SAMUEL.GURU, TAALK.COM: Hi guys, Welcome to Taalk. Today we are going to meet Velavan from Qrius Learning Initiatives and he is one of the Co-Founder of that Company and he along with his friends have started this company so you’re going to learn more about him and his Qrius Learning Initiatives.
VELAVAN, CO-FOUNDER, QRIUS LEARNING INITIATIVES: Hello Sam. I look into content in Taalk. It’s really great and I am really happy here talking to you about Qrius.
SAMUEL: So we don’t understand what this is Qrius and why you started?
VELAVAN: So Qrius is an education company. So we are part of the based organization. Qrius was founded in 2016 by a group of three teachers. So all three of us we were successful to varying degrees inside our classroom. So some of the things that we teach in our classrooms were hugely successful, many of the things that we did on our classroom were not very successful. We started asking ourselves why?
Why is it that some learning tasks and activities are welcomed by students, children participated in the very eagerly there is lots of learning happening in those activities? And why is it that certain set of activities don’t work in the classroom? The answer that we found was those activities that worked catered in a way to what we call the nature of the child.
And the activities that you did not worked the lessons, the learning tasks that did not that were not welcomed by the children were the ones that did not catered to the nature of the child. I’ll elaborate what we mean by the nature of the child during the course of the interview but this is the crux of our experience which prompted us to start Qrius.
Now we see children outside school they are natural learners. I mean there are plenty of children – I mean there are plenty of things that a child learns without anybody teaching the child how to do those things? Your TV remote is one nobody goes to child and tells how the remote in the child hand does and say you see this is remote, this is the power button. These are the channel buttons. You don’t do that. Still the child learns that.
So children these days I mean, on their own they learn how to use a cell phones? The same thing goes for Computers. They learn how to play games, not just games if you see gully cricket or something like that? The rules of gully cricket are different from ICC rules. So children as they grow according to their situation, as according to their environment, they start making of their own rules.
So children are endowed with a strong capacity for learning. All Children’s have this natural capacity for learning. Now the question that we ask is, why is it children who are natural learner is finding so hard when they come into the classroom? So outside the classroom the child is able to learn the number of things. What happens when the child steps into the classroom? So we all know the status of education in the country today the agile status of education report which is the asset report says that the average 8th standard child cannot read a 3rd standard text.
So why it is education outcomes are so poor and dismal in our country? At the same time, when we compare the natural intelligence of the child with the learning outcome of the child within the school there is a huge disparity, right?
So Qrius is an attempt to bridge that disparity. So what we at Qrius are trying to do is we trying to bring it aligned between the natural way or the natural ways which children learn, and the ways in which they’re thought in school. There is huge mismatch between them. So that’s what we are trying to do.
SAMUEL: That is actually every child is different right? So how do you measure that difference? Some way we have to see one guy more creative than other guy who has the capacity to bigot the text and reproduce that one child cannot do that? So how do you differentiate these kids?
VELAVAN: Okay. So the first thing is as I said every child is different. Now it’s important for us to acknowledge this. If we really accept – okay, see it is fashionable to say, every child is unique, we need to pay individual attention and all that but is that really acknowledgement of this. Do we really see it backdrop? Do we see and acknowledgement of this talent in every child is – do we see this being reflected in the classroom? The answer is no.
The answer is no because we look at it very practically, you say every child is unique. Now you tell me that am a teacher thing – or let’s assume that you are a teacher, you board into a classroom you are given 40 minutes, you have given a syllabus to complete and you have 40 different kids in front of you. Now realistically speaking tells me sir, how can you cater to 40 different children? Is that possible to address each child individually?
SAMUEL: No way.
VELAVAN: It may be possible if you have one to one instruction. But generally when you one teacher and many students obviously it’s going to be a very difficult to design a learning program or a curricular in which is tailored to a single individual child.And it is very difficult even if you do that it is difficult to administer 40 different tailor made curriculums to 40 children in the classroom. It’s not a practically possible thing. So how are we trying to overcome this problem? How are we tried to circumvent this?
We do this by — first of all acknowledging okay, see every child is agree. But their characteristics that are common to most of the children. Every child may be unique, they have their differences but there are things which children like in general. For example, take stories.
I hardly know kids. I hardly know any child who has said that I don’t like stories. He or she may have difference for a kind of stories that’s different. But all children or most children have a liking for stories so that is a general character.
SAMUEL: That’s a pattern.
VELAVAN: So these general characteristics are what we call the nature of the child which is common to mostly for all children. So what we doing in our programs are we address or we exploit these common characteristics and within that framework we allow for individual difference to flourish.
