Powering the Future of Education in India: A Deep Dive into PowerSchool’s Ambitious Expansion, Innovative Solutions, and Tech-Enabled Interventions
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Apoorav Nischal, Managing Director & Country Head, PowerSchool India
- How does PowerSchool plan to execute its ambitious expansion strategy in the Indian education sector, and what are the key components of its India strategy for this fiscal year?
We are pursuing a diverse approach to expanding PowerSchool’s position in the Indian education industry, building on our success in North America. We did extensive research to get a thorough understanding of the Indian education ecosystem, including the specific demands and challenges of various stakeholders such as students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Our aim is to personalise solutions for each of these groups, with a focus on increasing student results, providing time-saving tools for teachers, facilitating stakeholder engagement, and delivering rich analytics for administrators. This personalised strategy ensures that we can handle the unique needs of the Indian education landscape.
We also recognise the importance of localised expertise and are committed to merging our worldwide experience with market insights from India. Our mission is to become the trusted technology partner to schools across India by providing integrated and bundled solutions, rather than simply selling items. To achieve the greatest levels of client satisfaction, we prioritise continuing product innovation and world-class customer service in both India and the United States.
After our first acquisition in the India market with Neverskip, this fiscal year, our key focus will be on merging NeverSkip and PowerSchool solutions, deepening customer relationships, and delivering bundled technology solutions to schools, allowing us to cement our position as a trusted technology partner in the Indian education sector.
- Can you provide an overview of PowerSchool’s integrated Learning Management System
PowerSchool’s learning management system, “Schoology Learning” is a component of the personalized learning cloud that enables teachers to create customized learning experiences for every student
Schoology Learning is the premier learning management system (LMS) for K-12 schools, allowing them to increase student achievement while also empowering educators. Schoology Learning serves over 20 million users and 7 million students in over 60,000 schools worldwide.
Schoology Learning provides one integrated platform, bringing together everything from classroom elements like quizzes and discussions to perspectives on student achievement. It fosters a collaborative environment in which instructors and schools may generate compelling content, design lessons, and measure student knowledge. It also ensures teachers have the data needed to better personalize instruction and support individual needs with tailored learning content.
With Schoology Learning, we are solving challenges faced by the stakeholders at the schools.
o Teachers- It helps teachers to reduce their administrative work and spend more time teaching, communicating, and collaborating. It lets teachers organize their courses, post content for their students, select the right resources, manage attendance and assess student performance without consuming too much time. It allows teachers to personalise learning. Schoology learning also provides teachers with a forum for the sharing of resources and ideas.
o Students: It increases student engagement by hosting interactive discussions. Students can take online tests and quizzes directly within the platform, allowing immediate scoring and analysis. Students can submit their assignments online, where teachers can provide one-on-one feedback and track revisions.
o Parents: Due to their busy schedules, parents lack knowledge of the courses being taught. Schoology Learning gives parents a window into their child’s learning and provides real-time information about daily activities.
o Principal: It helps the administrator track the school’s progress and teacher’s effectiveness. It helps in identifying weak concepts by providing data on class performance.
- In what ways is PowerSchool leveraging data analytics to redefine the educational landscape in K-12 education?
School administrators are adopting more modern education technology as the education sector continues to undergo tremendous digital transformation, resulting in a flood of data on all areas of student learning. However, data is only useful if it is accessible. Unconnected data from disparate sources does not enable educators to make meaningful decisions and often overwhelms them instead. That’s why PowerSchool strives to offer connected data analytics that brings together data from all the platforms a school typically uses including SIS, LMS, assessments, SEL, behaviour, and more.
Providing a secure, unified view of data is a game-changer for education leaders because it helps them uncover meaningful insights about student progress and support needs, better predict student outcomes to provide opportunities for early intervention and highlight school or state-wide trends that can be addressed early.
PowerSchool is also pioneering the application of AI to school data, which is the most effective way to provide education leaders with relevant data insights without having to sift through massive amounts of data to uncover valuable information.
- What is the significance of PowerSchool’s integration of generative AI into back-end educational solutions, and how does this make it a game changer for educators?
