1.

Answer the following questions:

a) What do you think are the core competencies of PraDigi? Pick at most two distinct core competencies. Try to
pick core competencies that are specific to PraDigi and not general to Pratham.
Pratham was innovative from the start, partnering with UNICEF and the city authorities of Mumbai in a novel
arrangement meant to reach those left behind — the slum children in Mumbai city. Over the past 20 years, the
organization has widened its scope to include working with children in primary and upper primary grades, dropout
students, and youth in need of vocational skills in both rural and urban India. Pratham’s interventions rely on employees
assisted by volunteers from the local communities, a model it has since replicated in 20 of India’s 29 states, making it one
of the country’s largest non-governmental education providers. Chavan’s organization has also devised a metric for
measuring learning levels, ASER, now recognized as the gold standard in India and replicated in other countries.
In addition to providing tablets to rural communities, this digital initiative includes a learning app that offers children
high-quality, interactive content to improve their basic literacy and numeracy skills, support their subject-specific
competencies, and promote their ability to think critically and work collaboratively.
Pradigi core competencies are able to digitized carefully curated content in different ways which can then be utilized by
children and young adults to improve their basic skills and support their education.

b) Name two tangible resources that PraDigi possesses. Pick one financial resource (for instance, funding) and one
physical resource (for instance, computers). Be specific and detailed.
Physical Tangible Resources
Electronic tablets pre-loaded with content curated by Pratham in villages to help increase children’s engagement with
learning. Children of different ages and grades formed small neighborhood groups and shared the tablets. Self-directed
peer group learning was encouraged, but children also took assistance from parents, siblings, and volunteers. The tablet
triggered the children’s curiosity as most of them were not familiar with devices since they did not have access to even a
cell phone. They played with the tablets and learned how to use the camera to film and edit videos.

learning center was opened equipped with a Raspberry Pi, a low-cost computer. The computer, equipped with a
monitor, keyboard, hard drive, webcam and microphone, was installed at a cost of approximately $200. It served
three functions. It provided protected Internet access to 350 educational websites curated by the Pratham team. It
had a digital library that stored content and videos created by the children. Finally, it could help students learn
coding.

Financial Tangible Resources

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund

Around 3,000 tablets, funded by the CSRj wing of communication service provider Vodafone, were distributed among the
groups.
Sarva Mangal Family Trust (SMFT)k and Google.org also supported this cause and released funds
c) Name two intangible resources that PraDigi possesses. Focus on reputation, particularly the Pratham brand,
and its relationships. Describing how these serve as resources.
Pratham evolved from a service delivery network in slums to a learning methodology innovator, having an impact on
the country’s education policy and practice.
The Pratham team worked directly with children and youth as well as through large-scale collaborations with
government systems. In ‘direct’ work, a Pratham instructor worked with children either in the school or in the
community, whereas the ‘partnership’ model involved Pratham working closely with government teams at the state,
city, or district level to design and implement programs.
Pratham’s hybrid learning model was being used in vocational training programs. Though much of the assessment was
based on work output, the trainees were also assessed on the app internally before they were placed in jobs.
Pratham partnered with J-PALf to help address the learning crisis in primary schools in Africa through the TaRL
methodology.
Pratham collaborated with numerous partners to curate, develop and co-create learning resources for the non-
traditional curriculum. The content was developed with two main points in mind— children’s level of engagement and
learning outcomes. Videos which were rarely watched or activities which were seldom accessed, were removed or
replaced.

Tablets are distributed to groups of children in rural villages who direct their own learning path. The content is regularly
updated and student progress data is periodically collected. 
Learning content for preschoolers, primary school children and upper primary school children is available in major Indian
languages including Punjabi, Assamese, Bengali, Odiya, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English.
Pratham Digital has produced over 1700 videos and 200 learning games in the last few years. These resources can be
viewed on www.prathamopenschool.org. These resources have been deployed and monitored in many rural and urban
communities. With each passing year, this repository of content – videos, games and applications has grown to cater to the
interests and engagement of children.
Translating videos into 11 regional languages has helped them become relevant and accessible to learners in all states.
d) Name two human resources that PraDigi possesses. Pick one as a know-how and one as a capacity to collaborate.
Give examples to illustrate how these resources benefit the organization.
Madhav Chavan
Madhav Chavan is the visionary behind mass scale work for adult literacy in the slums of Mumbai as a part of the
National Literacy Mission in the slums of Mumbai. In 1994, as a result of an initiative of UNICEF in Mumbai, Pratham
was set up to address problems of universal primary education in Mumbai.
Dr. Chavan has since then led the development of the organization and its programs. Pratham has several mass-scale
innovations such as the Annual Status of Education Report in the area of assessment and the Read India movement in the
delivery of education for the underprivileged to its credit.
He also scripted and anchored a prime-time TV serial and radio shows dedicated to the cause of adult literacy.
Chavan’s belief that each child learned best when the content and pace matched his or her level, the digital
initiative redefined education by creating an `open learning’ environment for children and the youth.

