By Apurva Chaudhary on Sep 18th, 2013
Datawind, widely known as the maker of Aakash tablet, has tied up with TES India, an online teaching community,to preload educational content to its tablets.
The partnership will provide Datawind with library of 5 lakh teaching material to its users. It appears that Datawind tablets will be preloaded with an application which allows teachers to access course materials.
TES India has learning materials for courses such as Bachelor of Arts, B.Com, B. Ed, general awareness, CBSE content, educational presentations, discussion on social topics, among others. It claims that it also provides content for special need children with different cases. Besides this, it also provides features such as employment search for teachers and locate career guide for students.
It’s not surprising that Datawind has tied up with companies that provide educational content. Previously, it worked with the Indian government for government’s ambitious project to provide students with an Android tablet. Besides this, it also has also partnered with a lot of companies for content that it pre-loads on its tablets.
Datawind content partnerships
- In April 2012, Datawind was also offering 50% discount on the annual subscription for The Indian Express and The Financial Express to the new customers of UbiSlate 7+ and 7C tablets, however there is no word if the same discount is being offered for the customers of these newly announced Android tablets as well.
- Yahoo! Cricket and Yahoo! Mail apps. Datawind also stated it has preloaded Yahoo! India webpage onto these tablets as a portal. However it is not clear if the webpage has been set as the default browser homepage, like in the case of Ubislate 7+ and Ubislate 7C Android tablets, or it has been pre-loaded just as a browser bookmark.
- Reverie Language solutions to support over a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Punjabi/Gurmukhi among others.
- Mango Learning solutions for game based educational modules, interactive smart books and the full CBSE curriculum.
- TestBag, a testing and e-assessment solution from RKS Learning Private Ltd.
- Intelligaia finger tracing apps to teach letter writing for toddlers.
- In April 2012, Datawind had partnered with GetJar, the independent app store, to pre-install the GetJar app store on all Datawind tablets, including Aakash and UbiSlate.
Other Edu-tablets
While the Indian government’s previous attempts at the Aakash tablet looks like a dud now (Government now plans to license Aakash brand), a lot of tablet and firms in educational sector tried to cash on it by launching educational content on tablets or by launching tablets targeted at students with educational content. It’s worth noting that once the Aakash tablet project was seen fiddling, there’s been somewhat of a slowdown in companies launching educational related products on smart devices.
Greycells18 Media, the company set-up by Network18 and Educomp, which owns the Topper Learning brand in India, and runs the subscription based education channel Topper TV, and website, Topperlearning.com, had launched Android mobile apps developed for school children in classes 6th till 10th.
HCL Learning, the education and talent development division of HCL Infosystems, had launched MyEduWorld, an interactive learning app that includes school curriculum in digital format.
Previously, HCL had launched three educational tablets, My Edu Tab U1, My Edu Tab K12 and My Edu Tab HE. Apart from that, HCL had also launched a beta version of its cloud-based learning initiative, called ‘Learn On Cloud‘ which offers various personalized learning courses in the IT segment to students.
Apart from that, Pearson, the media group behind Financial Times, publishing house Penguin, and education brands like Longman, and Prentice Hall, had launched a new tablet-based education solution for schools in India, MX Touch.
EnableM, a mobile learning VAS company, had also launched Magic Pencil, a tablet-based education solution for higher education and distance education institutions.
Online publishing solutions provider Pressmart had also launched a tablet-based learning solution which allows schools and students to store and access books, study modules, assessments, and notices and also offer student, teacher, parent and admin modules to regulate the student’s school activity.
Edutor Technologies also offers its own education solution for Android tablets called ‘Augmented Classroom Solution (ACS)’ through which it offered learning material like digitized textbooks, multimedia material, interactive concept maps and assessments complementing the school syllabus on Android-based Tablets.
Vriti, an e-learning company, had partnered with Tata McGraw-Hill Education to launch free, online ‘Smart Courses’ for Engineering and Management on Android tablet devices. Minglebox also provides Android apps for CAT/MAT/XAT and AIEEE entrance exams.
