Empowering India & the Global South Through AI Literacy

Good evening everyone it is indeed a pleasure to be here and thank you to the NDIA mission and the NDIA summit for acknowledging this as an important topic to include within the panel discussions scheduled during the NDIA summit I also would like to thank the panel for the summit, so maybe we should just close with a bang, and I see Bhanu sitting with five women, so good luck to them. But I am here on behalf of the Central Square Foundation. Central Square Foundation is a philanthropy working in school education in India, and one of the focus areas for us is edtech. And now that edtech is getting powered with AI, it becomes very important for us to ensure that we impart AI literacy to every student, parent, and child in India, so they are able to become active contributors to AI rather than just being passive recipients.

And that is the fundamental premise of this discussion. CSF has been working on a program, a large -scale program on AI literacy called AI Summit, and this is the first program with a curriculum for AI literacy that has been built in partnership with the Wadwan, the Wadwani School of AI, which is also represented on this panel. So with that I will hand over to Bhanu to take the proceedings forward. Thank you.

Thank you Gauri. Good evening everybody. Like Gauri said we are in the last few panels of the summit and I have the distinguished privilege of moderating four stalwart women in the education space. I don’t think there’s any other, all other panels were the other way around where there were a lot of men and very few women. So it’s my privilege to moderate all of you. I will try to keep it as collogical as possible but you can also trouble yourself between with questions and stuff. So today’s dialogue is really about building futures through AI literacy for India and the Global South. AI is already in our hands. It’s in our phones, it is in our homes, it is in our classrooms whether we like it or not.

The conversation today is really about what features, futures do we want to build of the… tool which is coming into our hands, right? I think the discussion about should AI be in the classroom or should AI be a learning tool is already passed. It is going to be there and it is for us to figure out how to use it productively, right? So with that as a backdrop, we will move forward into the conversation and quickly talk about each one of you here. Shabana, senior project scientist from the Vardhani School of Data Science and AI, IIT Madras. Ramya, we all know Ramya, CENTA and a lot of other things as well before that. Tanushree, co -founder and CEO of Transform Schools and Chitra, founder of Chrysalis, right?

I would actually start the conversation with Shabana putting you on the spot, right? So your journey really in computer science really started with the trigger with your 11th grade computer science teacher. part in you in the classroom, right? In a rural school in the backwaters of Kerala, right? Nice place to be there. But from that time to now the role which you play as a post -PhD fellow in IT Madras, working in the ed tech space with all the things you do in AI, both on the usage side, design side, and the regulatory side, I would really like to ask you what, according to you, are the transformative bets AI can bring in

Okay. So if you want to analyze the transformative bets, the major transformation that AI can bring into the classroom, I feel that we should look at the impact that AI has on the key stakeholders in education, namely the students, the teachers, parents, and the education bodies and organizations at large. So if you look at learners, I think the biggest value add is in terms of personalization, right? Because research has already shown that one -on -one human tutoring results in better learning gains as compared to a traditional classroom -based learning. But we know that in India and also across the global south, the student -teacher ratios are quite large, which actually prevents personalization from happening. So this was the case before, but with AI in picture, this can change, and in fact this is changing.

Because AI can help students with personalized learning in terms of customized lessons that is tailored according to the student’s specific conceptual gaps or misconceptions. Or AI can also suggest tailored learning pathways. It can also provide individualized assessments and also tailored feedback pertaining to the performance of the students in the assessments. So that way AI can play a big role in adding quality to the learning process of the students, which definitely helps in bettering. So this was the case before, but with AI in picture, So this was the case before, but with AI in picture, this can change, and in fact this is changing. this can change, and in fact this is changing. this can change, and in fact this is changing.

Now coming to teachers, again, so we always say that, you know, AI is not going to replace teachers, but it is going to be a better assistant. Its role is going to be an assistant, which can help in better productivity, teaching productivity, as well as the quality of pedagogy is what it brings onto the table. So, for example, teachers can use AI -based tools to create better lesson plans, to run diagnostic tests that can help inform the misconceptions or learning gaps for students in the class and tailor instructions based on that. It can help in, you know, kind of producing required kind of assessments and also even evaluating them. So that way, the value add is in terms of improved productivity and also informed pedagogy.

And so another significant transformation that AI brings is that it lowers the barrier to quality education, especially for the underserved classes. So with the voice -based capabilities and the multilingual. capabilities of AI. Now, quality learning content is available in regional languages to learners, which in fact, you know, not only affects the teachers and learners, but it also affects the parents, in the sense that now parents can have a more engaged contribution to their child’s learning. So that way, it opens a lot of opportunities. And now coming to educational bodies or organizations at large, so we know that data is collected across multiple points. Including assessments, attendance systems, and program implementations, etc. Now with AI, it is possible to collect all of these data points, combine and analyze them to give actionable insights, such as, you know, identifying risks of dropouts, identifying high risk students, perform better resource planning, etc.

