Background

The Quality Education and Skills Training (QUEST) Alliance, emerged from discussions with several important actors in India’s education sector, including key players in the NGO and corporate communities. In August 2005 during these consultations, many and diverse stakeholders found they shared a common concern for the significant disconnect between India’s basic education system and the needs and opportunities of its emerging economy. Since more than 52% drop out of school before they pass class 10 and there was a need to put greater emphasis in linking learning with livelihoods. Given this alliance of interests, and an impressive indigenous experience base to build upon, addressing the problem through collective, burden-sharing and resource- sharing efforts made eminent sense – and QUEST was born.

After its initial deliberations, the Alliance soon realized that within the context of improving education quality and relevance, it must be selective and strategic in its particular choice of interventions. It thus needed to adopt an agenda that was limited, concrete and amenable to positive, demonstrable change in the short-term. Education Technology (ET) offered this promise.

Access, quality and equity are issues can be effectively addressed through responsible and effective use of ET. To improve quality and relevance of education and training, the effective use of educational technology – and particularly Information Communications Technology (ICT) mediated educational solutions – takes on critical importance. The rapid development and spread of affordable technologies offer the promise of (equitably) reaching new populations of educationally under-served youth with high-quality educational content in ways unimaginable a few years ago. There was a need to collectively innovate by leveraging expertise of a diverse network of partners and share knowledge on replicable models of delivery.

QUEST Alliance over the last three years has focused its efforts on demonstrations to see how ICT can be used effectively to bridge this gap of learning and livelihood. This was done through the development of pre-vocational content for High School students in Andra Pradesh, development of a digital life skills toolkit for facilitator development in 135 training centers in 7 states, the implementation of the Udaan Lifeskills for Employability program to over 17,000 youth in 5 states of India. It also incubated innovations in using interactive voice response systems for providing support to rural schools teachers as well as trained 24 community video producers to develop locally relevant content for schools as part of the Videoshala program.

The lessons learnt from these experiences have been synthesized and shared widely through evaluation studies, consultations and large format evenuts. Through these experiences in the field, knowledge sharing events and policy level dialogues were facilitated on the use of content, pedagogy and technology to improve the delivery of learning for disadvantaged groups.

Through these series of demonstrations QUEST has gained valuable insights on learning design and technology. It continues to anchor and incubate the design of innovative delivery methods to improve the delivery of learning and livelihoods development.