Q1. What are some of the strategic priorities for Central Square Foundation (CSF) to help children from low-income backgrounds learn better? 

Currently, through the LiftEd EdTech Accelerator, we are supporting eight EdTech solutions to build stronger products and discover pathways for scaling to support the NIPUN Bharat Mission.

CSF has been working on the continuum of EdTech evidence on what works (and more importantly what does not), how does it work in different contexts and what it would take to scale in low-income segments. Some interesting evaluations that we have had the privilege of supporting include the RCT of Mindspark in 2015, rapid evaluations of 12 EdTech products through the EdTech Lab initiative in 2018-2019, programmatic evaluation of the Convegenius home learning programme, action research on ‘Understanding EdTech Usage at Home Using Dedicated Devices in 2022-23 (Part 1 and Part 2 of the reports) and the RCT on Chimple in 2022-23. We are currently building further qualitative and quantitative evidence on home learning for FLN through our EdTech Accelerator portfolio partners.

CSF supports state governments to procure and implement EdTech effectively. We have had long standing relationships with the Governments of Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, to name a few. Moreover, in the last few years, there have been concerted efforts to institutionalise home learning using EdTech as part of public education delivery.

Finally, CSF supports the creation of public goods to support the EdTech ecosystem to operate more effectively. A few examples of our work in this space include EdTech Tulna, TicTacLearn, and the Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE).

Q2. What is CSF’s approach to institutionalise EdTech Tulna both within and outside India? 

Jointly developed through a partnership between CSF and IIT Bombay, EdTech Tulna is an evaluation index that enables governments and other users of EdTech to make quality-led, evidence-informed decisions regarding EdTech solutions. EdTech Tulna helps define standards for what good EdTech looks like, creates exhaustive toolkits to enable decision-makers to apply these standards to evaluate EdTech solutions and publishes evaluations of existing EdTech products to directly address the information gap on the effectiveness of EdTech solutions.

Tulna standards are available across a variety of use cases for K-10 learning – Personalised Adaptive Learning (PAL), Digital Classrooms (DCR), Interactive Audio-Visual (IAV), Game-based learning and Practice and Doubt Solving (PDS). Additionally, Tulna is also putting out public evaluations of products on these frameworks. 

Tulna has received promising traction from the India ecosystem and has been been leveraged by various state governments in India towards EdTech procurements across different use cases (for eg. PAL and smart classrooms). The Tulna standards are bringing focus to quality of software, as evidenced by their use in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh,  impacting over 50 lakh children across 21,000+ schools and influencing USD ~173mn (~1,446 crores) of govt. budget spend in India, since its inception. 

Moreover, Tulna was adopted by the Government of Gujarat in August 2023 as part of their initiative on a single sign-on portal for EdTech use in the state, to select vendors for integration with the portal.

In the first instance of an international adoption, Tulna signed an MoU with the Government of Nigeria on the sidelines of the G20 summit in September 2023. As part of this association, the Government of Nigeria will be adopting EdTech Tulna to drive meaningful adoption and usage of EdTech in the country. 

To support its vision of unlocking adoption within and outside India, Tulna has found its long-term institutional home in IIT Delhi and is in the process of being set up as an independent unit supported by IIT Bombay and CSF.

Q3. What have been some of CSF’s marquee contributions to the Indian EdTech ecosystem so far? 

As early believers in the potential of EdTech to democratise the quality of education in India, some of CSF’s marquee contributions to the EdTech ecosystem have been creating public goods such as TicTacLearn, an open source repository of curriculum-aligned content; knowledge reports such as ‘Reimagining Education through Technology’, “EdTech for India: Leveraging Technology to Bridge Learning Gaps’ and most recently, the ‘Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE)’ which is a first-of-its-kind household survey with insights on the state of EdTech in India. 

TicTacLearn

In 2020, in partnership with Google.org and YouTube, CSF developed TicTacLearn, a curriculum-aligned repository of Math and Science video content available in four Indian languages.

Since its launch, TicTacLearn’s YouTube channels have garnered over 200 million plays, approximately 50,00,000 hours of play duration and around 7,00,000 subscribers. The new YouTube channel, TicTacLearn Senior – Hindi, launched in March 2024, has already surpassed 3 crore views and garnered 1,80,000 subscribers.

BaSE – Bharat Survey for EdTech 

In April 2023, CSF launched the Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE), an EdTech-focused household survey bringing the voice of low-income users into the discourse on EdTech in India. The survey was conducted to bring compelling insights on access, usage and user sentiment towards EdTech. BaSE was conducted across 6000+ households, covering 9,867 children enrolled in either government or affordable private schools across six linguistically and regionally diverse states of India. 

