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Using AI for high quality education for differently abled

In Indic AI , we are working on a solution for over 1 billion disabled people, not having access to quality education. As per World Bank, about 15% of the world's population, have some form of disability. Persons with disabilities are more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic outcomes, such as less education, lower levels of employment and higher poverty rates​.

​We have created an accessible platform that solves the challenges of education and employment mainstreaming of differently abled individuals. Indic AI education is a free Online platform which provides high quality education for academic , professional, and job-oriented courses for self-learning of students and support resources for teachers of disabled students.

Online accessible education will ensure higher inclusion and employment for the disabled in the mainstream world. That’s one billion people looking for accessible education for their inclusion.

Obviously, we want a solution to address them all, but our initial focus is India that has 8% of the world’s disabled population and where the employment of disabled is less than .5%.  Beyond that , we are creating strong processes and using technology solutions that will help us to scale in other counties in a cost-effective way. 

Define three specific objectives that you would like to achieve with your proposal.

Indic AI Foundation focus is on solving challenges that prevent financial and educational mainstreaming of differently abled individuals. Our main focus areas are: 

STEM education: Currently differently abled students fear taking these subjects and are often discouraged by NGOs and Inclusive schools to pursue STEM education. Less than 1% students opt for science and maths in High schools as the content is not available in accessible format. Indic AI accessible school curriculum will ensure much higher participation of differently abled students in STEM.

Social Transformation: Most of the differently abled aspire for govt & public sector jobs, because of higher job security. But even in a best-case scenario, not all of them will qualify the same. So, we want the students to have the industry-oriented skills, do internships & explore job opportunities in private sector, these skills will also help them to perform on government and public sector jobs.

Higher computer literacy and Self Learning: Its very important for us that we enable our students to take ownership of their learning to keep updating themselves for new generation skills. This will also increase the computer literacy amongst the students .

What problems (particularly in value chain competitiveness and global disruption) are your community’s stakeholders facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic?

Most of the differently abled students study in special schools in classroom mode, the schools are now closed , so education is adversely affected.

Further the students who study in inclusion  schools and colleges are also facing challenges , since the current online education platforms are not accessible to people with disabilities. 

In the United States , they are considering dismissing rights by waiving portions of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under this law, students with disabilities have the right to an appropriate education. But Senate Republicans have called for the minister of education to prepare a report to Congress outlining any special education obligations that she thinks school districts should be temporarily freed from during the emergency. 

 

What minimum viable solution(s) are you proposing to address the challenge(s) in your community?

Indic AI provides  easy to use , accessible education resources for the disabled students and their teachers. This includes accessible learning resources and courses for academic, professional and job preparation. Our immediate goal is to provide accessible content and mentoring to enable the disabled students to achieve their highest potential . These immediate goals are linked to our long-term outcome of providing accessible education to  the 1 billion disabled people worldwide.  

To test some of the links we carried out a pilot with visually impaired students in India. Results show that students having access to accessible mainstream content perform equally as sighted students and there is a significant improvement in their morale and academic performance.  

Share your story (your narrative)

Hi , I am Sarita Chand, Founder and CEO of Indic AI foundation

Prior to Indic AI, I was the Co-founder of Edupristine , an Edtech start-up  funded by Mark Mobius , Accel partner and Kaizan private equity. Edupristine was acquired by Adtalem Global Education ( a NYSE listed Company) in 2018.

Our startup is  using AI and Tech solutions for accessible education of differently abled

Our vision is to empower disabled people around the world with high quality education for their inclusion and employment. We have developed fully online, tech based , disabled friendly education platform,  specifically focusing on academic , competitive exams and job-related professional courses .

At organisation level, we understand that lot of resources already exist with private institutions, corporates, NGOs and collaborating with them will enable us to make our operations commercially viable. We do not intend to reinvent something which already exists. For instance, we do not want to enter content creation space but want to invest on how to make existing content accessible. We are, therefore, tying up with mainstream training institutes and making their content accessible using our machine learning algorithms and tech solutions

We have trained  deep Learning Models  on educational content to automate the process of making content accessible, which helps us to scale our solution in a cost effective way. Our solutions can be used directly by the students for self learning or by teachers to enable their students.

Further we would license our AI and technology solutions to help corporates and education institutes,  to generate revenues to be sustainable organisation.

Once scaled in India, we have the potential to empower millions of disabled students across the world .  

Please provide any additional relevant information that you would like to share.

We would like to share short bio of our founders:

Sarita Chand, Co-Founder is responsible for partnering with Training Institutes and NGOs and manages the overall operations. Earlier, she was the co-founder of Edupristine . Edupristine is one of the largest training institutes for working professionals in India. In her 10 years of entrepreneurial experience with Edupristine, she was primarily responsible for business strategy and sales. Edupristine was sold to Adtalem Global Education (ATGE – NYSE) in 2018. She is an alumnus of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, India and College of Business Studies, University of Delhi.

Neha Shivran is co-founder of Indic AI and she is heading the Technology and Artificial Intelligence stream. She is responsible for conceptualizing, training and deploying deep learning models, managing technical team and coordinating with technology vendors. She has over 10 years of experience in data science, analytics and financial industry. Previously, she was Director of Risk and Analytics at Lenddo EFL India, an alternate data startup. She has also worked as Head of Custom Modeling with India’s largest credit bureau. She is an Engineer from NSIT, Delhi and MBA from Cranfield University, UK.

