Stuck on a maths problem? These social media apps could help you

Pushpendra Dhakad

, a 23-year-old teacher was on a routine visit to his village in Vidisha, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, in March when he heard a group of children pronounce some words in English incorrectly. Out of habit, he corrected them, but the kids ignored him. In the next few days, Dhakad observed that most children in his village had mobile phones,

social media

accounts and were hooked to popular video apps. “I realised the best way to reach out to them was through the medium they loved,” Dhakad said.


Within a few days, Dhakad — who teaches English and mathematics to students from classes 9 to 12 in Bhopal — had set up an account and posted short educational videos. Five months later, with 2.47 lakh followers and over 200 videos on the platform, Dhakad is part of a small but growing community of teachers who are turning short video-based smartphone apps into digital classrooms.

Short video-based social media apps are not just about dance moves or daredevilry any more, they are also making school subjects more interesting and teaching innovative. For instance, ‘#EduTok’, launched this year, has garnered around 38 billion views in India, as per the company’s officials. Similarly, regional language social platform Sharechat has 60 million active users who are connecting with each other (and teaching and learning) in numerous Indian languages like Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi. said a spokesperson for the company, while video streaming social network Bigo Live, which has a training programme for teachers, claims to have trained over 100 teachers to teach on the app by posting short videos on their respective subjects.

Educators said they were taking to these platforms considering their popularity among the youth.

Anand Prakash, an IIT-Roorkee graduate and co-founder of Vedantu, a Bangalore-based tutorial website, said that the short-video space is innovative for educators but challenging. “It is a big challenge for teachers to convey a concept in a 40-50 second video. So, they need to discover tricks. Only those who are passionate about their subjects can do this,” he said.

In order to cash in on the potential that the education space offers, one platform launched specific education channels in July. It is also training educators (whom it is paying) and has hired over 300 teachers recently for its English-training programme with more hires planned for teachers in other subjects too. Nagesh Banga, deputy country manager (India) of the company, told TOI that after getting a good response from English language teaching, the company has now included trainers for subjects like ‘presentation making’, ‘drawing up Excel sheets’, and even yoga.

Delhi-based Gunjan Chawla, an MBA in HR, is teaching classes on ‘how to make presentations’. “The best part is that I can connect to so many students living in different areas and solve their queries on a real-time basis through live streaming. For me, it’s an entirely new way of teaching and I am also able to earn money with zero investment,” she said.

For those who are not comfortable with English, Sharechat is offering options to learn in around 15 Indian regional languages. A spokesperson for the company said that Tamil and Hindi are seeing the maximum traction among users followed by Marathi and Punjabi.

Biju Meledathu, 38, a mathematics teacher from Pathanamthitta in Kerala, who has 18,000 followers on the platform, said that he hit upon the idea of teaching through this platform after he stumbled upon a tag called ‘knowledge’ on the app and found that there were lots of informative posts in the tag. “I thought why not post some tips about my subject that may be helpful to people? Several people responded and that is how I started posting regular videos,” he said.

Rany Mithun, a housewife who regularly follows Biju’s videos, said that they helped her prepare for competitive tests. “Since I am a housewife and have to take care of my child as well, it was difficult for me to take out time for offline classes. But the tutorials on maths were helpful and I was able to prepare on my own for the tests.”

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