 I'm your host, Kandur Riff of the Sand. Today's topic is about digitalization. We talk about digitalization and its impact on sectors of the economy, sectors of the society, and sectors of the government as well. What sort of impacts can result in shrewd policymaking amongst those particular sectors? Now for digitalization to take place, it's also important to make sure that courses are designed to make sure that it has a meaningful impact on the society in general. So I have with me CEO of Knowledge Platform, Mr. Mahbub, who is here with us today and he's going to be sharing insights on what the Knowledge Platform is all about and how to take digitalization forward in the modern era. Mr. Mahbub, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Hamza, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Well, first of all, tell us about the Knowledge Platform, its mission, objectives, and belief system. Pakistan has about 75 million people who are 20 years or younger. Out of that, about 22 million don't go to school. So we have the largest out-of-school population in the world. Out of the 50 million or so kids who go to school, about half are in the private sector, which is growing quite quickly and half are in the government sector. Our mission at Knowledge Platform is to transform education in Pakistan, improve the quality, help students and teachers deal with new subjects, and also broaden the access. To do this, we do three things. We develop curriculum and content. We develop technology and we help schools and teachers make the transition towards hybrid learning models and online learning models. Okay. Okay. Well, that's very, very important, especially in developing countries where technological prowess and you could say facilities are not really in abundance as compared to the developed world. So as CEO of Knowledge Platform, what initially inspired you to come up with a leading Singapore-based learning solutions company? Well, we had for many years, we were doing e-learning for the compliance sector all across Asia. So this was like anti-money laundering, risk management, our clients were banks and pharmaceutical companies. And indeed when e-learning started, this was the way it started in Asia to begin with. And then I started thinking I should be doing something with the school sector and doing something in Pakistan that can really have an impact as well. I was also teaching at INSEAD, Business School as an adjunct faculty member, and I helped pioneer the social entrepreneurship program there. And I realized that in the work I was doing, I was serving large banks, pharmaceutical companies and the like. And I said, let me try to do something with more of a social mission as well. So we have two missions. We are a business, but we also have a very strong mission to transform the quality of education. Okay. So when you transform the quality of education, obviously Pakistan has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. And I say one of the lowest literacy rates because when you take a look at the comparisons with other countries such as Afghanistan, I mean it's pretty dismal. So when you speak about the concept of e-learning, and it's often understood and confined to the internet, which by all means is a very limited definition, you would agree with that. What do you think e-learning and blending learning training programs, you know, you could say, what sort of program has a knowledge platform developed on dealing with subjects such as corporate, educational and governmental sectors? You mentioned education. What about the corporate and governmental sectors? The corporate, we work a lot with the government sector as well. We work to some extent with the corporate sectors for adult learning. But most of our focus is on the K212 education sector. And so your question about what is e-learning and how does it get involved in a country like Pakistan, yeah. I would say there are four key aspects to this. One is having the right kind of content that is relevant to the curriculum as well as the learning needs of the people of Pakistan. The second have the right kind of technologies, software that can work and deliver reports, can use adaptive learning and so on. But there are two other areas that are almost, or if not more important than software and content. One is infrastructure. We estimate that in Pakistan, out of the 50 million or so kids who go to, who are in the education sector, only about two million have devices of their own. And education is not like ordering food or ordering a cab because you need to use your device for two, three, four hours a day. So there is a big 48 million or more kids don't have regular access to a device. So we have to come up with strategies that leverage whatever infrastructure there is available, especially in terms of hardware and to a substantial extent in the context of, in terms of bandwidth as well. And the other dimension is where the teachers and schools are ready to adopt education technology. We are beginning to address that issue as well. The hardware issue creates very interesting challenges both in Pakistan and in other emerging markets because you can't just provide an online platform. We do provide an online platform, but that means only people in government and corporates can access that kind of have direct access using their devices. So we work a lot with schools. So the basic product that we provide, we try to reduce the price as much as possible. So we said, let's start with one laptop per kid, right? And per school and give one laptop, a projector or an LED screen, but capture the data from all kids in the school by rotating them through this class, giving them low cost clickers, showing them videos, games, integrating it with their lessons, and then when they do quizzes and so on, capture their data. Keep it