Automating Education

In 2010, when I was working with Flipkart, I was meeting this publisher called Pearson. They are big.

So big that If you have attended school or college, chances are that you have read at least one book or another published by them or their subsidiary. They are in 70 countries and have over 32,000 employees. Penguin is just one of Pearson subsidiaries.

In Flipkart days, a lot of our time was spent telling people about ecommerce and how it works. Most common questions used to be "so you are saying that you will not scan our book and put it on a website, but actually deliver it by post"?. And today you might be laughing at it, but in 2010, I did meetings with people publishing textbooks on ecommerce asking us these things. Those were bizarre days.

So i walked into the meeting with Pearson with similar expectations, and all the usual suspect questions covered. By that time, we had done the pitch so many times, that we didn't even bother preparing. You could waken my team including me at 1 in the night, and i could have given you a "Become partner on Flipkart" pitch.

Since pearson was big, all I did was tuck in the shirt in my jeans. That was about it.

So we walk into this meeting and did the usual rounds of expected greetings.But what i didn't expect was that the company had an actual CTO meeting us. 

I mean a publishing company in India, having a CTO was like futuristic science fiction. Hadn't even thought that its possible. Most of the book sellers were still working on registers for stock in and out, and the advanced and tech savvy ones had hired one person to run the computers to mail things and print invoices. I never met a bookseller or stockist whose stock on the computer was reconciled.

It was always this one floor guy who would know if the book was in stock or not. The computer might say that there are 1,000 units of a book, but if the floor guy said zero in stock, 99% chance was that the book was Zero in stock.

So you can imagine, sitting across a CTO, from a publishing company.

The usual phases of shock, disbelief and acceptance happened. But still had to make sure that this guy was really technical and not just a celebratory position that came with seniority and a capability to check your own mails.

Two three questions, and yep, they guy was the real thing. Within the next three questions, we were out of our depth.

So Satyarth, are you guys doing ebooks.

My mind is screaming with joy and agony at the same time.What!! Ebooks! You know this word ebooks. Are you making fun of us asking this..thousand questions.

Well it so happens that the guy is ready to give us an XML feed for stock data. Problem is that this is the first time that we are outmatched on technology and don't have the ready capacity to take that feed.

Most of my last six months had gone in realising that 70% of books industry did not have stock on computers. If they had that, they were not updated. If they were updated, we were too small to have a direct account with them. If they had an updated stock on a computer and we had an account as well, there was no one on that side who knew how to take that out and mail it to us.

And here is a guy, who is ready to provide stock details in an automated XML feed. No follow ups. no mail. Just servers talking to servers and my website always showing current stock status. I wanted to kiss the guy, but alas, we had create the capability to absorb them.

This was 2010.

Now stock lists are pretty standard. Computers are with every bookseller to upload their stock statuses in a predefined format. The bigger ones have API's integrated to publish book details and prices as they come into their system. So what is pearson doing?

Now pearson is grading some 34 million hand-written student essays by an automated ROBO-Grader.

Yep. large number of schools in USA have adopted the system where your essays will not be checked by a human, but by an AI.

And why not.

If AI can drive cars and talk to you and beat humans at chess, why can't they check papers.

How do robo-graders know how to grade papers? By crunching in thousands and thousands of previous papers and their grades to create a machine learning algo.

These Algos are being reverse engineered by students all the time and the robo graders are being duped as well, and companies like pearson are making them smarter by tweaking them. And that is where education is headed.

Which brings me to the point.

If a machine can be taught what is good writing and it can be used to correct papers, why cant the same machine be taught to teach you how to write well?

We have had spell check since ages. Then Microsoft added grammar check, which is kind of a hit and miss. New startups like Grammarly are doing the entire spell check and grammar bit a little more neatly.

But suppose you created a startup which was a clone of the paper check machine like Pearson has, except this one prepared you by giving you mock test on subjects and helped you write better answers in your school paper.

All of a sudden, the examiner can become the teacher. Imagine the scope of such a tool in India.

I am not sure if it already exists. If it does, hope you will let all of us know in the comments. But if not, i hope you will spread the idea around, so that the students in our country become better.

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Views expressed in the article above are personal