Using edtech to improve learning outcomes

The father of two teenage students, Agarwal has pursued an unprecedented approach to the edtech market that combines his knowledge of both rural schools and elite education across three continents. “It’s my responsibility to do something using technology to make education better,” he says. “I see educational technology improving learning outcomes in Indian public schools.”

TagHive’s mission is to connect the four stakeholder groups in public education–students, teachers, parents, and administrators–to improve teaching and learning experiences. “We are focusing on simplicity,” says Agarwal. “Simple, meaningful tools. We understand what schools and users need, and we built that.”

The company's technology includes the Class Saathi clicker and an AI-powered platform for self-assessment, attendance recording, performance evaluation, and quizzes.

Set-up takes just minutes. At the school year’s start, each student receives a clicker and a Class Saathi app profile. For the rest of the school year, the teacher can choose the format (in-classroom, online, homework, or tests) in which they want to ask questions and select questions from a repository of over thirty thousand questions. Teachers can pick chapters, sub topics, choose difficulty levels, select number of questions, and assign how much time students have to answer each question.

At school, teachers can use TagHive’s application to ask students quick questions to check for understanding and assess their critical thinking skills. Students use clicker devices to respond to questions, and teachers can use what they learn from assessing students to create student learning groups and conduct focus interventions.

“Our technology lets everyone participate in classroom conversation,” Agarwal says.

That’s important for students and teachers when masks are being worn during a pandemic, obviously, and for students who struggle with reading and writing. The clicker reduces participation barriers for students who may be hesitant to raise their hand or write out a lengthy response.

At home, Class Saathi continues to teach students and connect families. Students can access the Class Saathi mobile app to solve questions, do homework, practice skills, and improve their knowledge in specific subjects each day. Parents can follow up on their children’s' learning path and progress through the app, and teachers and administrators can view data on learning outcomes.

“The Indian education system focuses on accountability and metrics, so TagHive built a measurement system that keeps track of individual students’ learning daily,” explains Agarwal. “Teachers, parents, and students can see what’s going on in the classroom and take action based on those metrics. Schools can collect learning level data for each student and use that data to make improvements.”

An edtech platform built with Google Firebase

TagHive’s application is built with Firebase, which the team has been using for four years. The Class Saathi app uses Cloud Firestore as its primary database and accesses stored data using a client SDK and Firebase Cloud Functions. TagHive used the Firebase Realtime Database to create the Class Saathi app’s live quiz feature. Firebase Cloud Storage hosts app resources, like images for questions and digital copies of books. Firebase Crashlytics tracks app performance, in terms of fatal and non-fatal crashes and their root causes, and TagHive sometimes uses Firebase Remote Config to enable or disable features. Firebase offline capabilities allow the Class Saathi app to work without internet connectivity in schools. “We wanted to design a solution that works without Internet access, and Firebase provides the capability to create a solution that doesn’t require connectivity,” says Agarwal. “We chose Firebase and built on it, using capabilities including notifications, testing, and drag and drop.”

Class Saathi uses Firebase Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging to inform users about new features, share fun monthly challenges, send reminders about daily in-app activities, and to engage users to use the app more frequently and more effectively. TagHive combines its custom analytics with Firebase default dimensions for setting a target audience, testing message efficacy for audiences generated with Firebase Predictions, and utilizing Dynamic Links to guide users about notification topics.

Pankaj Agarwal with other founders from the Google for Startups Accelerator: Korea program and the Google Korea team at graduation

Clear milestones, solid architecture: How Accelerator: Korea sped up TagHive’s growth

When Agarwal found the Google for Startups Accelerator: Korea program online, he immediately applied. He and his team wanted to partner with a large, respected brand like Google for technical expertise and to grow their professional network. Firebase was on Agarwal’s mind as they began the Accelerator program. The Class Saathi application was experiencing performance issues, due to diverse latencies, and needed technical support to scale without issue.

“The two major features of our Class Saathi app are question recommendation and in depth analysis(reporting) of user performance,” Agarwal says. “We recommend questions to users on the basis of their past performance and choices. This includes a lot of data processing and transferring of data from database to the application. Multiple users were experiencing latency while using this feature.”

The problem increased when traffic was high on TagHive’s platform, impacting the user experience, so they prioritized solving the problem during the Accelerator program. “The scalability of our application and latency improvement were the key objectives for the team,” says Agarwal. “Through the GSFA program, we could successfully define both quick-win technical architecture based on Firebase and mid-long term migration plan and architecture based on Google Cloud Platform. As a result, we could have clear milestones for data migration and secure solid architecture to manage maximum peak concurrent users up to 100,000 users.”

With their Google mentor Andy Kim, Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, Taghive’s tech team reviewed the Class Saathi app’s architecture and how Firebase could best support it. “We addressed current technical problems to settle down the current business workloads on Firebase,” says Kim. “The application had some performance issues related to diverse latencies. I shared a checklist to find causes. We came up with a couple of ideas to address the issues, such as caching, locality on DB, warmup instances, data compression, and monitoring.”

They came up with several solutions:

• Store the frequently accessed data on the application side by leveraging local storage
• Compress images
• Reduce the response size of cloud functions

Kim also encouraged TagHive to consider Google Cloud as a long-term solution for their global scale of business, and they moved the most called cloud functions to Google Cloud Platform. Kim trained the TagHive team on Google Cloud and reviewed their architecture to make sure Google Cloud could provide the scalability and availability TagHive needed to scale their application globally. “We were using a serverless architecture, but for the long term, we decided to create a server on Google Cloud Platform,” says Agarwal. “It will give us more flexibility and control, and we can also leverage the concept of distributed computing to improve our system performance.”

Students using clickers to interact with the Class Saathi app at school.

All of TagHive’s Accelerator sessions were online until the very end of the program, because of the pandemic. However, Agarwal says the team felt like they were connected with the world via online meetings. They learned about and are exploring Google’s machine learning and AI tools, but they are currently using their own custom machine learning models. “I would like to thank Google and the entire Google Korea team for supporting us, onboarding us, and despite me being Indian and living in Korea, they believed in us and were very inclusive,” Agarwal says. “The support was felt at all times, coming from each and every side of the globe.”

Market share and fundraising

TagHive is a spinoff company from Samsung’s C-Lab incubation program, which allows Samsung employees to develop their startup ideas and later spin their startups off. Headquartered in South Korea, with an office in India, TagHive is among a handful of South Korea-based companies that have direct exposure to the growing India market. That’s attractive to investors hoping to gain exposure in India.

TagHive has found success fundraising and saw a jump in revenue last year. Agarwal says his number one rule for fundraising is to be honest. “If you’re honest, humble, and willing and able to work hard, investors will recognize it,” he says. “We’ve gotten good outcomes quickly. We were able to secure big funds pretty fast and move along with the business.”

Encouraging entrepreneurs to focus on India

Agarwal encourages entrepreneurs to build technology solutions in India, particularly simple, easy-to-use technology that solves problems. “There is so much impact and business possibility out there, not only in India but outside India, in other emerging markets,” he says. “This space has so much promise.”

His advice to other founders is to have clear knowledge of what you are doing and why; to be humble; to work hard; to focus on building a team; to test the products; and to believe in your idea. “You should always stay motivated,” he says. “If you believe in your idea, it will help you to achieve your goals. You become a better version of yourself, and in the end, you will succeed.”