How Satellites Can Help resolve Covid learning crisis

[Music]

hi tedx viewers

i want to be talking to you today on

something which is close to

all our hearts and something which

decides our

future that is provisioning

quality education for all as envisaged

in the sdg

four for example the importance of

education

cannot be overstated it

levels the playing field taking

any religion or color

or social status out of the picture

it is a means to improve your livelihood

to yourself to your family and to your

community

but the sad reality is there are

lots of children maybe a billion who are

out of school

and even who are in the school are

faring well below the grade in which

they are

and not getting themselves equipped

for the job opportunities in the 21st

century quality education

is something which requires

conceptual understanding

and this means that you have to for

example

learn to read very early

so that you can later read to learn

world bank recently has introduced a

concept of learning poverty

what it means is at the age of 10 a

child should be able to

read a small paragraph in

any language and comprehend it

they found that in most countries more

than 50 percent of the children

do not meet this criteria so much so

they have now revised the sdg4 target

to mean that by 2030 we want to half the

number of such children so unless

we sort of start early

you cannot address these issues because

the foundations are laid

when they are very young and if the

foundation is weak

all their future learning whatever the

best of the technology techniques that

we use

would be of no avail and

if they do not get the right skill set

then they will be more of a demographic

disaster

than the demographic dividend which will

be if

they are skilled and are able to be

employed properly

contributing to the gdp

even before covid there was a

very large variation in the learning

outcomes

if you look at the normal curve you will

see that it’s wide

and one of the important objectives is

to narrow this

variance or reduce the width and be able

to move it

to higher values for the learning

outcome that the mean should increase

and the variance should decrease

come covered the entire situation became

worse schools got closed so on the lower

end of the normal curve

you ended up with a large hump

especially for the low resource areas

where they did not have the right

opportunities so those people

are falling so far behind that one is

very worried

what will happen to them are they not

going to be

unemployed or underemployed and cause a

lot of problems with the society

unless we act now and when you want to

do this

you would want to make use of

such a technology which would help us

to tide over this and be in a position

to turn this crisis to an opportunity

but for doing that first let us quickly

understand what is the process

of conceptual understanding what it

means is that

the concepts which are in my head i

would like to transfer it

to maybe five more maybe two hundred

maybe a thousand or maybe two million

and when i want to do this first you

have learning materials which we call

content

then it has to be properly brought to

the learner that is the connectivity

then on a device if it’s the digital

content is going to be consumed it’s

going to be the learning process

of the student it has to be properly

guided in such a way

that you also assess for his learning

so that you under and come back with

what is needed

to make him understand the concepts

thoroughly

so this process is something which

happens again and again

for every topic every lesson every

subject

but then you must look at a solution

from the needs a demand driven solution

will always be more sustainable so what

do we need

we need quality contents we need a

way to transfer it to the right places

at the right time

and we should have the way of consuming

the content

and have a way to assess the way the

learning is happening

so all these are going to be properly

done there

when you look at the content for example

there is no depth of content

today in fact we have ended up with lot

more content

and so the problem is one of plenty so

one has to decide

what is the best which i should choose

what will fit in with my

audience and how do i get it ready

for that consumption you know that is

the easier part

now when it comes to connectivity almost

everyone

is going with a belief that when you say

digital education

it means that you must provision a

broadband

internet connectivity to the schools to

the teachers

to the students and so on they think

that this particular provisioning

is a must in order to provide digital

education whether on the other hand

digital education digital contents

and transforming it into their heads is

something which is a different process

in fact when i discuss this with even

my friends i feel like galileo galilei

when he proposed a heliocentric model

where there’s so much opposition because

the problems

argue that until the time when we

achieve

this kind of a universal internet

connectivity

we have to go with some stop gap

arrangements but then

all governments all institutions are

funding heavily

to make sure that everybody finally will

connected to the internet and that

would probably be the time when there

will no more discussion on

quality education because education

would be achieved when access is there

but when you go really and analyze the

correlation between

access and the learning outcomes

is not strong in fact sometimes it will

be even negatively correlated you have a

lot of access

you end up with a lot of distractions in

fact i met with lots of kids from

very well to do families and i’ve talked

to their parents

and they will think oh i bought them the

latest gadget and the

kind of very high broadband connectivity

thinking that they will all be used for

their educational process

but when i later find out their kind of

learning

levels there’s wide variations so it’s

not directly

correlated at all and therefore assuming

that

access to internet is the

access to education is like saying that

the

most intelligent man in a community is a

librarian because he has access to all

the books

see if a ladder is placed on the wrong

wall however fast you claim you’ll never

reach the

destination see what is good for

one kind of traffic may not be the right

one right communication link

for some other traffic for example now

for working from home which is so

important during the covet conditions

or for emails or for social media

interactions etc you certainly need

internet connectivity

and if this latest

technologies for example mega

constellations of

low earth orbiting satellites all these

would make sure

that this service would be available

everywhere on the globe

