Manoj Deshpande used to be a colleague of my friend, Prasanna Walimbe, at Infosys. In 2016, inspired by Modi’s Digital India, Manoj turned entrepreneur. His initial entrepreneurship was a weekend one. By 2018, the Minimum Viable Product was ready, and Manoj quit his job as head of Digital and AI business at Opus Consulting to become a full time entrepreneur at Zenworks Solutions. At Opus, he had made an intelligent BOT and machine learning platform for the payments domain. The entrepreneurial idea he was nurturing was a simple one. If you are able to enable digital communication between the trio of the teacher, parent and student, then you can get insights which are monetizable. Schools are restricted by governments on the fee that can be charged. So the real moolah is made when kids are involved in extracurriculars, facilitated by the school. The usual approach schools take to such a revenue generation is by launching some extra curricular paid activity, and waiting to see what the response is. As is the case with most new businesses, failure is rampant. 

What Manoj does is to look at data generated during the conversations and identify skills and strengths in students. And try to match the extra curricular activities to these skills/strengths. There is a 3 way sharing model in place, with revenues split between the service provider, the school and Zenworks. In addition, Zenworks also charges the school a per student per month fee for use of their platform. The fee ranges from Rs. 20 to Rs. 50 per month, depending on volumes. Manoj’s first experiment started with a school in Akurdi, Pune. The success achieved there has got him a conversion to the entire group – with 25,000 students. 

The sales pitch is directed at trustees – but the bottlenecks are usually in execution.  As expected, there was a lot of resistance from teachers. An interesting observation that Manoj made about one of his client schools – teacher absenteeism was running at 22%. The norm is 10% – and the extra 12% leaves were being taken surreptitiously, without being sanctioned or teacher pay being cut. The principal was hand in gloves with teachers, as she was the one who had to get work done from her aided school teachers. Trustees were not ones who were regular visitors to the school. 

The winning over of the teaching community took time. There is a lot of reporting and admin pressure on teachers. Teachers are intrinsically lazy – and will do everything possible to ensure that their workload does not increase. Manoj banked on this laziness – by pointing out to them that the app, with its emphasis on dropdown lists for student observation noting, was actually making data entry into the system much easier. For creating the dropdown lists, Manoj took the help of schools like Muktangan, and child psychiatrists like Bhushan Shukla. Another interesting kaizen in the app: move responsibility of attendance from teacher to parent. Parents were given access to the attendance API of the app, and they were the ones who had to mark the presence or absence of their kid in class. The teacher still was given an override function in the module, if she noticed that the kid was physically absent, even when marked present.

Manoj also enabled better marketing of the school using this data and digitisation. The data was used to provide insights about what are the strengths of the school teaching team. For example, one of their client schools realised that most students were enjoying History and Geography. So the sales pitch for 2020-21 for that school was on the parental ambition of their wards joining govt service. Success in MPSC (State govt recruitment) means being good in History and Geography. And our school is the best at that. Also, by digitizing the process of admission applications, Manoj ensured that tise school filled up more seats in its KG sections, and faster. 

For the parent, the sell was in having more data about what the kid was up to in the school. The HW assignment completion had to be digitally certified by the parent, applying a maker/checker principle. The app gives an option of parents receiving the communication in their local language. Teachers normally prepare handwritten detailed class wise session plans. These were digitized. If a student missed a class – the session plan et al was shared with the parent. This made parents happier as it reduced coordination work with other parents to find out what happened during the missed sessions.  

Most of the data capture is done using the app. Had a dekko; the app looks fairly ordinary. But what the app excels at, is analytics. Communication is more meaningful when seen in contexts. The app, by knowing the context, is better able to capture the meanings in the communication. (A good idea for PTP to implement would be to export the whatsapp chats into CSV – and run an analysis of parent interests and concerns.) Manoj has an interesting insight into perspectives. He says that teachers view students through a lens of relativity, whilst parents have views which are absolute. 

What this means is that teachers, who are handling 50 students, will not get worried if one student has had a fall. But for the parent of that kid, especially if she is the only one that they have, they will view it as nothing short of catastrophe. Given the differing lenses, digital dropdown communication, makes it easier for teachers to report these ‘routine’ incidents to the ‘catastrophed’ parents – and hence demonstrate the concern of the school and the teacher. Another insight that Manoj shared was that for a child, typically upto the age of 12, praise from the mouths of teachers has a much bigger impact than praise from the mouths of parents. By automating the praise function in the app, student motivation levels skyrocket. This improved communication also leads to fewer conflicts between parents and teachers.

The data capture work has suffered with the online teaching of 2020, as teachers and schools have been busy focussing energies in the transition from offline to online. From the looks of it, the offline school will be back in action only in AY 21-22. What are Zenworks’ plans for the future? Myelin, the brand that Zenworks uses for its school product,  is the fatty layer around a nerve which serves to insulate the nerve from random signals. What the company is trying to do is to ensure that this communication flows distortion free through all the stakeholders in the kid’s education. The education institution’s journey starts with a syllabus, and as the institute evolves, it moves to focus on learning objectives and eventually outcomes. Myelin’s data capture has started suggesting specific interventions for specific students to achieve desired outcomes. Manoj wants to go one step further – and capture alumni data – so that he can validate the correlations between interests, attributes and outcomes.