India faces massive challenges in educating our children. Digital solutions, with their ability to reach multitudes across vast areas, promise to play an important role in meeting the challenge. The educational technology industry already boasts established and growing players with a variety of point applications and software suites.

However, despite the confidence of developers and the hope of educators, the impact of edutech has not yet lived up to its promise. Gaps remain in compliance by learners and adoption by schools and teachers. Cost is always a hurdle when a sector operates on a not-for-profit basis. A second factor, culture, may stand in the way of adoption even more than cost.

Education vs. Edutech
Indian schools, by and large, follow the traditional model of lecture-based teaching. Teachers believe that their job is to communicate what they know to their students, whose job is to memorize what they are told. As a result, teachers are hired and rewarded for their memories and for their effectiveness as lecturers.

The advent of educational technology represents a direct threat to the existing system. When I conduct programs for professors,I remind them that computers can remember more facts than they can, and that Steve Jobs can give a better lecture(via streaming video) than they can, despite the fact that he is dead. It is not unrealistic to speculate that a teacher whose only skill is lecturing might become obsolete in the next 20 years, if not sooner. Rather than adopt technology, teachers may be expected instead to avoid or even oppose it.

Administrators who follow traditional industry practice may also be uncomfortable with edutech. At the college where I teach, I learned that assigning classes to various classrooms and halls takes up to 12 man-hours per week using an Excel spreadsheet. I remarked that in my old country, such scheduling is done only once, at the beginning of the academic year, using algorithms. The reason my colleague gave me for staying with a low-tech solution was that in India, we are more flexible with regard

to calendars, timetables, and even attendance, so last-minute and short-notice changes are expected, and accepted.

The advent of educational technology represents a direct threat to the existing system

Even students and parents may not be comfortable with a shift to edutech. Educational institutions are valued primarily for the credentials they issue. Students are taught to pursue marks and only marks. Families expect today’s teachers to continue the tradition of lecturing. Homework should consist only of reviewing notes and doing exercises in a workbook. Technology-based is practically unknown.

Hurdling the Cultural Barrier
Indian educators will adopt educational technology when the developers demonstrate three things. Each application must address a genuine need. It must function perfectly.And, it must be acceptable to the stakeholders, including the administrators who specify and buy the solutions, the teachers who use them, and the students who learn from them.

To achieve these goals, edutech developers should use Design Thinking, a five-step process for creating effective and desirable products, services and other types of solutions. The most important step – and the one least familiar to IT professionals – is the first: empathize.

Empathetic research involves observing and interviewing all the affected stakeholders. Even the most elegant and powerful software will not work if users refuse to adopt it. Empathetic research can reveal the social and cultural factors that business analysts and systems architects rarely consider. In a Design Thinking project, such as the development of a new edutech application, the designers should immerse themselves in the process they want to improve. Done well, this step alone can take several months.

Following empathetic research, designers should define needs, both voiced and unvoiced. Based on those needs, the next step is to brainstorm for solutions. After evaluating the solutions in-house and selecting a small number, the developers should create quick, inexpensive “preto types,” rough representations of the concepts in their minds. The final step is to test those preto types with stakeholders to validate the concepts prior to actual development. A solution developed through the five steps of Design Thinking is far more likely to succeed because it takes into account all the factors that affect adoption and implementation, not just functionality.

The Way Forward
Many challenges in Indian education are begging for technology-based solutions. Reaching six lakhs of villages with effective primary and secondary education is high on the list. Raising outcomes for the crores of older children who can now read only at the Class 2 level is a priority. Training and equipping teachers at all levels, from Pre-K through University, is necessary. Providing our young people with marketable skills and making them employable will be extremely important if we are to reap our demographic dividend.

Despite the crying need for such solutions, the edutech industry must recognize that technology alone cannot solve the problems.Powerful social and cultural forces can frustrate and defeat even well-intentioned efforts to improve the system. Design Thinking, for those who choose to learn and use it, will be the key to success.