, very often with very differing views on what pedagogy there should be. So, there are now contradictory versions happening in many places, thus dissipating all the effort underway.

 

On the other hand, we also have a situation where all teachers are being asked to strictly follow instructions given from the state level, consisting of which lessons are to be taught on which particular days. This is very difficult to achieve between, say, a tribal village and an urban area or a multilingual or a non-multilingual area.

 

Here, a degree of teacher autonomy (within a framework of agreed-upon principles) is extremely important. It is quite obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we now need to go beyond. Most of our inputs (such as curriculum, textbooks, lesson planning) do not take into account the multi-grade context, the multi-level context resulting from children's differential attendance, and the MLE context, which is now beginning to be thought of. So along with teacher autonomy, contextualization for diversity matters a great deal.

 

In order to gain traction on the ground, we need to create ownership on part of implementers, including teachers. Such ownership is only possible if there are some decisions in which the implementer is involved. That is where teacher autonomy – at least in terms of deciding the what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, in keeping with broadly agreed upon principles – makes a great difference.

 

The way to do this would be to enable a common vision, agree on goals and then let implementers decide their targets, state these publicly and support them in the process.

 

We would also need to work strongly on the belief systems of teachers and officials. It is often not acknowledged but discrimination remains a deep part of our system, where many teachers (and admin personnel too) do not believe that children from certain sections of society will learn. In fact, this is reflected in newspaper reports every year when after the board exams, it is often reported that a child from a poor family has done well. It is a news item because she is not supposed to do well!

 

A very good way to enable progress is to use performance indicators, not just for teachers, but for all involved, including HM, supportive supervisors such as BRCs and CRCs, BEOs, DIETs, DEOs, and state level personnel and institutions too. It is not possible for the school and teachers and children to improve without those at higher echelons improving too. Thus, collecting data on performance of all echelons and students would enable us to take corrective steps and generate momentum towards improved learning.

 

We also need to explore creating incentive for states, districts, blocks, clusters and even schools to focus on those at risk of being left behind. One good way would be to ensure that everyone is rated on basis of the performance of the bottom 25% in any cohort. If states and other entities know that they are ranked on basis of the performance of those falling in the lowest band, it would encourage them to focus on the needs of those farthest from the expected levels, thus raising learning levels overall.

 

In order to work on

·  belief systems of teachers and others, and

·  to create and implement TPD through a ladder or progression of performance indicators,

we need to urgently develop our SCERTs and DIETs, a process just initiated by MoE. In these institutions, it is important to place funding within the institution rather than with SPOs. Otherwise, we will be stuck with a situation where the institution is responsible for implementation and accountable for it, but does not have access to the funds needed for the same.

 

Along with this, if it do not work on CRCs and BRCs, then we have a cutting edge that is not cutting! We need to revive the supportive supervision mechanism of CRCs and BRCs around performance indicators as mentioned earlier.

 

The performance indicators could also be used as a basis to create a cadre of teachers for sectors where we are in short supply. This includes ECE where we need lakhs of trained personnel within a very short time, and ongoing TPD with assessment of performance on basis of indicators could offer an authentic pathway towards professional qualification.

 

And lastly, in order to improve classroom processes, we actually need to strengthen administrators at all levels. When I began working, there were only 28 lakh teachers in India. Today there are 98 lakh teachers. However, the number of administrators has hardly gone up. You might recall when you were young that there used to be something called ‘school inspections’ undertaken by administrators in order to assess quality of learning. That is no more possible because there is neither the staff nor the facilities to do so. Apart from being strengthened through staff and facilities, administrators also need to be supported in moving beyond a command-and-control approach towards transformative leadership.

 

While all these steps are much needed and also possible as they build on what has already been done in the country at different times, they cannot be implemented without a solid core of experienced resource persons working with the MoE and state education departments and institutions (in addition to those already in place). We need, in fact, to create a national pool of resource persons for this purpose, as a task force rather than a permanent ‘standing’ group.

 

3. Moving towards higher order learning

On the third challenge, preparing the ground to attain the higher-order learning that NEP 2020 repeatedly emphasizes as being a key aspect of ‘quality’ education.

