The Digital Teacher

Rajeev Pathak

Rajeev PathakRajeev Pathak, CEO, eDreamEdusoft is an alumni of IIM Bangalore and BITS Pilani. He has started the company after having 19 years of working experience in technology  industry. Prior to eDreams, Rajeev worked with Wipro as GM – Software Products Group. In conversation with digitalLEARNING, he highlighted how the company is helping schools in giving individual attention to students

What is eDream Edusoft?

eDreams Edusoft is a Bangalore-based company constituting a team of highly experienced individuals. The core team has a combined experience of over 100+ years in software product development, education and business innovation. eDreams has partnered with many educational and research organisations and is involved in basic and applied research to develop globally firstproducts.

Please share the genesis of the company.

We are two-and-a-half-year-old organisation working in the K-12 education technology space. The founders came into the education technology space after having successful careers in education and technology companies to give back to the society. To figure out the fundamental issues that exist in the education system, we went to several educational institutions across India, especially schools. It took us 3-4 months of research to realise that the fundamental issue is the homogenous nature of teaching/learning that exists in classrooms.Every child is uniquein terms of his or herability to learn, intelligence, attention span, concentration, interest, etc. And despite these differences, we teach them all together thesame thing at the same time and with the same methods, examples and questions. It is because of this that the child is unable to unable to understand many concepts and is unable to realise his/her potential. That is the fundamental problem.

Humans have been learning for over thousands of years without classrooms. The concept of classroomscame into existence only in the late seventeenth& eighteenth centuriesbecause of the industrial revolution, which also created the need to impart the same homogeneous skills toall workers. Earlier, the human brain evolved from self-learning by interacting with the society.

Schools and classrooms have a lot of challenges. You cannot address every individual in a school due to limited time and large number of students. The solution is to provide one teacher per child to make the child realise his/her full potential. The same concept can also be taught to a child according to their area of interest (say cricket, Barbie dolls), and each child has a different learning style and progression curve. Schoolstoo, agree that one human teacher is needed for every child for at least one-two hours in a day, if not for the whole day. But, providing a human teacher for every child is not possible. This issue challenged us to build an intelligent and adaptive technology that will provide personalized learning to each child. That is what our product, Funtoot, is all about: an attempt to provide individual attention to every child.It is anintelligent and adaptive learning solution like a digital teacher.

Please tell us more about Funtoot. How does it work as a digital teacher?

Funtoot is an intelligent and adaptive personal tutor that teaches children in a fun and interactive manner. It observes, assesses, diagnoses, interacts, encourages and tutors each student based on his/her individual characteristics.

Funtoot has been developed after extensive research and is personalised to the precise requirement of the student. Students can look forward to fun-filled learning. It helps cultivate innovative thinking in them. While enabling students to perform better in studies, Funtoot also assists teachers to monitor their students regularly and help parents be aware of the progress of their children. As Funtoot is built for a cloud computing environment, it does not require installation of additional software or hardware.
A computer and an internet connection is all that is required to get started.

You have received angel investment upto Rs 5 crore last year. Please share with us your expansion plans.

We have strong presence in the schools in South India including cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Pondicherry, Coimbatore, Hubli, and Belgaum, etc. We have priced our solution in a manner that it is affordableto all.We also give special discounts to rural areas.

In the next one year, we plan to enhance our reach to the Northern and Western parts of India. In fact, we have started the deployments in some schools in North India already.

We are also raising further capital to grow in India and abroadand make our interactive and adaptive technology more apt. We have plans to provide personalized learning to 1 Million kids over next 4-5 years.

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