Scaling tablet usage in India
Goal: Prepare Pratham with the tools and technologies to roll out its Hybrid Learning Platform.
Partner: Pratham is one of the largest non-governmental organizations in India. It was founded in Mumbai in 1994 to provide pre-school education to children in slum areas. Pratham today has interventions spread across 23 states and union territories of India reaching over 5.7 million beneficiaries. 
Pratham’s mission is Every Child in School and Learning Well. By increasing the literacy levels of India’s poor (which account for about one third of the world’s poor), Pratham aims to improve India’s economic and social equality. This is carried out through the introduction of low cost education models that are sustainable and replicable. Pratham has been exploring the use of technology to sustain the impact of their highly successful literacy programs and to enable students to become self-directed learners outside of school.
Pratham’s technology initiative, called Hybrid Learning or H-Learning, leverages tablet-based curricula to
empower students in grades five through eight to decide collaboratively what content they will learn and how they will go about learning.
Currently Pratham has deployed 2,000 tablets across 3 states – Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan. Content is uploaded on a weekly basis and covers a wide range of topics from astronomy to chemistry. Pratham’s objective is to better understand how a student-focused model can accompany more traditional models, with the goal of scaling these methodologies across India’s rural school ecosystem.
Project: Team4Tech along with a team of eight HPE volunteers traveled to Pune in September 2017 to help Pratham develop an Android application for their Hybrid Learning Initiative, and also to create dashboards and other data analysis tools to assess the impact of the program. The HPE volunteers, who were engineers, designers, and engineering managers, helped provide feedback on and implement solutions to improve the application database, UX design, and administrative tools. In addition, the volunteers modeled and shared industry standards and best practices to help Pratham’s engineering team improve their efficiency and quality standards. Together with the volunteers, Team4Tech donated 580 hours of skilled service work, and the equivalent of $74,400 of donated time.
Our goal was to help Pratham prepare for the exponential growth in usage that the PraDigi platform is expected to experience in the near future. With the right software, technologies, and best practices needed for efficient software development, Pratham will better be able to scale and improve the educational experiences of 6 million children across India.