 

First, if we aim for the basics, we are likely to achieve less than the basics, which means that the overall learning level will remain low. We need to aim high in order to get somewhere. While the curriculum often provides for this, it is in classroom processes that these get ignored, often because teachers do not know exactly how children who find it difficult to master the basics can go to higher order aspects.

 

To move towards higher order learning, therefore, it would useful to recognize the fund of knowledge and experience that students bring into the class. Every student is an expert on something or the other! A tribal child may know a great deal about plants and animals, while a slum child in a city might know a lot about materials because he's worked as a rag   picker. How can that knowledge and that capability, which they display outside the class actually be part of what happens inside the class? In fact, in a recent paper on street maths versus class maths, Esther Duflo points out how well children are able to handle the maths outside. So, we have a treasure of student capabilities, but it lies unutilized.

 

Similarly, community too can be a knowledge partner. For instance, a truck driver may know a great deal about the geography of India. An ironsmith may know about how to separate impurities from metal, which is high-level chemistry. Or a farmer may be well aware of weeds or a community health worker can enlighten students on many aspects of the human body. It is worth asking: How can the community emerge as a knowledge partner to enable deeper learning to happen in the class?

 

Finally, it is only when the assessment too starts looking at higher-order competencies and learning outcomes that these will become part of the normal process of the class. Hence, creating and implementing appropriate assessments, keeping in mind key areas emphasised in NCFs, would go a long way to enable higher-order learning to happen, ultimately contributing to the improvement of quality.

 

 

4. Finally, a fourth ‘basic’

While the three strands I have talked about address the critical basics we need to sort out, there is one overarching aspect too, which is of enabling continuity in the reform efforts. As we all know, whenever leadership changes, especially at the state level, there are disruptions in what is underway. Consequently, many good efforts do not see implementation over the duration that is needed for them to have an effect. As has been said, we have many beginnings, but not enough middles and endings.

 

In order to overcome this, it might be useful to consider creating a ‘educational quality protocol’. Just as there is no drastic change in administrative or financial procedures when leadership changes (because these have ‘protocols’), similarly, educational quality too needs to spell out a protocol. This could help ensure that random, sudden, or unexpected changes do not take place. For example, no ongoing project may be stopped without a sufficient evaluation conducted in a specified manner, or no annual work plan and budget may be changed in such a way that it contradicts a perspective plan that is put in place or that unnecessary piloting of what has already been piloted will not be undertaken. Such a step would ensure that there is continuity and reduced wastage.

 

Similarly, when any new leadership comes in place, a detailed briefing by the MOE on what has been done in the state and what needs to continue, would also be of great help.

 

 

 

The Evolution of Children’s Literature as Learning Materials – A Personal Journey

Subir Shukla

In the beginning

In 1986, I began working in Eklavya to develop and field test a primary stage curriculum appropriate for children in government schools. It naturally led to exploring the children’s literature that existed at the time (in English and Hindi) and looking for ways in which it could be used best with children. It soon became clear that:

• Despite having a very rich collection, there was very little material (other than books from NBT, CBT and a few ‘classic’ publishers) that could be considered child-friendly – that is, created and designed keeping in mind children’s ages, developmental stages and context. Many had very poor print quality too, with the ink rubbing off on to your hands (and hence actually toxic for children). 

• There was a plethora of myth and religious stories, or ‘moral’ literature whose purpose was to edify and ‘mould’ children into desired moral beings. Often stories would begin with what they were going to teach: ‘Children, greed is a really bad quality, and to explain that I’m going to tell you this story of….’

• There were plenty of ABCD type of books or garishly produced fairy tales, ripped off from some source that was never mentioned.

• Other than NBT and CBT books, none of the other publishers paid much attention to illustration and design. Font sizes were desperately small, with little relief for the eye.

• The few children’s magazines that existed were mainly full of stereotypes, anthropomorphic versions of animal tales, again with the morality that was often acquired through some violent consequence of giving in to one’s desires.

Overall, it was a grim and depressing scenario. What was missing in much of the literature was to see the world from the child’s perspective, or the effort to enable her to see things differently by engaging her in a process that encouraged reflection. Certain forms were generally absent or much less in evidence – whimsy, fantasy, nonsense or sound-based texts, and drama. Creative non-fiction, too, was comparatively rare. The situation was better in Bengali and Marathi (in which some of the great writers of literature for adults also wrote for children) but as I needed to work mainly with Hindi (and to some extent English), it was disheartening.

