In 2017, three friends, Sunil Sathyavolu, Kiran Jupudi and Vijay Pothula, went around Hyderabad to find appropriate schools for their children. They had only one question for the school management — Tell us about the education you provide. While the schools went on about their AC buses, vast campuses and computer labs, it left the trio wondering about their pedagogies, qualification of their teachers and other relevant information that was hardly mentioned. Realising the scope of improvement in the education sector, the trio along with Vivek Chandramohan started EdSense, an intelligent education management platform. "Teachers spend about 42% of their time in non-teaching activities. We want them to focus on students and their own professional development more," says Sathyavolu. And through their cloud-based application, they not only allow teachers to aggregate, curate open content and track their own progress, they also have the provision of 360-degree profiling of students which includes information like their behaviour, learning styles, strengths and areas of improvement.
"We want to make schools central to learning and teaching again so that students depend more on the school’s signature content than external help," Sathyavolu explains. EdSense's main focus is personalisation, content aggregation, teachers' professional development, comprehensive student profiling and more. They don't believe in rapid and mindless digitisation as, "the EdTech space is already crowded. What we really need to do is identify where the need for digitalisation is and limit the usage to it," says the 37-year-old. Another point that the co-founder makes is that we don't need to rush towards video-based learning, "It's not about textbooks versus videos. We need to identify learning preferences and cater to the needs of students accordingly." And it is this personalisation that EdSense offers to both teachers and students.
With EdSense, which blends academics and psychology, the quartet is trying to make sure that the core technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are used to give deeper insights to schools about teachers and students for better school management systems. For example, the use of AI plays a vital role in several features of EdSense like attendance. For those students who miss school on a particular day, AI pulls up the lessons that are taught on that day and automatically assigns them as assignments on the students' dashboard so that they remain up-to-date. If the performance of students, or even teachers for that matter, are not up to the mark, the psychometric tests and feedback systems help track their behaviour.
These are just a few of the many things that this platform can do. "It is not that we are telling schools how to teach, we want to partner with teachers, automate routine tasks and simplify their work, which is why we call ourselves the school’s digital strategy partners," explains Sathyavolu. EdSense enables schools to take a holistic approach towards child development, academics, health, nutrition, learning preferences, habits and dispositions. Currently, a few schools in Hyderabad like Glendale Academy, Keystone International School, Mount Litera Zee High School and a few others like Bengaluru's Harvest International School are onboard with EdSense. This start-up wants to not only expand to other states, but in the future, work with colleges and universities as well.
For more on them, click on edsense.in
