Learning will happen throughout one’s lifetime and will cease to be a milestone activity, teachers will turn into facilitators and learning itself will need to be more personalised — these are the three aspects of the future of education that need to become a reality soon, says Beas Dev Ralhan, Co-founder and CEO, Next Education India Pvt Ltd. This Edtech company based out of Hyderabad has been thinking about the future of education since its inception in 2007 and has been working in this space to bring about technology-backed K-12 solutions. Currently, its leading products like TeachNext, LearnNext, MathsLab, and ScienceLab are used by 2,00,000 teachers in 10,000 schools and ultimately impact 10,000,000 students. So, while the journey of how Ralhan got here is well-documented, we turn to him instead to understand the future of education.
Ralhan feels that as the digital wave catches on, there are at least six lakh classrooms that have been digitised in one form or the other. There are three ways classrooms can be digitised — students need books to be digitised, teachers need classrooms to be digitised and the management and parents need one platform through which everything can be communicated between them. "These three areas are where the next wave will happen," suggests Ralhan.
Ralhan also feels that the concept of having a principal will change and instead, educational institutes will have academic partners because "no one person can run or manage these dynamic institutes on their own. Principal-driven schools are not the future," says the 37-year-old. "There is also a lot of policy and mindset change required at the government-level," he says and we are grateful just thinking about the tedious work that Edtech start-ups like NextEducation have undertaken to bring the future closer.
For more on them, click on nexteducation.in