So that way, AI is already transforming education in a big way. And it is going to be, it has a lot of potential to, you know, play a greater role in education as a whole. now so this kind of emphasizes the need for AI literacy because you know AI is already a part of classroom and all the stakeholders are kind of already interacting with AI so there is the need for the for everybody right not just the students or teachers but even parents and generally for people to have a better understanding of the AI concepts how these tools work in order to use them responsibly

thank you so I hear three things you said stakeholders student teacher and maybe even the parent like a teacher and the second thing you said is that getting AI to the last child in our population which is equity and accessibility the third thing which you said is for all the use cases which you talked about to be utilized there has to be AI education in the form of where it is right that brings us to the stakeholders, right? So Tanushree, you across the last seven plus years have impacted over 30 million students, right? So my question to you is, from the government school systems point of view, and when you go on the ground to students, right, especially the government schools primarily, right?

How are they responding to AI in and around them in the classrooms, be it at homes or wherever they’re interacting? What are you seeing on the ground?

Thanks. Thanks for that question. And thank you for inviting transfer schools on this panel. So I think in past seven years, with our experience of working with the government schools, and as an organization, we work on improving learning and life outcomes. But with the program, which is AI Samarth, we have seen one emerging thing, that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child and learn.

And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have seen that a child is able to learn and learn. And that is, we have And I have two great examples to share from our home state, which is Odisha. It’s from the class nine. They’re both from the class nine grades.

One, there’s a girl whose name is Shraddha. And so she, when we asked her that, you know, how’s her experience in a class where she’s getting these lessons from AI, Samarth. So she said that I used to use AI tool as something, you know, just in a fun way. But now I’m able to cross check my difficult subjects or the topics. And if I’m still facing any difficulties, I’m able to go back to my teachers and cross check again. So she’s using AI as a companion as well. So what I see here is that curiosity is converging. Converted into confidence. That is one big thing. There’s another child whose name is Poonam. she said that for us when we saw AI around us everybody was the AI was a buzzword you know we were everybody was talking about it but it was for all entertainment because we were saying that okay you can you can gamify it you can make a cartoon movie about it all of that but when I see AI now is that I can get my project ideas from it I can actually you know do my preparation from it so and it is very useful to see that because they are the first generation learners in a government school so it’s it’s a great I would say pleasure to see that happening in a government school and I mean AI with AI Samarth we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are reaching the end of the world and we are talking about point talking about point talking about point nine million students in all and what we nine million students in all and what we nine million students in all and what we have seen as a pattern overall is three things.

One, which I mentioned earlier, is curiosity converting into confidence. Second, that AI is able to support learning, sorry, language, improving into languages. And second, reducing the learning gaps students have. And third is, which is the most important thing which AI Samarth does, is that teaching them about the ethics, the biases, and therefore it’s a responsible engagement. So that’s the

Thanks, Tanushree. It’s lovely that you talk about the story of Shraddha and Poonam.

Thank you.

the journey from curiosity to confidence. And along the journey, being able to use digital tools in the form of AI and exercise their agency as a learner and not lose it.

That’s correct.

So that’s a beautiful story. And I think, you know, 0 .9 million Shraddhas and Poonams.

Yes.

Thank you. And onward, upward and onward. And more than that, right? So that moves me to another dimension, right? So, Chitra, you’ve been, you founded Chrysalis over 25 years back. And you founded it out of the pain of being a mother of two daughters and their disillusionment in the school system at that point in time.

My disillusionment.

Your disillusionment. They were too young to be disillusioned. And the interesting connection here is that you actually started off as a full stack ICT curriculum embed provider from grade 1 to grade 12 for CBN. and you have seen that whole wave, right? And we still have over 40 % of our classrooms which still don’t have computer labs. And now you’re at the start of another wave with AI, right? So I think you’re looking at the second wave in your own journey, Chrysalis, you and your team and other people working with you, right? So my question to you is how are teachers in the government schools and the low -fee private schools in particular, not the middle and upper, but the low -fee private schools, today, you know, transacting around integrating AI into their life, work, and fun?

