Manohar Swaminathan

India has the world’s largest population of children with vision impairments (CVIs), a group facing significant educational barriers including inadequate accessible resources, limited school access, and a shortage of trained teachers. The authors from four different organizations including a non-profit dedicated to enhancing STEM education for CVIs through interactive, play-based learning and teacher training have collaborated to create SEEDS, Scalable Educational Experiences with Digital Scaffolding. This is a voice-based platform for educational experiences delivery, featuring an Android Teacher App, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, and a comprehensive website for content management. The Teacher app facilitates educational experiences via group calls with students, while the IVR system offers students independent access to educational content using feature phones. To assess effectiveness and usability of SEEDS among students and teachers, we conducted a mixed-methods study involving 29 visually impaired students across five schools and five facilitators (3 sighted and 2 visually impaired) from Vision Empower Trust . Despite challenges like internet connectivity issues causing call drops, the study highlighted strong student engagement and a collaborative environment among facilitators. By open-sourcing the SEEDS codebase, we aim to improve the platform and increase its adoption among teachers in schools for CVIs across India and beyond.

India is actively transitioning towards a ‘digital-first’ economy, bolstering digital public infrastructure in sectors like finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. Likewise, the Government of India is striving to revamp the education system, emphasizing technology integration to harness the demographic dividend. Understanding the impact of this technological shift at the grassroots level, especially from teachers’ perspectives, is paramount. This study delves into the factors influencing Indian teachers’ adoption of technology in education and their perceptions of its incorporation. Through a mixed-method approach involving a survey with 1,355 respondents and 20 semi-structured interviews, we uncover how education policies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and social media converge, placing teachers at the forefront of technology integration in education.

The Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community constitutes over 430 million people globally, with about 70 million of them using sign language as their primary means of communication. Learning sign language poses significant challenges, and researchers have explored the potential of digital games as educational tools for teaching sign language. However, existing educational games are limited to a narrow range of words and feature only single-player modes. Consequently, our objective was to design a sign language-based game that not only facilitates learning but also enables social gameplay and encourages user-generated content. In this work, we present SignIt!, an accessible quiz platform co-designed with the DHH community. SignIt! empowers DHH players to play sign language-based quizzes either individually or in competitive settings, as well as to create their own quiz content. Through a user study involving five DHH participants, we found SignIt! was deemed easy-to-learn, intuitive, and accessible by our participants. They expressed various motivations for using SignIt!, including passing time, learning quiz content, and connecting with friends.