all offline. And then later on, when you have access to the internet, synchronize it, including two-way synchronization. So if anyone has a device at home, they can study. So literally for a couple of thousand dollars, we can bring kids into the digital age. So this is about the lowest cost solution that we've been able to come up with, which actually captures data from kids and then makes it available to them as well as to teachers and any educators around the world. There are other solutions that are even cheaper, for example, giving one teacher a phone, but then that becomes just instruction for the teacher and the kids don't get a digital experience. And more importantly, you're not capturing any data back. So you have to work a lot within the constraints in the country and it makes it both exciting and impactful when you can figure out ways that you can actually make a difference. Yeah, I mean, that was going to be my next question regarding constraints of the country because when we talk about Pakistan in general or any other developing country, you do have areas where you could say the bureaucracy is extremely resistant to using digital technologies. And even in rural areas, there are many communities who would feel that the usage of technology, they might be enthused by it, but there will be certain segments who would also resist it. So how do you tackle such impediments? I think in terms of one of the interesting things that's happening in Pakistan is that now about half the kids who are getting educated are getting educated in the private sector. In that way, you can say that there's a very, very high demand for education in the country because you can get education for free in the government sector. But people who have very limited amounts of income will still pay a little bit of money, let's say $5 a month or $10 a month, $15 a month to get their kids into a private sector school and get a better education. So there's a high demand for education and people are willing to spend money. And then one of their aspirations, and this is a growing aspiration, is that kids should become digitally enabled and savvy. So on the parent side and on the kid side, we see a considerable demand, but it's a demand at $5 to $10 to $15 a month, which is not just the digital cost, it's the cost of overall education. So you have to figure out solutions that at the digital level will only cost a couple of dollars, including the hardware, which is why the kind of solution that I'm talking about becomes very, very relevant. So you have demand on the parent side and on the kid side, where we find resistance is on the school side, willingness to invest, and partly because they don't quite see how to use the technology well, and then on the government sector schools, there's a strong unwillingness to invest, or when they invest, they, you know, you bring in computer sets, but they don't use them very well. So I think there is a big need for the education system to step up and say, look, there is a lot of improvements we can make in the system by bringing technology and making investment in hardware, making investment in teacher training, and really figuring out ways to integrate technology into education. It's beginning to happen, and it's very exciting to see it when it does. And we get terrific results when it does happen, but it's a journey. And we are still in the very early stages of this journey. Okay, so but there will be many parents who would argue that kids being locked into digital learning would prevent them from reading books. Do you subscribe to that thought, or do you think that's contentious? Well, I love reading books, but I think unfortunately, we are getting into a world where the world of books is kind of fading out. Books are not interactive. And I think we're coming to a stage where we need to recognize that maybe we're never going to be in a state where people will actually go back to reading more through paper based books. So I think we are living now in a digital world, kids are vastly attracted to the digital world. And we need to move into this paradigm and embrace its positivities, rather than sort of go back to a paradigm where we read books. I'm very, very sad. I feel very sad to say this at a personal level. But I think at a given where we are in the age we are at, this is where things are happening. Now one very, very interesting thing that has happened with us is that about six years ago, we started creating learning games. So what basically our lesson structure was a video that explained the concept. We would always encourage the teachers to stop and start the videos, give counter examples, do lessons on drawings and using blackboards and so on. So video that was explanatory, then a game that engaged the kids and made them play around with the concept without testing them in a very rigorous way, and then some questions and evaluation tests and so on that would evaluate them. In the beginning the teachers would not use the games because their mental model is that learning, even if they're learning games, that games are not what you do in the classroom. But then slowly younger teachers started using games and the kids just loved the reaction they got, the amount of time they spent, their immersion in learning games became much, much, you know, I mean it was terrific. And last year we had 600,000 kids play learning games on an extended basis, get very good learning outcomes. And you know now I'm coming to the view that we do kind of insights. One is that maybe learning games are the books of the 21st century, you know, they engage us the way I used to be engaged as true books. And they, they, you know, because learning happens when you're engaged, you know, and games tend to make that happen. The second thing is that if you think about, you know, we talk about teaching