Yeah, thank you, Bhanu. That is a very important question to be thinking about. And I can speak from a pre -AI Samarth and a post -AI Samarth point of view. So very grateful to CSF and everybody who’s, you know, really pushed us into this wave with a very… Very, very… purposeful and meaningful work, and it’s giving us a lot of insights into this community of teachers and students. So if you look at preparedness when we entered, and I think we are now close to 200 ,000 students that we will be, you know, who would have been exposed to AI literacy, we are talking about the preparedness being, I look at preparedness from two points of view. One is awareness about AI, the skill sets, or whatever it means to handle a tool.

And the other is, I think, the sentiment and mindset that every teacher or every student has, right? So from an awareness point of view, again, the spectrum is, I don’t even, I just hear this buzzword, and I don’t even want to go near it on one side. And on the other side, yeah, I’m dabbling with it all the time on my WhatsApp. I know it. And then there’s always this confusion between the thin line that AI and, you know, an algorithmic. provides. So I think AI Samad has really empowered them on certain skill sets that has gotten them to understand what is AI and how I can be putting that to use. That’s from a skill set point of view.

But for me, I think more interesting is the sentiment and mindset point of view. If you look at that, it’s a spectrum between hope and fear. And hope leading to over, you know, stimulation, right? And fear, resistance and not really getting there. So I think that’s a very important spectrum. And I think a program like AI literacy and Samad kind of brings in an equilibrium. I think that’s very important because, and I completely, you know, I can relate to what Tanushree was saying, we see so many children and so many teachers who are now us, hey, you know what? I thought everything was bad about AI. Like I was so fearful. I thought it’s going to replace me as a teacher.

I now understand that if I hold the agency and I know what is what, and it’s not rocket science. I think that’s the first demystifying thing, right? I mean, it’s not anything that I cannot be conversant with. And we are talking about government teachers, affordable private school teachers who have found a confidence like she was mentioning. And that has made them approach AI in a very purposeful way, right? They are integrating it. I think the way we built the curriculum, thanks to the Wadwani school and CSF, and we’ve also made some meaningful contribution to that curriculum and content development. We are seeing that the use cases we build in, there is a very, very high relevance to what the teacher is doing, which is very important.

It’s not just literacy about what is what. but how it can be purposefully used by the teacher. So that’s a big winner for us. The second, when it comes to sentiments, we’ve heard children, actually children and teachers in particular, tell us that, you know, I had a negative approach and today I walk in with so much positivity. I know this can be engaging. This can be purposefully done. And even that over, I don’t know what to call it, but I think over -utilization, you know, where they would just generate lesson plans because somebody asked the coordinator or the, you know, educational officer asked them. They just go and dabble with the LLM, CHAP, GPTA and then churn out lesson plans, not even knowing what to validate, how to validate.

And that has also been kind of equalized. So I think it’s a beautiful, in my opinion, an equalizer. And of course, over a period of time, it will become a leveler. I look at it from that point of view. And there’s much more. work to be done, but I think it’s a beautiful start where there are so many positive stories in the field that’s giving us a lot of hope. I think even for players like us, you know, organizations like us, I wouldn’t say we were not in that spectrum between hope and fear. It’s not only about the teachers. We are all in this phase of, you know, is it going to be the thing tomorrow or is it going to be, you know, what is our position in this world?

And I think this is kind of now getting to some equilibrium. That’s what I would say.

What I hear you say is that, you know, tens of thousands of teachers are finding their balance in the classroom with confidence and agency, right? And I think that’s a good state to be in. And we have a lot more work to do. India is a big country and Global South is even bigger, right? That brings me to Tanushree. Sorry, Ramya. So Ramya, your journey really started off with the time you spent in McKinsey and you are actually kind of bootstrap the education practice for this region in McKinsey. And then from that horizontal view, you actually became a falcon and then you dove into teachers and the problem of teachers and there comes CENTA, right?

So over the past few years, like 11 years in CENTA, from across 100 countries, 100 plus countries, teachers have engaged with you. And now you’re at a place where you’re seeing AI come into the mix, right? So I would ask you to kind of be that falcon, fly back out of India and look at the global south and kind of talk about what are you seeing, what are you hearing from teachers in AI, not just from India and what you’re doing with AI but also in other countries where there isn’t any such thing happening.

I mean like in a remote part of Jharkhand we’ve had a teacher saying that I was worried that my students are getting into this world faster than I am and now with this literacy I’m able to catch up with my students which is a very nice thing of her to say but those are some of the perspectives to start with I don’t know if I answered because I was not sure what I was supposed to do as a falcon coming out

Thank you, thank you Ramya I think good conversations, three things to pick right, one is the stakeholders being touched and their journey from curiosity to confidence for some actors and then for a lot of other actors finding the balance between the hope and fear spectrum, right, so I would like to kind of take the conversation a little bit down into the implementation and design of all of what we’re working, right, I mean that’s where the rubber really meets the road right, so I would go back to Dr. Shabana and Shabana you have been a part of the curriculum design and the curriculum review and the endless debates of how should we help a rural school student in Orissa understand computer vision and what metaphor would we use that and those are fascinating conversations we had in those times.

