Mr. Pankaj Agarwal is on a mission to transform classroom learning with Class Saathi – an affordable clicker solution to drive engagement and participation in classrooms. He is an inventor on over 50 international patents and was selected as one of the Top 10 Innovators in India in 2017 by MIT Technology Review and Mint. Prior to TagHive, Mr. Agarwal was with Samsung Electronics where his decade-long career spanned several professional capacities – hardware circuit engineer, strategic innovation manager, and an advisor to the CTO of Samsung. He is the founder and Chairman of the IIT Alumni Association of South Korea. He is also a trained magician and is fluent in Korean. He has a Bachelor of Technology degree in EE from IIT Kanpur, MS from Seoul National University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
1. How do you help students to have a school-leisure balance at home?
When we created Class Saathi, we built a system through which students can learn faster and retain more. Our personalized quiz-based learning model promotes natural curiosity in students and the mock tests are designed to leave a lasting impression on our students. We have seen that students learn faster and they save revision time because they retain a lot more information with our model. They can use all this saved time to curate whatever extracurricular activities they want to focus on.
2. What does TagHive do to promote extracurricular activities?
We built our Class Saathi solution with the agenda to save students time which they otherwise spend learning by rote. Our personalized quizzes target concept-based revision and it does so by instantly covering gaps that our Saathi AI spots missing in a student’s learning. We also provide concept notes and video tutorials that will help them cover their lags. All the features we offer over our app have been designed with the specific intent of saving students revision time. We believe that this valuable time students can spend refining their creativity, satisfying their social needs, and creating other, immersive experiences that are as important as learning. We want to make learning a time-efficient process for students.
3. How do you make your app user-friendly for both teachers and students?
We do that in so many ways! We have features that teachers, students, and principals love. Principals have access to a single dashboard from which they can pull out performance reports for any student in any class. Individual student reports show performance metrics for different subjects and different concepts.
Teachers can assign homework, conduct live quizzes during teaching sessions, and monitor reports to deliver better teaching methods. We also give teachers data points that help them control and monitor their learning environments which are especially important now that virtual classes are rendering teachers helpless where evaluations are concerned.
Students can take daily mock tests and homework all in the comfort of their homes. Their reports are collated and published without any errors and biases which lets students know that their learning environment is free from any sort of data manipulation or evaluation biases. We also encourage students to learn over our app by offering incentives like daily quiz contests where they stand a chance to win gift vouchers for their consistency and performance.
4. What is unique about TagHive?
The name TagHive stands for a hive of connectivity. We always strive to incorporate the core value of our company in the products we offer and Class Saathi, our flagship product is the living example of it. With Class Saathi, we have created a fully connected ecosystem of learning where parents, teachers, principals, and students are fully in sync in a system that produces clean and instant data to drive impact. All the key stakeholders in the system are tagged to each other in a bid to improve accountability, learning, and impact wherever necessary. TagHive is about a committed and clear communication channel that opens up a dialogue for creativity, collaboration, and compassion and our products deliver these promises and aim to strengthen them wherever possible.
5. What is your view on eLearning? How do you help students regulate or restrict screen time?
E-learning is a good tool to leverage to help students learn at their own pace. Many e-learning offerings can accurately predict a student’s learning level and help them progressively improve. E-learning is good when it is focus-based and delivered with intent. The content and features offered by e-learning solutions must be scrutinized for quality and impact to ensure students gain from it. By no means is e-learning a replacement for in-classroom learning. It must be used as a teaching+learning facilitator and we must not allow it to dictate the other areas of a student’s developmental needs. There is no one-size-fits-all method to restrict a student’s screen time. What we can say is that our app has very clear intentions. We want our students to learn efficiently and for that, we have a streamlined learning model that sticks to the plan and delivers intent along with learning. This ensures that students learn what they need to and they don’t spend any additional time on screen.