One aspect that seemed to be completely missing was that of trying out draft material with children. That is, field testing or getting children’s feedback in order to re-work and refine emerging material for children, including stories, poems or other forms. It thus fell to me to test the literature that existed, for suitability for its use in the textbooks we would create. Within the first few weeks it was apparent that there was a very limited number of works that could be effectively used with children. An overwhelming amount of dull and didactic material dominated the few that made and effort to connect with children.

While the NBT and CBT books were useful in generating oracy, they did pose a problem in that children from the poorest sections of society, including those in the tribal area where I was located, could not always connect with the visuals or the contexts presented. When it came to introducing literacy, it was worse – most available literature did not lend itself to use in our emerging curriculum and textbooks that would be field tested. Texts that tried to be ‘simple and easy’, usually by not using ‘matras’ ended up sounding distorted or extraordinarily insipid and off-putting, making it more difficult to teach children. E.g. – अमर उठ, घर चल, पानी पी, मत रो....  One of the keys to generating literacy is that if the material you struggle with is promising – that is, it arouses curiosity or holds relevance or feels like it is going to be interesting, fun or worthwhile – then the effort is worth it. Instead, we had material that was actually deterring children by being boring, disconnected and irrelevant, thus defeating the very purpose of trying to introduce literacy.

Creating the new

This then led to the situation where, over the next six years, I ended up creating or adapting – and field-testing – hundreds of texts across various genres for different age groups. Of these, around 200 emerged as ‘successful’ with children – that is, they loved (and demanded) listening to these again and again, or would happily engage with their written form or try to extend their own efforts into the exercises included and, most satisfyingly, even be heard singing or narrating these on their own, after school hours. A great deal of such material found its way into our textbook, Khushi-Khushi, for classes 1-5.  Despite the fact that it was printed in black and white and had only line drawings as illustration, children loved to carry these books around with them, in the fields or sitting on a buffalo’s back.

Some lessons I learnt from these years of creating and field-testing material are as follows.

• Children love sound based materials or pieces that involve word play, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. (For instance, the poem एक था खटखट, बहुत ही नटखट, or the rhyming story छोटा सा मोटा सा लोटा, now in its 20th edition as an NBT publication. Surprisingly, there was not enough of this, and much of it needed to be created.

• While adults may not be able to relate with ‘nonsense’, children do. They seem to understand it intuitively and connect with it quite well. 

• Children love it if they are able to participate in a story by responding or adding something. In poems that they can easily extend, their excitement and participation is really high. For example, the poem क्या है काला, क्या है सफेद or पांव अगर पंखे के होते.

• It is important that children and their lives are represented in the literature. Tribal children or children who ‘don’t wear shoes’ – their world and their perspectives must find place. Thus a story about a child who’s gone with a bullock cart across a forest to buy fodder, or about looking for root vegetables in the hot period after the monsoon (when the earlier crop has been consumed and the next one is not yet available), or not having clothes to wear to school because there’s only one dress and it’s not yet dried – would foreground the world children knew, but would also prepare them with the literacy skills to unpack other worlds that were less familiar.

• Action matters, in poems and stories. It was incredible how much literature spent far too much space on description and not enough on action. Thus a poem about a हरे रंग का तोता would focus on what the parrot was like, instead of what it did. This made it difficult to visualise or communicate through actions and gestures in a class full of children whose first language was not Hindi. And it was also difficult for illustrators to show!

• Children can think and debate on what stories contain. Grey works better to generate moral-ethical understanding than black and white, especially when children themselves have to figure out which options are the right ones to take. For instance, in a story on बन्नो का चांद, about a little girl who laughs at the moon, hurting it so much that he goes away to the night (and is still there!), children were able to argue that it’s OK for friends to tease each other and the moon need not have run off in a huff.

• Coincidences are unsatisfactory ways of characters attaining their goals, and make the lessons learnt seem even more random. This tends to communicate a fatalist perspective, wherein you wait for your kismet to rescue you from whatever dire straits you find yourself in.

• Fiction and poetry work very well in subjects other than languages too. Stories involving aspects of science or maths or social science are quite successful, as long as they respect the requirement of being good children’s literature first and not message-dominant.