CSF Knowledge Reports

CSF has offered thought leaderrship through the creation of knowledge reports such as the ‘Reimagining Education through Technology: Global EdTech Landscape and Insights’ in 2020 which provided insights into nine key teaching-learning interactions that EdTech has impacted around the globe and the ‘EdTech for India:Leveraging Technology to Bridge Learning Gaps’ report in 2022 which provided recommendations that can serve as a valuable springboard for reviewing EdTech policy planning and implementation in India.

Q4. What is CSF’s approach to building evidence on EdTech to improve student learning outcomes in India?

In order to inform policy and programme design, CSF aims to generate robust evidence on EdTech across the ‘product-programme-scale’ continuum:

• Product evidence helps establish efficacy for high-quality EdTech products 
• Programme evidence helps establish programme efficacy for EdTech in native environments
• At-scale evidence helps generate evidence of effective implementation of EdTech at-scale

On the product front, CSF supported the contextualisation of Educational Initiatives’ MindSpark, which was evaluated through a RCT, that looked at the impact of a personalised technology-aided after-school instruction programme in middle-school grades by scoring 0.37 sigma higher in Math and 0.23 sigma higher in Hindi over 4.5 months. Over 2022-23, CSF supported an RCT on Chimple’s teacher-led at-home learning programme in Bharti Airtel Foundation’s Satya Bharti schools in Haryana, making a compelling case for leveraging EdTech for FLN in India. The results have shown significant and promising improvements of 0.25 standard deviations for Grades 1 and 2 in Math, with gains of 0.44 standard deviation among the lowest-performing students.

On the programme side, learnings from the recently concluded project on ‘Understanding EdTech Usage at Home Using Dedicated Devices’ have been collated in two reports — Part I and Part II — which is an action research from setting up device distribution programmes for educational purposes and discusses tech-based interventions iterated and deployed to encourage EdTech usage at home. 

In order to build at-scale evidence, CSF is currently supporting the ongoing study on the impact of the PAL implementation in Andhra Pradesh, which is being conducted by the Development Innovation Lab, University of Chicago, led by Noble Laureate Prof. Michael Kremer. 

Through these various studies across the product-programme-scale continuum, CSF aims to create robust evidence for EdTech interventions that are cost-effective, impactful and scalable in improving teaching and learning outcomes for low-income populations. 

Q5. How does CSF look at the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, eventually improving student learning outcomes?  

Recent advancements in AI  have unlocked capabilities that hold immense potential to catalyse innovation in education. It  has the potential to leapfrog progress to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — specifically SDG-4 on ensuring quality education — cost-effectively and at scale. 

At CSF, we see great potential for AI to not only strengthen and support existing EdTech products on their journey to scale but also create new teaching and learning experiences that can comprehensively address gaps in the education system in India. An example of how AI has strengthened existing EdTech products is personalised tutoring solutions. By leveraging capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), intelligent tutoring solutions can now engage in a conversation with children to clear specific doubts in their understanding. Similarly, it has also become possible to provide teachers personalised actionable feedback, based on automated analysis of audio/video recordings of classroom practices, thereby providing continuous professional development support.  

However, these solutions are only as effective as the underlying technology. While language technology has reached the desired accuracy levels for English,  the performance for Indic languages is still a long way to go. We see significant ongoing efforts to advance technology for Indic languages by researchers at premier academic institutions to address this whitespace, which is indeed promising.

Finally, we also recognise that the use of AI entails risks that need to be mitigated through thoughtful design and policy. To ensure that AI advances learning rather than hamper it, solutions must be guided by evidence-based learning principles and standards set up by indices such as EdTech Tulna.

Aligned with CSF’s ecosystem approach, we see an opportunity to collaborate with key stakeholders to guide the development of technology that effectively and responsibly advances educational goals for the low-income segment in India.

About Gouri Gupta

Gouri Gupta leads CSF’s work in the area of education technology. She works with a portfolio of EdTech products that take high-quality, contextual solutions to young children from low-income backgrounds to support learning. 

Prior to CSF, Gouri was part of the founding team at the National Skill Development Corporation, a public-private partnership, founded by the Govt. of India, to invest in skill development ventures in India. She crossed over to the development sector from The Boston Consulting Group, where she was a Project Leader working primarily in the financial services domain. 

Gouri is a Chartered Accountant by training and a management graduate from IIM-Bangalore.