Grover: remedial education initiative

– Summiya Yasmeen (Bengaluru)

Ekta Grover is founder of the mint new Shunya Impact Pvt. Ltd (estb.2020), Bengaluru, which has designed the Shunya Intelligent Classroom Learning Management System (LMS) mobile app for K-12 students. Based on latest machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, Shunya LMS enables students and teachers to post class notes and assignments digitally to receive assessment feedback and remedial education assistance.

Newspeg. In November, the company was named among the Top 100 edtech companies in India and South-east Asia by HolonIQ, a San Francisco-based ‘global intelligence platform for education’.

History. A computer science engineering graduate of PESIT, Bengaluru and economics postgrad of Goethe University, Frankfurt (Germany), Ekta Grover has many years of rich and varied experience in the IT industry having worked with SAP; VMWare; (24)7.ai; BloomReach; AdNear and InMobi. In April last year, she quit InMobi to promote Shunya Impact.

“In 2016 en route to office, I started giving rides to children to reach their government school. This continued for the next three years. During this time, I began thinking about how new IT technologies could be applied to benefit and improve children’s learning experiences. Last April, I took the plunge and started Shunya with the objective of applying advanced technologies to revolutionise teaching-learning in schools,” says Grover.

Direct talk. According to Ekta Grover, Shunya LMS is revolutionary inasmuch as it applies latest machine learning and AI technologies to improve the learning experience of K-12 school children. “The unique proposition of Shunya LMS is that it charts an individualised learning programme for every child based on her academic history and progress. It does this in a content agnostic manner, as content is often a hyper local phenomenon. This app is very helpful to teachers who can provide customised remedial education to every child and thus raise overall teaching-learning standards. Hyper-personalisation of K-12 education is specially needed to enable teachers to identify and remedy learning gaps resulting from the prolonged shutdown of schools because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Grover.

Future plans. With Shunya LMS receiving enthusiastic feedback from schools, teachers and students, Ekta Grover is focusing her energies on adding “intelligent features to make learning more personalised”. “This is the first edtech platform that measures the learning gaps of children and enables teachers to bridge them through remedial education. Given engagement challenges due to Covid-19, K-12 learning gaps will continue to widen, and we are hopeful about teachers embracing this new technology to enable children to recover lost ground,” she says.

Fair winds!

Also read: 5 Apps that are redefining online learning