ConveGenius reaches out to 1.5 cr students through conversational AI

ConveGenius, an EdTech social enterprise, has scaled its reach to 1.5 cr students in 11 months against the backdrop of the pandemic-led technological shift. It achieved this milestone by moving from tablet-based adaptive learning to chatbot-assisted teaching and learning.

Viprav Chaudhary, VP-Operations ConveGenius, had found that during the onslaught of COVID-19, access to digital devices was a major barrier to education for young students hailing from rural and remote regions in India.

“While education shifted to the online medium in the wake of the pandemic, device inequity emerged as a major problem faced by a majority of students beyond tier-1 and tier-2 regions across the country,” he said. “We realized that we needed to turn the adversity at hand into an opportunity to resolve this challenge effectively. We decided to transform our existing solution to a parent-based offering, moving from tablets to WhatsApp as the optimal vehicle of education.”

Chaudhary said parents and their wards were quarantined at home, and children could use their phones to access learning in, and despite the viral outbreak. As such, the ConveGenius team adopted the chatbot-based model of learning by integrating WhatsApp APIs into their solution and using the messenger function to deliver small chunks of information and materials to students studying from home.

The shift to WhatsApp was inspired by both device (tablet/PC) inequity highlighted by the viral outbreak, as well as the ubiquity of WhatsApp among Indian households across all socioeconomic backgrounds. The app’s user-friendly interface further made it the ideal solution to deliver education to quarantined students while also enabling their parents to monitor and participate in the learning progress of their wards.

Since the launch of the chat-based teaching and learning platform in May 2020, the startup has now scaled up to 1.5 crore students across 10 mediums of instructions, with learning sessions through the WhatsApp platform, reaching 98% completion rates weekly.

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“Integrating WhatsApp into our EdTech solution has unlocked many benefits for not just students, but also teachers and parents. Students can retain information better when they are empowered to access learning at their own pace,” Chaudhary said. “The conversational AI built into the platform allows us to push each student up personalized pathways of learning. Educators have been creating many educational videos in vernacular languages during the lockdown. The AI-led algorithm is designed to connect students with the most relevant content. Further, teachers have their own version of chatbots which gives them access to student data. This empowers them to map and shape the learning trajectories of their students while assessing their individual learning outcomes.”