Puneet K is the President, The Narayana Group. He shares on how the group has actively used EdTech for better learning experience for students.
When it comes to using EdTech for schools, there are several advantages to it. The key advantages of EdTech solutions are their ability to augment the learning experience and smoothen the examination experience for students.
The Narayana Group has consistently delivered world-class education for over 40 years. We have done so by being ahead of the curve. We leverage any innovative process, product or technology that would provide our students with an edge over others. EdTech is one of the components in a series of innovations we have introduced to bolster academic excellence in our students. We began developing our online learning ecosystem in 2016.
We began by installing digital classrooms in all our campuses in 2016 to complement classroom teaching with video content. This has enhanced our students’ understanding of concepts and increased the overall quality of interaction between teachers and students. Students are now able to visualise what they are being taught, frame their questions better and recall concepts with ease.
In 2018 we developed and released nLearn, Narayana Group’s in-house learning and testing application. We invested heavily in curriculum planning, content creation, design, and a proprietary test engine to help our students excel in competitive exams such as JEE Main, JEE Advanced and NEET. We also invested significantly in hardware and equipped our campuses with digital labs to ensure that all our students had access to nLearn’s content and testing platform. We shifted to online testing across all our campuses and provided students with the ability to practice effectively at home. This helped us rapidly scale the amount of practice we were able to give our students in their preparations for competitive exams. The National Testing Agency’s (NTA) decided to move JEE examinations fully online in 2019.
We have integrated features like integrated learning, regular testing, and detailed remediation in the nLearn app to complement our process with technology for every step of the learning journey. Micro lessons for enhanced conceptual understanding. Assessments and testing for focused practice. Detailed feedback and analytics on the performance of every student. The feedback loop is closed by our teachers who leverage this data to tailor instructions, focus on difficult concepts and quickly close learning gaps. Integrating our process excellence with technology has enabled us to make learning adaptive and engaging for students.
Since 2020, we have significantly scaled our EdTech capabilities on the strong foundations that were laid. We rolled out online live classes on 24th March,2020, just one day into the lockdown announced by the Indian government. We expanded the reach of the nLearn app to pre-primary and primary students, giving them access to classes, curated video content, interactive practice, platform for doubt solving and assignments.
Over the last two years, we conducted over 10,000 live classes per day. Our students cumulatively consumed 150 crore plus video hours of educational content. Our proprietary online test engine is one of the best in the country. Over 1.5 lakh students simultaneously take tests on the nLearn platform every week. While most online test platforms offer only objective (multiple choice format) examinations, we developed and deployed online, multi-chapter descriptive tests to ensure that our students do not lose touch with the subjective examinations during the lockdown.
During the pandemic, we also deployed the nDigital app for students outside the Narayana ecosystem. It is a platform where any student in the country can sign up for short, medium, and long-term courses for JEE and NEET preparation. Students benefit from content and exams curated by our experts. This was to address the lack of remote access to quality coaching for JEE and NEET aspirants.
The impact of the loss of schooling on students during the pandemic has been extensively discussed in the media. The Narayana Group’s early adoption of EdTech ensured that we were able to seamlessly pivot to online learning during the Pandemic. Our strong digital infrastructure ensured that we minimize the learning losses for our students. As we move back to traditional education, we are integrating the best aspects of our EdTech with classroom learning to maximize learning. We are leveraging technology for asynchronous learning, customized content (Video/ audio/activity-based), tailored assignments, remediation classes, one-to-one doubt solving sessions. Some of these activities which used to previously cut into classroom teaching time are now moved beyond it so that teachers can focus completely on teaching during classroom hours. Furthermore, by providing remote access to doubt solving, remediation etc. students get time to resolve their doubts comprehensively. Additional access to content allows students to solidify concepts.
