Using platforms to share knowledge with teachers and students
The Indian school education system is one of the largest in the world, with more than 260 million students and 9.6 million teachers. While previous interventions to close learning gaps have succeeded in siloes, they have not been achieved at scale. To address this issue, in 2017, India launched the platform, Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA), which can be accessed by learners and teachers across the country, including via a low bandwidth option that supports mobile access and also offline access.
The platform provides access to digital content through QR codes printed in over 600 million textbooks distributed across the country. It also delivers in-class resources, teacher training content and assessment aids. Importantly, DIKSHA policies and tools make it possible for the education ecosystem to participate, contribute and leverage a common platform to achieve learning goals at scale for the country.
Since its adoption, DIKSHA has driven the digital transformation of India’s school education ecosystem. The platform, in which digital content is available in 36 languages, has delivered over 300,000 digital learning content and more than 8,700 Digital Capacity Building courses which augment learning for more than seven million teachers and 180 million students.
EY is working in close collaboration with the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the Indian Ministry of Education (MoE) and other key stakeholders to support the DIKSHA platform from inception, working with education departments to design large-scale programs and support procurement, on-boarding and vendor management. Collaborating with other education-based government agencies, EY also helped to develop the framework for periodic competency-based assessment and created a dashboard within DIKSHA to make it easy for administrators to monitor its impact and support performance improvement.
The growing economy of India has become increasingly digital in nature and has led to the developmental efforts of digital public infrastructure across sectors. The efforts of India in developing Digital Public Goods (DPGs) has been admired globally and has also resulted in an opportunity for India to offer DPGs to interested countries. DIKSHA has been identified and declared as a Digital Global Good by the Government of India and is being offered to all the interested nations.
These examples illustrate the art of the possible in using digital platforms and public and private partnerships to close the learning poverty gap. The opportunity is here to scale up these platforms, connect with and upskill more teachers in low-income countries, help more students to attain greater education levels and build a bigger talent pool for the future. When global organizations, non-profits, teachers, and governments collaborate like this, we can accelerate future skills learning at scale.