• Non-fiction is where children’s own fund of experience, environmental knowledge,  and the community’s knowledge heritage is best tapped. This works well if there are openings in the material where children can add from their own environment.

At the National Centre for Children’s Literature, NBT-India

This experience was of great help as I joined the National Centre for Children’s Literature (NCCL) at the National Book Trust, India in 1993, as Editor (Training and Promotion), under the amazing Mala Dayal. The Nehru Bal Pustakalaya series flourished and we were able to make significant improvements in what was published. The NCCL brought out a magazine for its Readers’ Clubs, with a country-wide appeal, deceptively called the Readers’ Club Bulletin – but actually containing high quality children’s literature in a variety of genres, again illustrated in black and white. The basic tenet was that it would speak with children rather than at them. Some of India’s biggest writers wrote for this, including Mahasweta Devi, Arup Dutta, Khushwant Singh, Pushpesh Pant and many others. However, even they were asked to revise or refine what they had written in keeping with guidelines for what made for age-appropriate, context-appropriate and child-friendly literature. A new benchmark was set for the kind of non-fiction made available to children. With some of India’s best illustrators chipping in, the black and white format was again very popular with children, as the large number of post-cards received from them showed. These learnings also carried through into writers’ workshops we organised in Odisha or the North-East or Punjab.

On the largest possible scale, across states

During this time (1994), when DPEP was being conceptualised, the MHRD would occasionally ask me to review research designs developed by the NCERT, e.g. for examining the readability of Indian textbooks. I was also asked to do a gender analysis of textbook contents (which showed appalling discrimination against girls, in the texts, exercises and illustrations). By this time, we had also put together in the NCCL’s library a collection of award-winning children’s books from across the world, many of which included material designed specifically for learning. This served to set the framework against which the textbooks could be seen, especially the children’s literature they contained.

What these exercises brought out was that:

• In a way, the ‘real’ children’s literature could be considered to be that which existed in textbooks. The stories, poems and non-fiction that these contained were the only children’s literature that an overwhelming majority of our children accessed, especially in rural areas. In fact, the largest print runs of children’s literature was (and still is) actually in the form of textbooks – often in lakhs of copies over several years whereas ‘best-selling’ children’s literature remains in thousands.

• The material that textbooks contained then was uniformly disappointing – age inappropriate, didactic, usually information dense, focused more on the needs of the subject than children, and representing only a middle-class universe.

• Stereotypes and prejudices abounded. Not only against girls but also the poor (e.g., ‘he was poor but honest’).

By the time I got the opportunity to work as Chief Consultant (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Textbook Development) in DPEP, it was clear that those creating materials for children needed not only inputs towards understanding the craft and the subject, but required an understanding of children and their world view, how they engaged with their environment and with learning, and the role of material in the process of their overall development. It was for this reason that textbook writers, who would also be creating or collating stories, poems and non-fiction texts were required to go through:

• A Visioning Workshop where they understood how children learnt, their contexts, and envisioned the qualities they would generate in them.

• Discussions on the beliefs and assumptions that inform our understanding of children and learning, and the implications of these for the materials we create.

• Exposure to some of the best children’s literature from across the world (here we got help from the embassies of many countries) and draw from these the kind of benchmarks they would set themselves.

• And finally, agree on and implement a process of testing what they created by spending time with children, narrating or reading out or giving the drafts to children to observe their responses and getting feedback from them.

This process would yield detailed guidelines and specifications for different kinds of texts for various age groups. Combined with inputs on the actual writing process, these efforts led to a dramatic impact on the kinds of texts that the textbooks developed in DPEP contained.

Implemented across more than 10 states, this process led to the development of some of the most interesting, child-friendly, best illustrated and well-designed textbooks. The field-testing experience provided authors a deep understanding of what was needed. For instance, after a number of stories were tried out with Class 1 and 2 children, it emerged that ‘high emotional content’ of relevance to children led to them asking to hear the story again and again, which then acted as a trigger to engage them in making drawings, doing role play, trying to read the text or identify words/letters, and even use ‘pretend writing’ to create their own stories emerging from this input.