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Nelson Milla May 14, 2020

Hey Sarita! Nelson here,
You have a nice idea I really like it because I am very interested myself in education for developing countries. I have a couple questions that may help you improve (or not?) your pitch and maybe your idea.
I (and other people mentoring) are very cautious when it comes to some buzz-words (AI, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Quantic, etc...) because they always sound good on paper, but on reality scaling and building them proplerly takes a lot of skill (For instance my best friend is working in an AI startup in France, Shift Technology, where they have a whole 20ish people team just for developing, and 3 Ph.D. just researching, I am not saying your cofunder is not capable but that it can take a lot of talented developers to go global).
That begs the question, how exactly is AI improving your solution? I read you trained some models using Machine Learning to produce content, how this specifically works? Are you creating excercises for the students using ML?
Can your idea work without AI? If that's so, how?
I hope this helps at least as a thought excercise and I wish you and your cofounder the best of luck!
Kind regards,
Nelson Milla

Patrick Obumselu May 14, 2020

What’s your UX/UI design?

Sunday Bawa May 22, 2020

Nice work. What type of disabilities actually?

EUNICE KAJALA Jul 2, 2020

Hi Sarita,

Have you considered including blind people in your innovation?

Ivana Kostic Jul 18, 2020

Hello, did you try it out already on some disability group? What is the feedback? Many thanks!

Niedja Cavalcante Jul 21, 2020

Hi Sarita,

I hope you are doing well. The project´s is very unique. Thanks for sharing it with us.

After going through the project´s details some questions and suggestions came to mind. So, I put together a list of gaps found that if solved will to help refine your project´s idea.


1- In terms of information presented

The research presented brings a lot of great insights. However, to make it credible it is important to specify the sources from the research information. Follows some informations missing its sources:
initial focus is India that has 8% of the world’s disabled population and where the employment of disabled is less than .5%.
Currently differently abled students fear taking these subjects and are often discouraged by NGOs and Inclusive schools to pursue STEM education. Less than 1% students opt for science and maths in High schools as the content is not available in accessible format. Indic AI accessible school curriculum will ensure much higher participation of differently abled students in STEM.
Social Transformation: Most of the differently abled aspire for govt & public sector jobs, because of higher job security.
Higher computer literacy and Self Learning: Its very important for us that we enable our students to take ownership of their learning to keep updating themselves for new generation skills. This will also increase the computer literacy amongst the students .
In the United States , they are considering dismissing rights by waiving portions of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under this law, students with disabilities have the right to an appropriate education. But Senate Republicans have called for the minister of education to prepare a report to Congress outlining any special education obligations that she thinks school districts should be temporarily freed from during the emergency.

1- In terms of technology

Nowadays the urge for data protection has increased. So, does the platform has cybersecurity technologies to protect users sensitive information.

2- In terms of business model
The platform is cost free for students. So, can you detail how does the investor can generate revenue with the solution?


3- In terms of features
What are the specifics on the platforma that make it a disabled friendly education platform?
Does the platform has specific features for disabled people?
For instance, what features are available to help visually impaired person ou a handicapped person to navigate on the platform?
How platform is prepared to attend disabled people´s necessities?
The platform is focused on specific disabilities?


I hope the questions presented above are of help. Keep up the great work!

Best regards,
Niedja Cavalcante .

Victoria Masso Jul 21, 2020

Status label added: Mentor feedback received

Shawn Melville Jul 23, 2020

Hi Sarita,
This is an excellent idea. Your proposal is well written and clearly addresses the global problem of a lack of inclusion in higher education due to inaccessible content and its adverse effect on persons with disabilities. Your solution which uses AI is quite interesting and I am curious to know how successful you have been at automating the process of making accessible content using deep learning models? The spectrum of disabilities (blind, low vision, deafblind, etc) and the range of file formats (text, images, multimedia, etc) used for producing educational content is quite broad. Could you briefly explain how or if Indic-ai would accommodate some or all types of disabilities and educational file formats?

Fahmida Hossain Jul 24, 2020

Hello Sarita, Thank you so much for this great initiative. I am also working with people with disabilities on their Digital Skill Development and Job Placement. Please have a look on my initiative also. Hope you like it too. If we can all work together, we will be able to build a better future for people with disabilities

Alberto Farca Aug 1, 2020

Dear Sarita,

Congratulations on your project. Having a person close to me with disabilities, I find this is a great initiative. As you say, there are few are few options in education that are available for people with disabilities.

As I have read in other comments, I believe it would be interesting to know if you are thinking of the platform specifically for certain disabilities. My suggestion would be to clarify what is accomplished through AI. I understand that you are not trying to create new content, so I assume that the AI is primarily used to adapt or enhance the learning method. Is this correct?

Congratulations on your proposal. Best regards,

Alberto

Nivashini Rave Rattey Aug 27, 2020

Status label added: Community feedback received

Nivashini Rave Rattey Aug 27, 2020

The idea has been progressed to the next milestone.

Nivashini Rave Rattey Aug 27, 2020

Start refining your idea. You are running out of time. Also, respond to those who have provided you constructive feedback. They have after all dedicated their time and initiative to help you improve your submission. Please be more active.

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