17-07-2025
AI-powered digital literacy platform empowers poor students
Visakhapatnam: Notwithstanding resource constraints and on a shoestring budget, a distinguished professor with an indomitable will managed to reach out to disadvantaged students in five villages of Pendurthi mandal in Visakhapatnam and, with his team, made learning fun for the digital have-nots. Thanks to his indefatigable efforts, some of the students now know pretty well how to access digital lessons, post queries, view video classes, and share best practices.
Prof Meka James Stephen, Chair Professor of Dr. BR Ambedkar Chair, Andhra University, embarked upon a short-term research project that focused on 'digital education for social justice: achieving equal opportunities through Sustainable Development Goal-4 in rural India', the path ahead was not that easy as children used to shy away when the team approached them. Besides, there were resource constraints and lack of infrastructure. That, however, did not deter the 15-member-team and over 30 facilitators, led by James Stephen, from reaching out to the marginalised communities residing in five hamlets of Pendurthi – Pinagadi, Rampuram, Karakavanipalem, Gorepalli and Kotnivanipalem and encouraging the wards help browse beyond their favourite YouTube channels, reels and movies to add value to their education via a digital journey. After making repeated field visits, followed by a detailed survey, Prof James Stephen says that a comprehensive framework for a customised AI-driven digital literacy platform was initiated. 'By integrating advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and scalable cloud infrastructure, the platform delivered relevant and personalised digital learning portions to students,' the Chair Professor highlights.
Multilingual support, 'gamified 'content, real-time analytics, and hybrid infrastructure that supports both online and offline access formed part of the key features of the digital literacy project. 'To access AI-driven content, mobile phones were used.
Children were able to access digital lessons and go through the content whenever they wanted to,' explains Prof. James Stephen, who was recently honoured with the 'Global Research Excellence Award' at the Nexus Synergy Awards 2025, Europe in recognition of his outstanding contributions to research and social innovation.
Also, as a keynote speaker at the Springer international conference 'Networking International Conference on Emerging Trends in Expert Applications and Security' held in Poland, he highlighted technological interventions for marginalised communities.
The short-term research-based project in Pedurthi empowered over 250 students aged between 10 and 18 years in the five villages with digital literacy. 'Post our literacy intervention, their ability to use digital tools shot up to 97 per cent from a mere 21 per cent before. There is an apparent shift in their subject-wise understanding as most of them crossed 60 per cent in their test scores. And their comfort level in accessing digital content rose to 88 per cent from 18 per cent before,' exults Prof. James Stephen.
But in order to scale up the prototype project to a real-time application, the Chair Professor says, infusion of additional funds is required. 'With the support of government funds, IoT-enabled devices and a cloud-based set-up could be designed to cater to a large section of rural students for digital literacy,' James Stephen shares with The Hans India. A multilingual NLP interface with speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversion made content accessibility much easier for students.