Very often, it turned out that the ‘classic’ children’s literature of a state tended to contain stereotypes or discrimination, and violated other key principles. In comparison, ‘folk’ material, especially with its repetitive elements, was liked more by children and generated greater learning. Some states found that ‘tweaking’ existing (non-copyrighted) material was a good option, considering that writing new texts at the desired level of quality was not always easy. At the same time, for specific purposes such as generating literacy or an environmental understanding, it was better to create new material.

An important theme across states was to develop ‘contextualisable’ or ‘localisable’ material. Thus, Kerala’s EVS textbooks (1998-99) had exercises leading children to record information such that by the end of the year, each child developed a book about her own environment. In UP (2001-02), the class 3 Hindi textbook used a blank page as a lesson, where children could fill in any song they like and answer the questions on this ‘text’ given in the facing page (e.g. which are the rhyming words or verbs, when/where is this song sung, etc.). Gujarat (2012-13) made 'shell' books that could be completed only with district-specific material developed by local DIETs. All this was not always without its controversy. In Kerala, the introduction of a single line containing words from a tribal language led to an uproar in the state assembly. 

An aspect that often gets missed out is that these processes had an enormous impact on production. In many states local illustrators were selected and trained over months – and many of them still continue to contribute to material for children and have even won awards. The work with production personnel, including the staff of the state textbook presses (where they had them) created not only the ground for timely supply of material but also laid the grounds for India to be able to provide free textbooks. 

However, the best feedback came from Haryana after its new, integrated textbook Hanste-Gaatey had been implemented for a year in DPEP schools. Teachers working with the poorest children in reported: 'Earlier, when it rained, children would cover their heads with textbooks, but since these have come in, now they hug them instead.'

Why Digital Content May Be Its Own Enemy

Many of us are feeling gratified that we have now provided a great deal of digital ‘content’ to students of various levels. Apart from issues of access (who has a smart phone, whether the network speed is OK, etc), it is also important to realise that much of this content is about explanations, examples, depictions and assessment. In other words, not necessarily very different from what a fair number of teachers already do in class – and find students not paying attention, not learning and, if learning, not applying that learning when the situation demands. 

This is because the overall assumption is that it is a student’s duty or compulsion to pay attention to what the teacher is presenting. Shift this to digital content and it becomes even more apparent that an overwhelming amount of content just assumes that students need it. 

Well, they don’t.

Because the same or similar thing is in many sources and most of it fails to arouse the student’s interest. In fact, this is an extension of the problem that ed tech faces, that it is a solution in search of a problem. (The other word we have for unwanted solutions being thrust on us is ‘spam’).

So, if we want our content to be used because students want to rather than have to engage with it, here are a few things we could do:

1.     Try to make the question interesting rather than presenting answers (that is something students have to work towards, and use the hints and supports your material provides to come out with their own answers). (E.g., What is a good way to know how many times we blink our eyes? And incidentally, why do we need to blink?)

2.     Help students discover a world that appears to be different and interesting because the new things they are learning are applied to it. (E.g. Why does the marigold leaf help prevent a cut or abrasion on our skin from getting infected? / Did you know that there are more than 20 different kinds of bread that are baked in our tandoors, and that some of them cannot be baked without a specific kind of yeast? / This story happened to an individual who is completely different from all of us - yet we always feel that it could easily be our own story. How do you think the writer does this? // These are then followed by possible areas of information to be explored by the student and fill in a framework that adds up to an understanding of the learning objective at hand.)

3.     Create a reason for students to return to every instalment of your offering. (Tomorrow, we will talk about how these shapes were combined and used to make one of the most unique towers in the world.)

4.     Be humble. Know that the student can switch you off, look away, stop paying attention or look at something else even as you are presenting what you think is the most important thing for your student to know. You have to earn that attention. One way to do that is to stop trying to set the agenda and instead let the student decide what she wants to learn, how much and how quickly. In the days when schools ran ‘normally’, teachers noted students who had access to technology both in school and at home would be far more animated when using their own devices outside the classroom – because on those, they were setting the agenda. Can you design your offering in such a way that the student ‘invests’ in it by taking certain decisions about her own path and progress, which then makes her a committed stakeholder who wants to use your material? 

Coming out with engaging digital material is not rocket science – but giving up our general notions and buy-in into the mythical powers of ed tech is!