Nishant Baghel
Baghel directed to curate the content around fun and engagement to get the children interested in the tablet.
Interesting content did not mean sophisticated visual graphics, it meant what children could do using the content
with their friends.
Baghel and his team observed how the children studied together outside a formal school structure; how they engaged
with the device; how they explored the content and which videos and games they found interesting. Sustaining
children’s interest was the toughest task at hand. They analysed that when they launched PraDigi, children were
passive consumers of digital content and in order to hold their interest they needed to make them active
participants.The team observed that the pre-loaded content such as games was interactive, but other content like the
science experiments encouraged activity away from the tablet, which was more engaging.
At every stage of the project they learned a lot from the children. Baghel and his team noted “Through every year
of the project, one factor remained constant, children inherently enjoyed doing something with their friends.
Therefore, the emphasis continued to be on learning in a group. They used their observations and children’s
feedback to continuously develop the content and track engagement.” To sustain the children’s interest, they
augmented the content through village fairs, competitions, quizzes, etc.

e) Name two operational capabilities that PraDigi has. Focus one on managing volume and one on ensuring quality.
Link these to what Pratham had as operational capabilities before PraDigi.
Operational capability on managing volume.
Building on the principle of ‘education for education,’ Pratham decided to expand through a youth network. Around
6,000 youth members across 1,000 villages were engaged as coaches in the PraDigi Open Learning program. The idea
was that these 1,000 communities would be ‘demonstration sites’ where new ideas and resources would be
implemented.

One such pilot was organized with the Raspberry Pi Foundation where coaches were trained in basic computational
thinking concepts. In return, they were asked to mentor the children on their projects. The youth formed Code Clubs
through which they learned Scratch programming and coached the children too. There were over 400 code clubs with
over 1,100 active members in 40 villages by the end of the pilot. The cascading model of training motivated the youth
to learn more themselves and engage effectively with the children.

PraDigi Open Learning was also launched in urban communities in larger cities such as Pune, Bangalore, Delhi and
Mumbai. In urban areas, the usage patterns were different. With more students going to English-medium schools, and
higher smartphone penetration, the interest was less. “We altered the content to focus on computational thinking and
English,” said Annapoorni Chandrashekar, senior manager, digital innovations, Pratham Education Foundation.

Besides, the social structure in the urban areas was different from rural communities as many parents and older
siblings were not always present in the house since they were working and studying. In urban communities, Pratham
formed youth groups comprising volunteers from schools and colleges and asked them to support the children. These
volunteers were given the tablets and asked to run the groups like a library, instead of allowing the children to take
the devices home.

The digital initiative was an additional input in Pratham’s work to educate marginalized children in rural areas.
Therefore, the resources and tablets were made available in Pratham’s foundational and vocational programs and in
the early childhood education programs on an experimental basis, adding another dimension to the expansion.

Operational capability on quality.

Quality has also been a major focus area for the. There was wide disparity in student learning levels. Teachers had to
complete the syllabus within a specifiedc time and focused on the ‘top of the class.’ Students were promoted to the next
grade automatically, up to grade 8, until the law was amended in 2019.3 Many students entered a grade without acquiring
that grade-level knowledge. Besides, trained teachers were in short supply, and teacher absenteeism was common.

Pratham focused on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the education system.
The organization also widened its scope to include dropouts and youth in need.
The coaches were trained by the Pratham team in person and through video calls. One of the coaches said he was
shown how to use computers and how to assist children with their arts and science projects. The social status of the
youth changed when they became coaches. Another coach shared: “We command a lot of respect from the
community.” The most common problems with the tablets that the coaches addressed were technical. They also
assisted the children with learning activities which did not require devices, such as scripting and performing plays.

Meanwhile, the content for the children was organized according to subjects and ‘mini-courses’ were created. The
courses had a completion date and included videos, experiments and activities on each topic. To complete the
course, the children watched videos, participated in activities with and without the device, and their projects were
showcased to the village elders and assessed digitally.