But now looking back at the journey and looking back at what we’re hearing from the field, not just ASM, but there are a lot of other literacy programs happening. But I would really like you to kind of, you know, focus a little bit on moving towards what is it that you would like to see in the design, which kind of ensures ethical judgment and critical thinking among all the stakeholders, the child as well as the teacher.

Dr. Shabana Bhattacharya Okay. So first, I think we should start with the child. Dr. Shabana Bhattacharya Yes. so when we look at the available AI literacy curriculums around the world we see that many of them deal with foundational AI literacy along with AI skilling but AI skilling is more about how to practically use AI which is more role or context dependent so for example AI skill for a software engineer could be different from what AI skilling would be for a teacher but AI literacy refers to the foundational set of AI concepts that is kind of universal that is something that everybody should know about so as a part of the AI Samad curriculum so we collaborated together the Badwani school and CSF collaborated together to come up with a wonderful curriculum which I feel is like very grounded and it kind of focuses on the key AI foundational concepts that everybody should be aware of and later you could build on top of it to do further skilling which is more tailored towards each role So to talk about the AI Samarth curriculum, we have four key pillars.

The first being understanding what is AI and what are the applications of AI, like looking at, you know, the everyday applications and identifying the AI component, because we all interact with AI in some form or the other without realizing that, you know, it is a form of intelligence that we are interacting with. So understanding that is very important. Understanding what is AI is important. And, you know, also, you know, kind of having an awareness about some of the key technical aspects, like what is data? What is the role of data in training an AI system? And, you know, about vision, about NLP. So these are the basic AI concepts, the technical concepts that, you know, students and teachers and universally everybody should be aware of.

And then once we have an idea about the software. The role of data in training AI systems, that naturally leads us to understand about the societal impacts, the environmental impacts, et cetera. So, for example, so we. we know about the issues of bias and fairness in AI systems, right? So we know that, okay, an AI system is trained based on the data. So depending upon the kind of data that was used to train the systems, we can have, you know, these issues. And these arise whenever the systems are used in practice. So the third pillar is definitely about the societal impact, the environmental impacts, what happens when we require the computations at scale. And finally, about how to practically interact with these systems, right?

How to write effective prompts, because we all interact with, almost all of us interact with generative AI tools such as the chat GPT, right? So then how to actually frame an effective prompt to get the desired result. So that is also very important. So I feel that these kind of cover the basic fundamental AI concepts that is universal, that everybody should be aware of,

So just one more. One minute on. how do we in all of this safeguard critical thinking

okay so coming to critical thinking so so when we know that an AI system is trained using data we know that you know the kind of research that we would get on a query would depend on the kind of data that the system has seen so which would make a student or a teacher or any user you know be vigilant about using the AI the the results from the AI tools directly so we have to be careful about double -checking cross -checking with valid sources and not trusting the result you know directly and also coming to the critical thinking part it is more about you know not over relying on AI tools and using your judgment to kind of validate the results to verify like I said with verified sources whether the results are you know valid or not so which is also important

I think just correcting all the results is a very important thing to do and I think on that there was also a lot of exercise which was done across the curriculum to sprinkle various good ways of using AI where we basically kind of said it’s not about asking the AI for the answer but actually doing your own exercise and submitting your answer and then asking AI to review and improve which is that critical thinking loop which we reinforced across multiple places. So I’d move forward a little bit to Chitra now. So Chitra, I would like to take you down into a teacher training scenario where your team has trained a lot of teachers on AI literacy via the curriculum and then they were cascading forward, right?

So at that level, right, what is it that you and your team have done in terms of building confidence for the teachers who are in the training program to carry that back into their classrooms and deliver it to the children?

I think we… always believed that teacher training is more about building an emotionally safe environment whatever topic we are training teachers on and with AI the hope and fear spectrum, this becomes even more relevant. So I think both in the curriculum the way we’ve done it and in the way we facilitate and train the teachers

Namaste Krishnan ji Pleasure to have you here We welcome Shri Krishnan ji from MIT Thank you for joining us today sir

Chitra So I think we definitely need to look at how the confidence is built. In a light hearted way I also want to say a lot of teachers have now started saying we are becoming more polite and classroom Any other questions? idea why? It’s nothing to do with the training but to do with LLMs. Because chat GPT always tells them, hey, you’ve asked a brilliant question. So that is becoming contagious. And the teachers are today like, you know, we’ve seen that happen. So that is why I wanted to bring that was there is a lot of role modeling that happens when there is a cascading, right? And I’m simply saying an LLM cascading also is bringing that politeness.

