Genie in your smartphone?

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The scene is beautifully set up: The kid is struggling with Algebra. All seems lost. All of a sudden, a messiah dressed in sharp business wear, waves his wand of genius to the same kid who now cracks the code, and now transforms into the wiz in her classroom. Her mates and the teacher applaud her.

Unless you've been living under a rock, the frame that I have described above is an easily identifiable one. It is one of the many commercials floating around on TV during over breaks in the ongoing T20 spectacle. While these advertisements had gathered sizable traction and momentum in the lockdown, they seem to have upped their own game this summer with Bollywood's biggest names backing these tools.

These alternative education modules are being offered in a flood; each promises parents unbelievable turnarounds for their children. They often promise not one but two teachers ‘ka advantage' [remember the times when we were happy with just one efficient teacher]; our guess is that parents are already sold on the idea. So never mind that the child has to contend with one school teacher, because back home, there are two more waiting to ensure you ace your grades. There are promises, stirring Obama-type speeches, money back guarantees and what-have-you.

What does that mean for the teacher in school? Will they no longer play an integral role in a child's student life? Are kids no longer interested in paying attention during their class periods largely because they've got these cooler-dressed genies tucked away in their smartphones?

There is another concern.

A few weeks ago, while speaking about the travails of poorly trained interns and freshers from some journalism schools, this columnist briefly touched upon a point about this booming industry. In the process of interviewing some of this specimen type, I had stumbled upon a shocking detail. Many of them, while in the process of boasting about their available options and/or projects that they had simultaneously taken up in their final year of college or in their gap year, shared that they were content providers [for those who have come in late - this is the new synonym for a journalist] for such educational platforms. When I probed casually about their research tools to generate content for these school subjects, pat came the reply [and no prizes for guessing] - Google. Thanks to the facemask, my jaw didn't drop.

Nineteen and 20-year-old students barely out of college, barely able to string a grammatically correct sentence together, barely aware of basic current affairs in their own state, were the chosen ones to draft and develop educational content for these slickly packaged educational apps directed at students who were three-four years younger to them. On asking around, I learnt that this modus operandi was more the accepted norm and not the exception. Silly and naïve of me to imagine that retired school and college professors or academics were the minds behind such so-called ‘user-friendly and successful' content.

Still shell-shocked by the origins of this content, I learnt from another candidate who I had interviewed for an internship that their compiled/curated content is not even cross-checked or referenced by a senior ‘teacher' or fact checker. At that time, she was wrapping up an Indian history module, using the Internet as her sole resource. Again, silly of me to have expected her to at least head to her college library to access a verified primary source like books [remember those great tools?].

A few weeks later, another such young hopeful who was trying their luck as a junior writer while also being ‘project head' [at a ripe old age of 21 years] for an educational app, stuttered and stumbled his way writing a simple review of a city restaurant.

All these disturbing developments led to my hitting rewind mode. Having been part of a research team a long while ago where we conceived, ideated and developed a knowledge series as an after-school supplementary module for middle and high school students across Indian cities, this wasn't new terrain. Back then, we'd burn the midnight oil while preparing these sessions; we'd check and recheck content; next, we would have to cross-reference it with at least two resources to prove how we arrived at our answers. Senior hands would then accept it after which it went through another round of rigourous fact-checking. Such was the meticulous detail with which these sessions were envisioned before reaching the student.

From those days, to today's instant times, with teens being roped in to do copy-paste jobs off the Internet, it has been quite an observation exercise for yours truly. It brings me back to the same concerns I raised at the start of this column -- Does it also mean that today's kids need more than one tutor for the same subject? Secondly, and more critically, does it mean that school teachers will no longer be the key influencers in a student's life? Your guess is as good as mine.

mid-day's Features Editor Fiona Fernandez relishes the city's sights, sounds, smells and stones...wherever the ink and the inclination takes her. She tweets @bombayana

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