Shaping Students and Educational Practices
As a teenager, Vipul Redey was clear about his future. Watching cadets emerge from the National Defense Academy near Pune – their muscular bodies, their sharp crew cuts, the swagger with which they strode across the Deccan Gymkhana Club – he yearned to belong to their tribe. With a bomber jacket and aviator glasses like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, he envisioned crisscrossing skies on fighter jets as part of the Indian Air Force. Then sometime around the 9th or 10th grade, he was prescribed glasses. While the spectacles sharpened his sight, they also splintered his dreams. One could only apply to the NDA with a 20/20 vision.
Compelled to rethink his future, he chose to be an engineer like his father. This was an acceptable, and achievable pathway, since Maths was a strong suit anyway. But perhaps he had been blinding himself to another role model, someone he had always observed but hadn’t thought of mirroring: his mother.
As a Professor of Nutrition at SNDT, Pune, she was a passionate teacher, given to revising her lectures every night, wondering how she could tweak her methods to enhance student performance. During his growing up years, he had watched how students often dropped in at their place, with teary “Thank You” cards or wished-for admission letters. He had absorbed how teaching offered different rewards, intangible no doubt, but not less valuable than material ones.
Pivoting from Product Management to Education
Vipul himself was to veer into education later. Topping up his engineering degree with an MBA from Canada, he was bitten – like many in his generation – by an entrepreneurial bug. His first startup, cofounded with a friend, did not take off. Shutting shop, he moved to the Bay Area and worked in industrial technology and as a Product Manager for 12 years. In his last stint at CISCO, he was involved in managing their learning products and that’s when it hit him – maybe not in a lightning bolt fashion, but more like the gradual awakening of an inner calling.
Though CISCO was a for-profit, capitalist enterprise, he was tugged by the ineffable magic of learning. How does learning happen and what can one do to foster it? How could one leverage technology to bolster it? And right at the bottom of all these questions, there lingered an image of his mother – her zeal to spring upon new articles or books, of giving her all to her students, night after night, year after year. There were memories too of his own education at a Jesuit Convent in Pune where his high-caliber teachers had stoked a lifelong curiosity in everything. How had they done this? Could he do it better?
This time the epiphany was strong enough to prompt action. Redey applied to the top three Educational Technology programs which were Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. He picked Stanford because it conferred students with flexibility to design their own programs. Besides, he planned to work alongside at CISCO.
Garnering Fresh Insights at Stanford
He admits that those two years – of holding up a job, while pursuing a full-time graduate degree – racked up massive sleep deficits. Keeping himself engaged with “lots of caffeine”, he soaked up theories and practice – on education, psychology, the morphing technology landscape. Despite being overworked and sleep-deprived, he also aimed to enter the Stanford archery team. Maybe the fighter jets hadn’t been flown, but he wished to shoot ultraprecise arrows at a target. Starting from ground zero, from never having shot arrows ever, he made it to the team. He laughs at how his early arrows landed far from the target, requiring long scrambles in the wilderness.
As part of his graduate thesis, he explored how blue-collar workers could master dangerous physical tasks without endangering their lives. For instance, how could one repair a wind turbine, which involved scaling dizzying heights, while also tinkering with minute parts? This is where technology held promise. Using AR/VR simulations, these workers could hone their repair skills, which would then work autonomously in perilous, real environments.
Forging Kid-Centered Learning Spaces
Armed with his new degree, Vipul considered building a startup in India. Then he bumped into an entrepreneur who was “creating high-quality schools in the middle-of-nowhere towns,” in places where the thirst for first-rate schooling could never be quenched. As the Chief Product Officer at Global Discovery Schools, he gleaned what it took to build child-centric schools in places like Chillepally in Telangana or Tirupur in Tamil Nadu.
Moving to the Pearson corporate network as a Director, he was part of an experimental school in Surat, where a “Maker’s Space” was designed to be a central aspect of the pedagogy. In an extremely well-resourced workshop type environment, kids were prodded to “learn by doing” – for instance, to discover Newton’s Laws by moving objects in space, or to conceive of singular ways to construct a car from a box of its parts. “If there are 30 children, there would be 30 ways to build that car,” says Redey. “No one way is the right way.”
In such settings teachers were not expected to be experts, but to function as facilitators and cheerleaders as students stumbled into their own takeaways. Speaking of the school’s success, Vipul says the institute reached peak capacity in two or three years. Usually, schools take at least five or six years to achieve that kind of traction. Moreover, all stakeholders gained lessons about the payoffs and challenges with such an approach. As Vipul observes, “student engagement was off the charts.” Challenges centered around lesson plans, curriculum design and gearing students up for competitive admission tests. In the long term, if students were able to retrieve joyful and agentic learning memories, they would possess a lifelong zeal for learning – an outcome that many other institutes might struggle to engender.
Ushering Tech-powered Lessons in Indian Government Schools
Shortly thereafter, Redey joined Khan Academy to broaden their impact in India. Till then, despite the nation being Math-obsessed, and education-focused, Salman Khan, the founder and CEO of the wildly popular non-profit, was puzzled that the channel hadn’t gathered as many users. Despite its tutorials being free and compelling. Sifting through real classroom experiences and teacher testimonials, Vipul quickly identified the hurdles.
To begin with, most of the content was in English and designed for American cultural contexts. Translating their material into Indian languages and modifying the content to reflect local cultures was a critical first step. Thereafter, teacher adoption wasn’t a given. Some teachers felt threatened by the infiltration of a new entity. They felt their learning outcomes were already optimal, so why would they adopt new classroom practices? Others were unfamiliar with technology, even with the basic know-how required to operate Khan Academy inside classrooms. All this required teacher training and persuasion, something Redey already had a handle on. When he left the organization, Khan Academy was not only available in several languages – like Punjabi, Kannada, Hindi to name a few – but had penetrated Government schools in many states. From a miniscule number, at least 10 lakh students were accessing the site every month.
Exploiting Tech and AI to Drive Learning Outcomes
After stints with a few more non-profits, Vipul currently works for Magpie Literacy in the U.S., where they are planning to raise the reading levels of children in public schools. The organization will be using the ROAR (Rapid Online Assessment of Reading) methodology created at Stanford university to ensure that reading abilities reach more robust levels.
In terms of using technology to improve education, Redey remains an optimist about its potential. With his own 11-year-old daughter, he’s been exploring how AI can make lesson plans and projects more appealing: “She’s been watching Madam Secretary and wants to be a diplomat.” To feed her curiosity about geopolitics, they’re working through various regions around the world, starting with Russia. With AI, they’ve been able to haul up resources on Russian history, sports, technology, its spaces program, its writers et al. They’ve watched “The Last Czars” on Netflix about the Romanov family.
He understands that tech in classrooms has be accompanied by guardrails, including the physical presence of a supervising teacher. AI can also create personalized chatbots that offer customized instruction to students. “In most school settings, that’s not a possibility.” Foreseeing that AI will play a more prominent role in all our futures, he’s keen to leverage its snappy smarts to bolster the old-fashioned three Rs in Gen Zs and Gen Alphas.
Being a Force Multiplier
In one of his TED talks, Vipul observes that “educators are force multipliers.” When you impact students, your influence ripples into the future. When you impact teachers, there’s a multiplier effect. Redey’s is the kind of life that the essayist and scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson would have endorsed. As Emerson put it: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”