What strikes you in India is a great need to improve general awareness. This can be cleanliness and hygiene, safety consciousness, common courtesy and discipline, safe driving, food hygiene and many other things. While some would want these to be included in the general education curriculum, we have the following challenges:

– Regular subjects always take much higher priority
– How to cover the unschooled and the grown-ups?
– How to make these seemingly drab topics interesting? and
– How to measure participation and effectiveness?

While mass awareness programs are being run mainly by the government and NGOs, change on the ground is not as fast as we would want. I think we are missing a trick here and a highly effective mass awareness tool , that has been a great success in the west has not taken root in India. Yes, I am talking about eLearning.

Current Scenario
Many large organisations (Indian and multinational) use eLearning effectively for employee on-boarding as well as their continuous professional development. However the topics are usually technical and the number of people covered is a small proportion of the overall population.
There are a few initiatives to use eLearning in colleges in the form of online classrooms and also to provide students with the facility to watch lectures and other content they may have missed.

Let this go Viral
To achieve mass coverage and participation, we need to address MSMEs(Micro Small and Medium Enterprises) and the general public with help of the government. In order to ‘catch them young’ we also need to involve schools, especially in rural India where over 60% of the people still live.
Micro learning modules (usually 15-45minutes) can be designed in English and regional languages to cover the subjects I mentioned earlier. To be honest there is no limit to what subjects and target audiences eLearning can cover.

To make these engaging and effective we can use:
– Learning through real life stories with characters and situations the learners can relate to
– Animation and videos to make the story come alive
– Motion graphics to make this an enjoyable experience
– Interactive sessions to challenge the learner and test effectiveness
More sophisticated concepts like branching within a course and gaming can be used for specific audiences.

These courses then can be offered to the MSMEs and the general public both offline and online. All one would need to take a course is a computer preferably with an internet connection and a valid login. Costs can be kept low as it will be easy to achieve economies of scale.

Need to Adapt
To a traditional eLearning enthusiast, offline courses can be anathema. However my personal experience is that this can be a show stopper, especially in the rural areas. While theoretically every village and school is getting connected to the internet bandwidth and reliability is an issue. Moreover with rich content the performance degradation can put off learners. I would recommend that the option of distributing courses with CDs is maintained till online is fool proof.