I hope we don’t become artificially polite, but then I’m hoping that some of these things rubs off in the language of teachers. So I think that hope and confidence is what trainers are modeling. And that I think is being carried on by the teachers when they do the cascading to those students. And one other thing in the literacy, I mean the Samarth model, I feel is the capacity we are building in the teachers is actually strong because there is the responsibility of the teacher to go back and train the teacher. And see, they are all teachers. You know, when we analyze why teachers resist training, it’s because they think that they are the deliverers and then to receive becomes difficult for us.

So I think I love this AI Samarth model, the literacy model we have built, thanks to CSF and, you know, the whole think tank there, is that yes, I’m going to learn and some of us are actually going to translate it to the students. And so that rub off is really, really working well. So I think the preparedness or I would say the teachers are very gently handling this whole thing because for them it is a new topic. It’s not like I’ve done math teaching for 25 years and I’ve found all my children getting into IIT and all of that. This is a new topic, this is a new skill, and they are very, very careful when they are doing it.

So there’s a lot of deep respect that they have in terms of translating this into their own training, Banu. So I think in many ways this has been an eye -opener into how usual teacher training and how this AI literacy teacher training is bringing very new insights into how teacher training can happen. So I think that’s very, very critical.

Thank you, Chitra. We would now request Shri Krishnanji to kind of address us, Secretary Mighty.

I’m sorry to literally photobomb this session. It was not my intention. Ram is a very old friend. And when she asked if I could stop by, I just thought I would. Primarily, more than anything else, to thank all of you for participating. in probably a historic summit, one that finally democratized AI. In that sense, I think what we have managed to do is to actually bring people into the room. And more than even people, we have managed to bring people’s concerns into the room. And I think it’s very fitting that we are talking about education today, which is so critical in every sense of the word. Partly because I think if we have to achieve anything we need to achieve, we need people to do it and people who have the skills and who have the abilities and who have the competencies to actually do what needs to be done with technology and make sure that it works for them and make sure also that they’re able to participate and they’re able to actually take advantage of it.

The other part of it is, of course, while we are making them capable, to what extent can we use technology? I think it’s nobody’s case that we have enough teachers or teachers’ assistants or we have the kind of technology that we need. We need the kind of resources. we want for education. If technology helps us to multiply that rather than substitute it and if technology helps us to actually enable our teachers to deliver better, nothing like it. And I think those are the kind of applications that we seriously need to look for. The Expo is replete with those examples. Incidentally it’s open tomorrow and it’s extended up to 8pm today so if you haven’t gone and taken a look at it, let me make a pitch.

Please do go take a look. I think a huge number of social applications of what technology can do and how it can work for people. I think all of that is something which would interest many of you but more than anything else I’m not an expert on education and I would be the last one to suggest that we should, I mean this is a silver bullet and it will solve all the problems. It may, it may not. But I think we need to sort of experiment. with it but more than anything else I think one thing I do know that students of all ages and students in all disciplines need to be aware of the potential of the technology and see what it can do for them and I that in itself I think would be significant the government of India has already made a policy call that they would teach about AI from class three onwards and I’m sure that many states would also do the same thing and that would form part of the curriculum and likewise in practically every institute or every university I think AI needs to be taught across all disciplines I mean not necessarily only to the computer science people in the IITs but to just about everybody because again the jobs in AI are not just of the guys who build the models I mean those are the nerdy PhDs there are probably about 300 of them across the world who’ll do it the rest of us are not going to do that the rest of us are not going to be Sam Altman or Peria Amadei or Dennis none of those I mean, all of them we saw yesterday.

The rest of us are going to be more journeymen, more people who will actually figure out ways in which this technology will affect us so that people need to know, people need to understand, even in an area like art history, what is it that the technology can do to their own discipline and how they can sort of leverage it. So if the Central Scale Foundation and educationists and everybody focuses on this area and is able to actually train the next generation to do this, train the next generation to figure out what jobs can work for them, that’s going to make all the difference. I or none of us are in an age group where, I mean, Rom and I are probably about, we are contemporaries, so we are too gray and too old now for this to make a huge difference for us.

But this is a technology for the next generation, and they should not be lost in this. And that is something which, I think we need to keep a sense of what is going on. to the message and the whole message of this summit is inclusion and bringing everyone in and we have to also ensure through the education process that no one is left behind so thank you very much for having me and i wish you all the best again a plug for the expo try and take a look and thank you all for joining us here today thanks thank you you you