including in the remotest village so

it’ll be very good

but when it comes to education

especially the early education

you find that it’s so much schedule

based

there is a curriculum the syllabus you

have to follow lesson by lesson today is

lesson one

in english and you would want to teach

some poetry

and that poem will be taught in school

one or school two or school three or

school thousand

all of them follow the same syllabus and

therefore there’s a lot of commonality

in what needs to go on that day if

there’s a match

exam every student would like to pass

question papers

answered revisions and so on so

therefore if there’s a commonality

you must look for a broadcast solution

and for the broadcast solution

one of the standard things that we can

do is to have a satellite broadcast

because satellites are inherently

broadcast media

and therefore it will be always the best

leveler

whatever goes to one very highly urban

conglomerate

would be the same which goes to the

remoters rural

community and that is very very

important for example

about 40 years ago when i was just

living in bangalore in india i found

that there was a time when we didn’t

have any

television coverage at all then it

started with one channel which was

relayed from two different cities and

all that

within couple of years the entire thing

changed like anything because satellites

came in

and they had capacity to provide what is

called

direct to home dth service which made

sure

that whatever program i watch in the

five-star comfort in a hotel is the same

that as home in a slum area

would want to get he may not have a roof

but he will have a roof antenna

to receive this so a similar kind of a

transformation can happen in terms of

delivery of

education so the advantage of such a

scheme is twofold

one is the fact that we are pushing the

content the pushing

means that there is no traffic

congestion and the sender decides

what goes in to the user devices

when it should go how long it should

reside you can purge it also

all these can be controlled from one

single central end that’s one great

advantage

the other thing is that there is one too

many when you’re talking about

the same thing goes to everybody

therefore

the research on what should be the good

one can be done

once and for all so that means the best

teacher

best learning materials is available to

everybody

the best super experts

are available for sort of giving clues

ex and teaching aids to the teachers

all over so the skill variation of the

teachers can be taken care

of by having such a link you know

synchronously

and like this what happens is if finally

the assessment part

is also important i’m going to touch

upon that is something which can

also be done in such a manner

that that information can go to each and

every location so that’s a great

advantage

but then the question comes what is the

space segment do you have the satellites

available for this

broadcast satellites like dth we talked

about direct

home here dtp a direct person kind of

satellite

but we don’t have to wait for that maybe

we can put in a payload

which is a hosted payload or simply what

we can do

today we have the dth services all over

and we can

directly use that service look at the

picture i’ve shown a schematic

where i’ve shown the television programs

the contents are aggregated on the

teleport and

uplink and the satellite brings it down

to each and every

small dish in the homes same way on the

same channel

we can encapsulate the digital contents

it can be files it can be live stream

any ip stream

can be sent along this on the same path

and now same dish in that home or in the

school

can receive it but then when it comes

down you take that signal

and then you look at only the digital

content for the education

store it in a server locally and then

make it available on a local hotspot

to the devices of the individuals bring

your own device that’s what i’ve shown

there

so the important companies of course

that local server also because that acts

as a digital library where the

downloaded contents or what is delivered

you know we don’t use download

we don’t use online we take on-site we

have this

particular content which is available

for browsing

by the children with no risk of

any distraction no need to check for

which link is better and all because we

have made the choice

at the sending end so this scheme is

something which is doable right away

and therefore this delivery of content

via the satellite itself cannot achieve

the quality education because that would

require

hand holding and guidance which has to

be done by the teachers as i was telling

you the teacher

skill levels are widely variable and

therefore rather than giving them

a summer course of training and all it

doesn’t seem to work

just in time lesson by lesson on that

this kind of topic

you give them the right kind of

additional tips

cheat sheets which they will remember

from their short-term memory and be able

to conduct the class better

the pupils listen better

they respect the teacher now more and

the positive spiral sets in

and this kind of a way the teachers also

improve their subject matter knowledge

the pedagogy and all that

and also what happens assessment is very

important which has to be done by the

teacher

today the teacher is overloaded so

probably he just gives you a

multiple choice question and just takes

it and gives it back

but it’s much more than that because we

believe

no one is mediocre and everyone can

learn

if the way they want to learn you have

to find out

and for that purpose one shoe fits all

won’t work

and therefore the feedback is required

as to what the student needs

and that the teacher only can do but in

the close out of this

schools the best time to try new

technologies

where even local volunteers can help and

once all the data is collected

you can certainly make machine learning

and then have a kind of techniques

to make sure that the assessment

component is a continuous assessment

because that is very important for the

demographic dividend because everyone

has to finally be brought up engaged

educated

and be able to contribute to the society

of course india has done lots of things

in this regard right from 1975 with a

satellite instructional television

experiment where

villages were given developmental

communication

then exclusive satellite for education

hadoos act

but now for example if you look at dta

channels they’ve as many as 32 channels

called swim prabha

which are all on different subject

matters but usually they are all

for higher classes and they are

delivered on a tv and all that which is

not the best medium for

like this kind of education but we can

use that channel

and ride on that and be able to conduct