Eduphoria, an ed-tech startup, offers innovative solutions in education and skilling space through a bouquet of novel products and services to enhance the quality of learning and teaching thereby making it more impactful. Mr.Sarang Gangan, Founder of Eduphoria has spent nearly 20 years working in the education sector. Recently Team IT-Voice had a chance to interact with him. Mr.Sarang was kind enough to spare time and answer our questions covering many areas of the ed-tech industry. Here is an excerpt from the interaction.
Prateek: Tell us about the vision behind Eduphoria.
Sarang Gangan: Our vision is to deliver innovative solutions in education and skilling space through a bouquet of novel products cum services to enhance the quality of learning as well as teaching thereby making it more impactful.
With a vision to transform education and bring about educational equality, Eduphoria plans to set up Innovation Labs at schools, offer STEAM education, online training interventions, contextualized teaching, and learning aids and provide learning outcome-oriented assessment programs, especially in Tier 2 & 3 cities.
Prateek: You have extensive knowledge and experience working in the education sector for two decades. What are the key problems in the sector, and how technology can help?
Sarang Gangan: Having worked 18 years in the education sector, I recognized the challenges & gaps that exist in the Indian education system are primarily driven by lack of quality teaching aids and low technology penetration in schools and colleges, especially in smaller towns and cities. I also realized that comprehensive STEAM learning programs at schools are imperative to lay a solid foundation for key skills required for 21st-century careers among students.
It will need ingenious solutions backed by technology to address these gaps. Technology is going to be a great leveler and will transform all aspects of education including teaching, learning, assessments to bring parity and standardization. The key will be to make these innovative solutions quickly accessible to Tier 2/Tier 3 cities.
Eduphoria is also contributing to enable the vision of NITI Aayog’s Atal Tinkering Labs to ‘Cultivate one Million children in India as Neoteric Innovators’; by setting up ATLs across the country from mainstream to remote areas.
Prateek: What are some of the challenges faced by Eduphoria while setting up ATLs across India? How has the company overcome these challenges?
Sarang Gangan: Most of the equipment and tools provided are new to students and teachers. There is, in general, low awareness of the STEAM curriculum and resources. This creates a major challenge as these schools struggle to capitalize on the full potential of ATL Labs.
These gaps are being addressed by team Eduphoria by deploying training programs to hand-hold the schools initially and bring them to a level where they start managing it on their own. We provide them with a comprehensive STEAM curriculum. With this hand-holding support, we have seen schools show impressive learning outcomes, even in remote areas.
In addition to this, we also find most students are not very conversant with technology and are not even familiar with computers in many cases. Though there is a great amount of enthusiasm among these students and once our training program starts, we invariably find these students quickly grasp the concepts and can independently start doing 3D modeling, making prototypes on 3D Printers, and even pick up blocking programming.
Even schools in remote areas are quickly getting to a level where they can create many working projects like Controlling Cars with Mobile Bluetooth, sensor-based lighting systems in the lab on their own.
Again, due to the pandemic, physical schools have been closed most of the time, and usage of tinkering labs has been affected. This, however, has also turned out as a blessing in disguise as it has made schools more open to online training programs. We have also been developing digital learning resources over the last two years that have been very crucial in the continuity of the training program at ATLs. We have seen numerous examples where students reach out to us online for developing working models and projects.
Prateek: What will be the strategy of Eduphoria in the coming years for growth?
Sarang Gangan: So far we have been working on a B2B model focusing on establishing Innovation Labs and Atal Tinkering Labs. We are currently working in around 10 states across the country. We plan to extend our client base to new states.
We are also at the advanced stages of implementing our new strategy for reaching out to consumers directly. We have been working on different ways to leverage our existing school clients’ network to expedite the business acquisition through this B2B2C model.
This year, Eduphoria plans to reach out to 250 new institutions impacting at least half a million students through our B2B & B2B2C initiatives.
We are also in the process of introducing some global solutions to implement best practices that will help schools to improve the quality of education and make it more inclusive. We have registered more than 2X growth in FY 20-21 despite the impact of the pandemic. We are expecting to maintain similar growth this year as well.
Prateek: Tell us more about STEAM Solutions and its utilization in the Indian Educational system.
Sarang Gangan: We offer several services to promote hands-on STEAM learning and imparting new-age skills to students. We are establishing Innovation Labs & Atal Tinkering Labs where school students can experiment with, learn, conceptualize and develop innovative ideas. Schools are provided with end-to-end solutions from setting up & installation of ATL, personalized training sessions, industrial visits to get an understanding of real-life problems and solutions. Eduphoria also provides a comprehensive STEAM curriculum for these schools and follow-up training sessions.
We are offering in-depth programs for imparting next-generation technologies including Robotics, AI, 3D modeling and printing, Programming & App development among others.
We are also launching Do-It-Yourself (DIY) STEAM Kits that are designed for the school curriculum. The idea is to offer hands-on learning for various concepts of science that students can see in action and not just study them theoretically thereby moving the education system from rote learning to evidence-based and hands-on learning.
For any such interaction opportunities, you may write to us at [email protected].
