These are exciting times in the landscape of education. Where once the time-honoured tradition used to be sitting in a classroom or a lecture-venue, the concept of classrooms has now been thrown wide open in a way that has never been seen before. Once again, man ventures into the unknown with this revolution that the education sector is experiencing right now, and we will see the fruits of it in the coming years.

In the global education landscape, the growth of AI is expected to rise to $6 billion by 2024 with China and US leading the charge. Most recently, AI has started to appear in many colleges and universities to drive enrolment or to streamline operations, among other things.

One such area where we can anticipate the rise of AI and machine learning to demonstrate their enormous influence is on personalized learning. A steadfast company which is leading the charge to bring about the educational revolution through AI is Edwisely.

Aspire to Make a Difference

Founded by IIT Madras and Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) alumni, Edwisely is India’s first AI-driven personalized hybrid learning platform that connects both curriculum and career.

Recognized among the Top 10 Emerging EdTech start-ups in 2021, the company has completed 3 years of deep research on Indian higher education to understand the fundamental and practical issues that need to be addressed, with the valuable advice from various eminent educationalists. Edwisely has forged a community partnership with NASSCOM. It has been identified as a high potential startup among Higher Education SAAS companies and is now part of Amazon’s AWS EdStart Program.

Edwisely technology for higher education institutions harnesses artificial intelligence to help teachers create a personalized learning experience for their students and significantly improve their learning outcomes. The analytics engine continuously captures data from learning, behavioural, and assessment cycles to provide custom learning paths and prescriptive actions. Edwisely’s knowledge graph and cloud-based architecture allow it to handle large datasets and scale across different disciplines.

“In the current pace of technology evolution, India needs a new generation of quality institutions and educators to nurture and build productive and creative individuals,” stated Mr. Harsha Kankanala, the Co-Founder of Edwisely. “The current education system runs on a onesize-fits-all model. Obsession for marks and constant comparisons have broken the self-confidence of students. The system is more driven by examination, rather than educating the individual to become a productive citizen. Institutions that are the temple of learning, are unable to provide quality education. With rapid changing requirements from the industry and the limitation of subject matter expertise, it has become a challenge to adapt to the changes,” he added.

Edwisely’s Mission is – To make every Indian graduate employable by harnessing AI for personalized learning.

The EdTech Harbinger

Harsha Vardhan Reddy Kankanala (Harsha) is an engineer turned Edupreneur and Co-Founder at Edwisely. Working on a vision to personalize education, Harsha helps learners achieve their goals in a faster and an efficient way. Coming from a family of teachers, he has closely seen the changing trends of teaching and learning, both from a faculty and a student perspective. His passion for education has triggered him to start Edwisely. He strongly believes in the fact that understanding the student needs, capabilities and personalizing their learning experience can bring a real change in Education. With this vision, he has been researching ways to improve education by using technologies like AI. He has done a detailed study on various pedagogies, global curriculum frameworks, and adaptive methodologies in higher education.

Harsha has a professional Doctorate in engineering from TU Delft, Netherlands, and is currently focussing on student-centric innovative learning systems and product development. At Edwisely, he continuously engages with various stakeholders in education and is working on institutional alignment to NEP2020 through AI and personalization.

The Path

Although, the company had a long and arduous journey of years since its initial inception, Harsha Kankanala (the founding member), Yashwanth Tudimilla (Co-Founder and AI expert who is an alumnus of IIT Madras), and Y. S. Rao (Co-Founder) started Edwisely with a fresh perspective, having learned from their past experiences.

After working with major global airlines, churning massive amounts of data for better pricing and customer experience, Yashwanth has decided to apply the same AI technologies in personalized learning. His team at Edwisely is harnessing the power of data science to make engineers more agile and industry ready.

A seasoned professional with 30 years of the industry and amassed IT consulting experience, Y. S. Rao architected and implemented complex business solutions to customers across the globe in diverse industries. He brings his expertise to Edwisely by forging all key partnerships with academia and industry.

They raised the notion of transforming higher education institutions into AI-powered learning campuses. Further, the team also wanted the end customers to experience the vision of AI transformation through premium user interface and personalized interactions within the product. To achieve the same, they went to India’s best design company to uplift the UI/UX and to make the user experience the value proposition.

“We reached out to the colleges to showcase the value institutes shall experience with the AI Transformation,” added Harsha. Multiple workshops and webinar sessions were conducted in marketing this vision.

Institutions that are looking to new-age learning, should start thinking beyond regular LMS (learning management systems) or ERP (enterprise resource management) systems. Most of these technologies that colleges and universities are currently using are just used as convenience tools for administrative purposes and for few academic activities. They don’t bring in a real value proposition to either faculty or students, in terms of making learning more purposeful and engaging. Today, with the increased technology adoption rate, Institutions should aim for futuristic technologies that can bring in a significant impact in day-to-day education, rather than going back to regular standardised technology platforms.

These helped Edwisely reach out to 1000+ colleges in the span of 6 months, starting from October 2020. Various education veterans, vice-chancellors and institutional heads started acknowledging Edwisely’s mission, its products, and the unique value proposition it brings to the institutions. A strong product-market fit has been established, being the only company in India that brings personalized learning technology to higher education institutions.

At the core of personalization lies ‘Knowledge Graph’: A technology that is used by all tech giants. A Knowledge Graph is like the internet of knowledge. Millions of atomic knowledge units (concepts) interconnected with relationships. This lays the robust foundation needed for AI to propagate.

Changing the Game: The ‘What’

Innovative learning science models with the intervention of technology, unlocks the future of education. Personalization in education using AI majorly depends on the multi-faceted learning approach for each concept.

Though lots of learning science models and preferential styles are constantly evolving, a little is known about what an individual student needs for him/her to learn better. In general, assessments conducted in the colleges fail to understand the exact reasons for the students’ inability to learn. Is it a lack of prerequisite knowledge to master a concept; inadequate time spent; attention deficiency; improper exam temperament; mismatch in learning styles and preferences.

Edwisely AI systems will automatically analyse the reason for inability and support each student to get through by personalizing their learning experience. AI based recommendation engine also provides the best learning modules based on individual’s learning styles and abilities.

Edwisely AI framework can also support institutes in nurturing the personality by understanding individual students’ attributes in the 1st year of their graduation and support them to build on that.

Edwisely AI-driven Personalized Career path helps accelerate institute placements by connecting students to their best fit opportunities across the nation. Personalization helps students set their career goals and drives them to stay ahead of their peers by following our career guidance model, focusing on individuals’ skills and job key skill requirements.

The Edwisely web applications, mobile applications (IOS/Android) are designed for the faculty, students, and management which are customised to their requirements. These applications conduct assessments and analytics, create learning paths as well as career paths, and plan to integrate an AI-Driven Placement Accelerator.

Institutions that are empowered with Edwisely are branded as ‘AI Powered Personalized Campuses’. “Our goal is to transform 1000 colleges into AI Powered Personalized Campuses by 2025,” concluded Harsha, the perseverant leader of Edwisely.

Awards

Recognizing the efforts and impact that Edwisely can create, ASSOCHAM, The Associated Chambers of Commerce of India, has awarded the young startup ‘The Emerging Startup of the Year’ award at the 14th National Education Summit in New Delhi.