At PowerSchool we believe that embedding generative AI into back-end educational solutions will be a game changer for educators. Through the integration of generative AI directly into the secure platforms educators are already using, educators will receive and individualized recommendations to improve student engagement and support the needs of each student, be more effective with timesaving tools like automated assessments and content generation, all protected by our stringent security and privacy protocols, trusted by IT for nearly three decades.
PowerSchool has already integrated Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to use OpenAI’s large language models within their solutions including PowerSchool Performance Matters and PowerSchool LearningNav, part of PowerSchool’s Personalized Learning Cloud.
The implementation of generative AI within these products will dramatically improve educators’ ability to deliver personalized learning to students at scale by enabling the application of personalized assessments and learning pathways based on individual student needs and learning goals. K-12 educators will also benefit from access to OpenAI technology within a secure, private platform with the same stringent privacy, ethics, and security standards that govern all PowerSchool products. The application of Azure’s OpenAI service within PowerSchool products will usher in a new era of personalized education, dramatically reducing the burden on teachers and providing truly individualized learning and support for every child.
The generative-AI functionality will save educators a significant amount of time by providing them with AI-generated assessment items within the PowerSchool Performance Matters formative assessment solution aligned to a desired learning objective, grade level, subject, and standard, which the teacher can use to deliver more frequent formative assessments at scale. Instead of spending hours creating assessment items, the built-in AI-powered item creation will reduce this effort to minutes. The AI-generated assessment items will be complemented by AI-powered Adaptive Testing in Performance Matters to better understand each student’s competency and personalized instruction needs. The educator can then leverage generative AI within the PowerSchool LearningNav product to create multiple-choice questions within diagnostic tests personalized to each student’s competency level to assist in instruction and measure progress against learning goals.
By integrating GPT into PowerSchool Performance Matters and LearningNav products via Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, educators can access the benefits of generative AI safely and securely, integrated into the existing education technology tools they use every day. Educators will also benefit from generative AI recommendations with increased accuracy due to PowerSchool’s sophisticated model performance and quality monitoring for factual accuracy of data, validation on reasoning, sensitivity, and content quality metrics.
- What are PowerSchool’s views on the future of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and other tech-enabled interventions in education, and how do we plan to contribute to this evolving landscape?
At PowerSchool we believe that ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems play an essential role in shaping the future of school education and are strong supporters of them. ERP systems are complete software solutions that help educational institutions automate and combine numerous administrative and academic processes. These technologies are the foundation of effective school administration, and they considerably improve overall efficiency, data accuracy, and decision-making capabilities. We recently acquired Chennai-based (ERP) software company Neverskip, and currently serve over 900 schools and 1.2 million students across India. From growth perspective, India has nearly 260 million+ students and to start with we will be focusing on around 50 million who are enrolled in English medium schools. In the next two to three years we look forward to serving 2000 schools with a key focus on South India. With this, we also envision to reach around 2.5 million students in next two to three years.
One of the primary reasons we support ERP systems is because they provide the fundamental framework upon which innovative technology-enabled interventions in education can be constructed. ERP solutions free up significant time and resources for educators and administrators by centralising data and automating typical administrative duties, allowing them to focus on more critical activities such as personalised teaching and learning initiatives. Additionally, ERP systems give a wealth of valuable data and insights that may be used to improve the educational experience. ERP systems provide a comprehensive perspective of a school’s operations, enabling data-driven decision-making by tracking student performance and attendance as well as managing financials and resources.
Furthermore, we aim to actively contribute to the evolving educational landscape through tech-enabled interventions by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. By investing heavily in personalised learning initiatives, including the groundbreaking “Learning Nav,” we demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that every student can embark on a personalised learning journey. Using this technology, students can learn at their own pace and in ways that correspond to their unique learning styles and comprehension levels.
In addition, we recognise the importance of assisting students in making informed decisions regarding their future jobs. To address this, we provide career counselling and career-building solutions that give students useful insights into many job opportunities, allowing them to make well-informed decisions about their future routes.
India is a land of opportunities in the ERP ecosystem and with our wealth of knowledge in leading this space in the US, we wish to contribute towards India’s transformation in the education landscape effectively.