kids 21st century skills, collaborating, communicating, problem solving, being creative, being innovative, critical thinking, these are really difficult things to teach in the classroom through a traditional textbook based approach. And through learning games, especially in the area of problem solving, we've created a few hundred games in problem solving and now we're creating hundreds more. We found very, very good, very positive impacts. Kids begin to think, you know, and come up with solutions of their own and so on. And then I began to ask people about what the experiences were in playing games. And what I realized is that in the emerging market, just as there's a digital divide, there's also games divide. When I was a kid, I played more games than I played than I study, you know, and the games I played were drafts or checkers, Ludo, chess, bridge, all kinds of card games, Gammon, Monopoly, Crabble, crosswords, you know, there are no crosswords, you know, most kids who don't have a privileged background basically are reduced to playing Ludo and maybe drafts, you know? So this rich environment that we get in which our minds are being challenged and we sit around with families and play games and so on, kids don't, a lot of kids in Pakistan don't have that environment, you know? So even reading books is something which is a cultural thing. We read books, my dad would give me books as birthday present and, you know, the whole family would read books, so there was a cultural dimension. It's very difficult to replicate that culture, a book reading culture, but it's very easy to replace, to create a games learning culture. And recently what's been happening is we've managed to even convince government authorities to embrace games as a way of learning and specifically as a way of learning 21st century scale. So does that include simulation exercises as well? It includes simulations as well, it includes paper-based games, it includes digital games, all kinds of games. So the Ministry of Education has just, we've just delivered for them and they'll be uploading it soon. 40 videos with little exercise activities and links and all, two different kinds of games that explain different kinds of games and make it accessible to kids in an Urdu-speaking environment. And now another provincial authority, Gilgit Baltistan has commissioned us to make a big role in teaching teachers. We're going to do about a thousand teachers to begin with, teaching teachers on how to use games as a form of learning. So, you know, in addition to using technology, we're also trying to change the paradigm and how people learn. And I'm very, very excited that we, games-based learning has started to take off. We're also working on project-based learning. That's a little bit more difficult, so maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that next time. We're just about starting project-based learning as well. Yeah, well, good luck with that. So you've designed competency frameworks, adaptive assessments, content architecture, and even learning games, as you rightly pointed out. How do such frameworks impact various targeted sectors? Now, you spoke about the educational sector. What about the corporate and the governmental sectors? Well, you see, in the case of the corporate and governmental sectors, there are a couple of different areas where we are focused on. One is compliance, because we had a big background in compliance. So we are working with the State Bank of Pakistan, which is the central bank, on creating content for basically people in financial services or people who are regulated by the State Bank, anti-money laundering, and many other subjects of that nature. So that's beginning to take off. So that's one sector that's taking off. Another thing that we are doing is we are working with IT companies. And just about introducing now, in the process of introducing our problem-solving games as a way of improving IT skills. But what happens in Pakistan is that a lot of programmers, we get about 25,000 programmers that come into the market every year from out of college. But the way programming is taught is mainly focused on learning specific languages. And so what we are trying to do is make kids more effective problem solvers and lateral thinkers and so on. So we're introducing that as well. So these are the two sectors that we are working on. There has been a fair amount of utilization of platforms such as Coursera for getting specific degrees or specific credentialing for things like digital marketing and so on. So that trend has begun to take off. Okay. So, Mr. Beboob, if we speak about the developing world, basic infrastructure and learning is, you know, it's pretty much lacking, let alone next-generation learning solutions. So how has Knowledge Platform bridged this gap, particularly in emerging markets? When we talk about emerging markets, we're talking about Indonesia. We're talking about, you know, countries in Africa who have been performing quite well economically, but some of their social indicators are pretty much below par. So yeah, how has Knowledge Platform, you know, bridged this gap particularly in emerging markets? So I would say that we are beginning, we and our whole industry is beginning to solve two problems. But there are two problems that we have really still got ahead of us. Okay. The problem that we are beginning to solve is the content problem and the software problem. But we still have two problems left, which is the infrastructure problem and the teacher training and school support problem and integrating technology in education. Regarding this fourth problem, schools are getting a little more open and partly because they're getting pressure from parents and from students to using technology. And even if parents are paying $15 a month, they now have aspirations that their