Make them like learning. Make them addicted to learning: Byju Raveendran

Byju started his talk at TechSparks on Saturday, Oct 31, with a video from Byju’s learning academy where academics teach concepts visually. He went on to talk about what the education lacks right now.

He said the main problems with the current education system in India are:

• It is not engaging enough, which makes students think one-dimensional. Startups in the education space need to build great content.
• There is no personalization for students. Each has a different learning capability.
• Great teachers are rare. Many of the existing teachers are there by chance and not by choice.
• Academic assessment tools are primitive and assess the wrong metrics.

“We are leveraging the power of learning on your own. Which is why we create engaging educational movies for India and soon global,” he adds.

Don’t build for the star student

He categorizes students in every classroom as: the context learner; the visual learner; and the mugger and why the need for personalization comes in.

“People have classrooms that run at the pace of the top two percent of students, those strategies may not work for the others,” says Byju, who wants education startups to delve into this sector with the best interests of students on mind.

Trigger curiosity

“We used to ask hundreds of questions per day when we were four-year-olds. We have become one-dimensional thanks to our education systems. We have to create interest. Once startups are able to make content contextual and visual, students don’t have to then try hard to learn,” says Byju.

Byju’s currently has over a 150-member production team to make fun videos for learning on various subjects. They will be teaching over 300,000 students across the globe by the end of this year.

Create a revolution

Byju says that the current acceptance rate for Indians into top universities in the world is 0.3 percent, and students need to understand what they learn to increase this number.

He ended with Victor Hugo’s quote,

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

A big shoutout to TechSparks 2015 sponsors – Sequoia Capital, ICICI Bank, Money on Mobile, Microsoft, Signal Hill, IBM Bluemix, PwC, Atom Tech, Teamchat, Govt. of Karnataka, Intel, Rabbler, Dailyhunt, Reverie, Loginext and PayUBiz; Partners – Duff&Phelps, Taxmantra, Dineout, Exotel, 360ride, Yoga Bar, Chai Point, GWC; and our Media Partners – TV9, Fortune India, RedFM and Deccan Herald.