Designing Technology for 287 Million Learners

How can we design technology for 287 million adult illiterates in India spread across 22 Indian Languages? In this paper, we summarize our experience towards addressing this challenge over the last 6 years. We briefly present our journey of technology for adult literacy in India emphasizing the key shift in focus between different generations. We then present the design of technology for adult literacy from multiple perspectives of learning methodologies, learning technologies, software engineering and HCI. The main thrust of this paper is to present a holistic perspective of designing technology for supporting education in the context of mass scale and variety.