child should become digitally enabled. So I think what's going to solve this problem, at least on the private sector side, is the demand pool of schools getting more tech enabled plus support from our side. We will then be left with one major problem, which is infrastructure. You know, we talk about, for example, chat, GPT and you know, personal bots. But the problem is, if you if a kid doesn't have a device, then what how are we going to get their data? How are we going to give them a personal bot? This is a major issue. Now, a good device plus hardware plus bandwidth plus software and everything costs about even if I give a you know, I mean, a conservative number about $250 a year. Okay. So if you give a kid $250, if you invest $250 a year in a child for 12 years, you will end up spending about $3,000. Yeah, right. Nothing. It's absolutely nothing. If that child makes the incremental earnings of what a daily unskilled laborer makes in Mumbai today, that child will make a return on that investment 30 times during his or her lifetime. In other words, there is a compelling and statistically almost guaranteed return on investment if you can get kids a device. You know, I went into education because there was a guy in MIT called Nick Negroponte who had started an idea called one laptop per child. There were many problems with the basic idea, but I was very inspired by it and ultimately that project didn't work. But I said, wow, this is a great idea that let's get a laptop in the hands of every child. And then I forgot about the idea, but I dived into edtech and edtech and emerging markets. But then I realized that wow, this is the one constraining factor. We can transform the world, but we will need to get massive investments because $250 sounds like not very much money. But when you do the math, there are 2.6 billion people in the world today who are under 20 years of age and 90% of them are in emerging markets. And that percentage 90% is growing, not reducing. So if we want to transform the world, we need to come back to Necrobonte's idea and figure out ways to get every kid digital access so that we can deliver good learning because the rest of the problems are getting solved. This problem of infrastructure, we are way behind. Yeah. So briefly, Mr. Rainbow, tell us about the Ultra Bot. So Ultra Bot is our learning management platform. It's quite exciting because when we first went into edtech in Pakistan, we said okay, everything has to be offline. Because there's not enough internet connectivity. So we devised a learning management system and software that within with one laptop, I can give you a laptop with everything online. But then we realized, oh, but I mean, everything offline, you know what, so it's one, one laptop in a school in a remote village. It works perfectly well. But then we realized we're not capturing any data from the kid. So then we integrated clickers with it, very low cost devices. We made them ourselves, but ultimately we started importing them from China. And we just, you know, gave a kit. So it was a laptop, a projector, or an LED screen, and a bunch of clickers. And that made the school intelligent. The system captures data locally. Then it transmits it to the cloud. There's two ways, synchronization, a kid can study at home. When they study at home, there's adaptive learning possibilities because then we're tracking every child themselves individually. And so they can keep improving if they have some kind of device at home. And now what we are working on, which is a very interesting, but not very well explored area is using AI to assist teachers. How can we make teachers stronger by using artificial intelligence? Okay, so that's what I'm saying. I mean, you know, there's a long road ahead, but obviously you've made those strides to try and make sure that there could be a meaningful impact in the near future. So Mr. Babu, finally, what challenges lie ahead for the knowledge platform, and how do you expect to surmount them? We feel that there are two or three areas that are probably the biggest challenges for us. One is as people have started using technology more in the classroom, and COVID has helped that, or students have started using technology at home, we haven't caught up with what are the best practices in integrating technology and learning. So we need to get a better handle on this ourselves. And by us, I mean the industry as a whole, and make that accessible to teachers, students, and so on. So what I call education practice is something we are focusing a lot more on. Looking at the data we're getting more closely, seeing what's working and creating a positive loop, not just pushing things out there and, you know, getting positive results are feeling very happy about it. So I think making this loop is very important. The second area is how can we help teachers because we don't believe, we believe that teachers have a very important role to play, and we should not try to just listen to immediate teachers. And then the third is how can we work with people outside of what we are doing, like telcos, we are working now with Zong, and with infrastructure hardware providers, and with banks and financial services companies to try to solve the problem of getting a device into, ultimately into every hand, but getting enough devices in schools to begin with. Okay. Mr. Mehboob, thank you so much for joining me on the show. CEO of Knowledge Platform. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure and honor to talk to you. That's all that we have for now for Islamabad today on Think Tech Hawaii. This was Andorra for the Send. Follow us and you can follow us on our social media pages and do provide us with your feedback. Until next time, take care. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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