Pratham collaborated with numerous partners to curate, develop and co-create learning resources for the non-
traditional curriculum. The content was developed with two main points in mind— children’s level of engagement
and learning outcomes. Videos which were rarely watched or activities which were seldom accessed, were
removed or replaced.

f) Name two dynamic capabilities that PraDigi has. For example, one can be on innovations in education delivery,
and the other on responsiveness to trends in rural schools. Discuss with examples.
Innovations in Education
Pratham Digital has produced over 1700 videos and 200 learning games in the last few years. These resources can be
viewed on www.prathamopenschool.org. These resources have been deployed and monitored in many rural and urban
communities. With each passing year, this repository of content – videos, games and applications has grown to cater to the
interests and engagement of children.
Content was contextualized with inputs from the children. For example, videos created to learn English were based on
everyday conversations, which encouraged children to practice through role- play. Science content had simple
activities that children could do for a better understanding of the concepts, such as making a telephone with paper cups
and strings to understand how sound travels. The videos on the lessons were filmed in rural settings and the sound and
visuals mirrored the children’s real lives so that they could relate to the videos.
Even the camera was used as a learning tool. The children, for example, explored content on irrigation systems on the
tablet and then made a video of the system in their village over the past 50 years. Children who were initially reluctant
to participate as they were not interested in school subjects, overcame their hesitation and became involved in activities
such as filming videos. It was the first step towards making children content creators. Soon some children were
confident enough to challenge the Pratham team, saying, “We can make better videos than you.”
This new approach to digital learning created a buzz and organizations such as the Sarva Mangal Family Trust
(SMFT)k and Google.orgl came forward with their support to help scale this experimental approach to more
communities and translate the content to 11 regional languages.

Translating videos into 11 regional languages has helped them become relevant and accessible to learners in all states.

Responsiveness to trends
Based on trends, it was estimated that India would increase the number of internet users by about 40% to between 750–
800 million and double the number of smartphones to between 650 - 700 million by 2023.
Although around 78% of India’s 1.4 billion population had cell phones, tele-density in rural areas was around 57%.
Added to these disparities was the digital divide between rural and urban areas. Data showed that access to virtual
learning was far from universal in India. In urban areas, 23.4% of households had computers and 42% had access to
the internet, while the corresponding numbers in rural areas were 4.4% and 14.9% respectively.
All these factors combined led to low learning outcomes in schools, especially in rural areas. By grade 8, children were
expected not only to have mastered foundational skills but to have proceeded well beyond the basic stage. However,
data indicated that children were falling behind in learning. Around 50% of children in grade 5 could not read a grade 2
level text.
Based on these trends the digital initiative, PraDigi Open Learning, was launched in rural residential communities,
away from schools, to avoid “fitting” into the content mapped to an academic curriculum. It involved the
distribution of electronic tablets pre-loaded with content curated by Pratham in villages to help increase children’s
engagement with learning. Children of different ages and grades formed small neighborhood groups and shared the
tablets. Self-directed peer group learning was encouraged, but children also took assistance from parents, siblings
and volunteers. The tablet triggered the children’s curiosity as most of them were not familiar with devices since
they did not have access to even a cell phone. They played with the tablets and learned how to use the camera to
film and edit videos.

2. Pratham asked itself “Should PraDigi be used to replace schools during the Covid-19 lockdown?” How did the
various competencies, resources, and capabilities discussed in part 4 allow PraDigi to answer this challenge?
Chavan felt that in many ways, Pratham had the resources to help during the lockdown. Its digital content had been
translated into many Indian languages that could be shared across different states. “We did not restrict the content to
textbooks and had a repository of content in different Indian languages that we could share,” he added.

Besides, Pratham’s hybrid learning model was being used in vocational training programs. Though much of the
assessment was based on work output, the trainees were also assessed on the app internally before they were placed in
jobs. Since residential training centers were shut due to the lockdown, virtual classes were being held and Pratham
planned to extend the program to migrant daily wage workers who, rendered jobless by India’s coronavirus lockdown,
were leaving cities to return home to their villages.11 “The pandemic had disrupted every industry leading to an urgent
need to reskill migrant workers. We decided to assess and certify them online. Fulfilling the demand of reskilling
migrant workers was a good measure of success for us,” added Chavan.

PraDigi Open Learning has shown that children can learn independently outside a formal schooling system. they trained
the youth and in return they have mentored the children. This model could be scaled rapidly, and it could support the
school system and may be of interest to the government.
Electronic tablets which were pre-loaded with content curated by Pratham in villages would help increase children’s
engagement with learning. Children of different ages and grades can form small neighborhood groups and share the
tablets. Self-directed peer group learning can be encouraged, and children can also take assistance from parents, siblings,
and volunteers.
their digital initiative also included a learning app that can be leveraged to offer children high-quality, interactive content
to improve their basic literacy and numeracy skills, support their subject-specific competencies, and promote their ability
to think critically and work collaboratively.