Jai D'costa, the Mumbai-based marketing director of Helix Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd (HTS), was interviewed by Dilip Thakore in Hyderabad. Excerpts:
The market for ICT learning products and services is getting quite crowded with several heavyweight companies including Educomp Solutions, Everonn Education, NIITand Manipal K-12 among others in the fray. Against this backdrop what is the USP of Helix Technologies?
Each digital solution has three basic components — hardware, content and service. We have two solutions that encapsulate the best mix of all components ensuring quality without compromise, yet also guaranteeing that schools don’t end up paying for something they don’t require.
In terms of hardware, TeachNext is the only low-cost, single classroom solution available in the market today. Its sleek operating unit can be plugged into any audio-visual device — projector, TV, LCD etc — and the classroom is digital-ready instantly. Its box is operated through a simple remote control. It’s as easy to operate as a DVD player. In short, it’s easy to use, requires no training, needs low risk investment, and has the ability to digitise even a single classroom.
Its USP is that it is 100 percent course aligned, ready to use and has been designed and developed bearing in mind students’ understanding and teachers’ usability. Subjects covered include maths, physics, chemistry, biology, English, geography, history, economics, civics for classes K-10 with classes XI-XII to be covered soon.
As for service, the TeachNext solution comes with a hardware configuration that requires minimal maintenance. The content ensures zero training and we provide free upgrade of the software or the syllabus, as and when required. Plus a service coordinator is assigned to each school.
Our other solution is SchoolNext, which is a complete end-to-end multi-class digital package. It comes with the best in hardware configuration, yet gives schools’ the flexibility to pick and choose hardware options.
Over 80 percent of primary-secondary schools in India are run by the Central and state governments. How receptive are governments and government schools to ICT products and services?
Government is increasingly becoming receptive to ICT products and services. This is demonstrated by the Union HRD ministry’s enthusiastic involvement with ICT initiatives. In December 2004, the HRD ministry launched its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Schools programme to provide opportunities to secondary school students to develop ICT skills and also encourage ICT aided learning proce-sses. The scheme provides support to state governments to establish comp-uter labs on a sustainable basis.
In this connection it’s pertinent to note that TeachNext is an ideal solution for government schools. Given that any solution to government schools should be durable requiring little maintenance, easy to use and inexpensive, TeachNext meets all these requirements. It is the cheapest solution available, does not require any training and is extremely rugged as it is built for Indian conditions.
The teacher’s community in particular is notorious for its known resistance to ICT products and services. To what extent if any, do Helix Technologies’ products and services address this problem?
A product might have the best quality and configuration but if it’s not easy to use, adoption won’t be easy. Therefore our guiding principle in design is ease of use.
One of the best features of both our solutions — TeachNext and School-Next — is its teacher friendliness. We’ve not only designed the content based on recommendations of acade-mics, but the hardware and interactive features have also been created keeping teachers’ needs in mind.
Against the backdrop of depressing data about learning outcomes in school education, unemployability of college and university graduates, and poor research record of indian academia, how optimistic are you about the future of indian education?
We need to move from rote-based learning to a comprehension-based education system. There’s urgent need to transform school education so that students understand con-cepts and lessons, rather than just mug them. HTS is committed to this transformation, and to making our products user-friendly so that learning concepts becomes more important than learning to use software.