Learnings from Haryana’s At-home Learning Programme
Learnings from Haryana’s At-home Learning Programme
What Avanti Fellows learned during their online-learning intervention last academic year with students from public schools of Haryana and the path forward
In response to COVID-19 mandated school closures the Government of Haryana (GoH) initiated an at-home learning programme called Ghar Se Padhao. Under this initiative, GoH mandated the setting up of class-wise WA groups (consisting of students & teachers) to encourage teaching and learning online. In a matter of weeks, lakhs of students were connected to their teacher and peers through class-wise (and in some cases school-wise) WA groups. In parallel, a dissemination network of WA groups (consisting of district officials, block officials, principals etc.) was put into place so that content created/curated centrally by the education department reached students.
Avanti Fellows (AF) supported this initiative by creating daily math and science lessons for Grade 9-12. AF crafted the messages that listed what the student needed to do on a particular day. Daily lessons were essentially a video link (AF has developed one of the largest YT video repositories for math and science at the secondary education level ) and occasionally some notes. AF sent these messages to the state education department and then the department used its dissemination network to cascade these lessons into various school/class WA groups. Along with daily lessons, a weekly quiz was also conducted every Friday. The link to the quiz also reached students through this cascaded network of WA groups.
The main drawbacks of using YT videos was that they didn't provide student-level engagement and learning data. Thus, it was unclear how many students engaged with the materials; how many students clicked on the links; how much of the video did the student watch and were they able to understand what was taught, etc.
In January ‘21 (seven months after the WA groups network was established) the YT videos in the daily lesson were replaced by plios. Plio is an open-source tool that empowers creators to make their videos interactive and gather rich analytics on user engagement. A plio is a combination of video overlaid with questions at regular intervals. As a user watches a video, questions pop up that they can answer (or skip) and continue watching the video. The Plio platform collects rich student engagement and learning data and thus overcomes many of the drawbacks of using YT video from a data perspective. Also, plios are much more engaging than regular YT videos. The questions create opportunities for active engagement in an otherwise passive activity of watching videos. We found that student engagement on plios was five times higher than regular YT videos!
This post summarises our findings and learnings from using plios in daily lessons as part of the at-home learning initiative deployed in the state of Haryana over the course of four months - Jan 12th to Apr 8th, 2021.
Context
Over the course of four months, 128 plios (55 Grade 9 plios and 73 were Grade 10 plios) were sent out to all Grade 9 and Grade 10 students in Haryana through the cascade network of class-wise WA groups set up by GoH. Through these WA groups, plios reached about 1,20,000 Grade-9 and 1,15,000 Grade-10 students across the state.
What did we find?
Most students don’t open (or click) on links posted on school WA groups. About half the students engaged for less than 10 secs.
Over the course of four months, about 40,800 students clicked on the plio links at least once. This is about 17% of students who could have participated. Further, only about 25,350 students watched a plio for more than 10 secs. Some potential reasons for this could be:
Most students borrow devices from their parents / elder siblings / neighbors. Thus, it's possible that in some cases, the plio links were clicked by a parent/ sibling accidentally and which they closed before 10 secs. This implies that less than 17% of students actually clicked on these links intentionally.
Teachers did not explicitly push participation in daily lessons (messages which had the plio links) and thus we saw lower uptake. In comparison, we observed much higher participation in weekly quizzes, which could be due to the state-wide push for participation by the government system.
Students did not find the daily lessons interesting or rewarding. When we interviewed students in Feb, several said they didn’t look at the daily messages anymore and many had not noticed that the content had changed from YT videos to plios.
Most of the students who watched at least one plio for more than 10 secs, came back to watch other Plios.
This is a promising finding. This could be because of the novelty appeal of plios. Students had never seen a video where questions pop-up as they were watching a video. In our interviews with students, we found that students liked plios because they got instant feedback on their answers and could gauge if they are understanding the concepts or not. The other reason was that most plios were shorter (3-4 mins) compared to other educational videos they had seen.
But, there was a massive variation in the total time watched.
While the novelty factor or the inherent appeal of plios could bring back students a few times (we found that 60% of students had watched 1-2 plios and 30% had watched 3-4 plios), long term usage is probably driven by other factors. We interviewed students with the highest plio watch times and found that these students were (not surprisingly!) highly motivated towards their studies (quotes from their interviews - “I like studying”; “I like learning new things”; “I was excited to see which chapter will get started”), had access to a smartphone (e.g. mother’s phone) almost all the time and mostly did not have issues with the internet, recharge, etc.
Lastly, through a series of micro-experiments, we found that the best plios (ones with the highest participation) are 3-4 minutes long, had hook questions (i.e. a simple question within the first 5 secs of the video), and one question every 30 secs.
Implications
Regular (ideally unrestricted) access to smartphones and the internet (through unlimited data packs) is crucial. Without this, the barriers to developing a steady study routine at home might be too high for an average student to overcome.
Points, leaderboards, and other reward and recognition mechanisms need to be put into place to nudge students to participate. These are forms of extrinsic motivation that give students an instant feeling of achievement. While the novelty aspect and inherent features of plios make them more engaging than regular YT videos, this alone cannot drive long term usage. Without any teacher/ system push only 10% of kids would meaningfully access learning materials posted on their school WA groups.
Intrinsic motivation of students towards learning also needs to be developed for the long term sustainability of at-home learning programs. We found that students who liked to study spent a lot more time studying on their own (e.g. watched plios) compared to other students even in the absence of immediate rewards.
Way forward
We need to find ways to provide regular (ideally unrestricted) access to devices and the internet to students.
The role of teachers in class WA groups needs to be explored. They are well placed to motivate students and develop engagement (e.g. through non-academic activities) in school WA groups, much like they would have in a regular classroom.
External reward mechanisms like competitions, leaderboards, point systems etc. need to be put into place to give students an instant sense of achievement while also working on developing their intrinsic motivation towards learning.
We have a real chance of bringing the power of technology to those at the bottom of the pyramid. If this sounds exciting to you and if you are interested in shaping the education of millions of students in the country, we are actively hiring full-stack engineers for our core team. Reach out to us at plio@avantifellows.org for more details.