The Jaipur Education Summit brought together 503 educators, policy makers, and educational technology builders for two days of intensive discussion about the future of learning in India. We attended to listen, learn, and challenge our assumptions about how education evolves.

The summit delivered. Conversations were substantive. Debates were heated. The gap between theory and practice became vividly clear. Here are the insights that will shape our thinking for the next year.

Key Insight 1: Assessment Drives Everything

Every discussion eventually circled back to assessment. Teachers want to teach differently. Students want to learn differently. Institutions want to innovate. But assessment methods remain locked in 19th-century thinking. Multiple choice questions. Rote memorization testing. Standardized formats that measure recall instead of understanding.

The constraint is clear: educational innovation requires assessment innovation first. Until we build better ways to measure learning, pedagogy remains trapped. This explains why experimental schools revert to traditional methods—they need standardized test scores to prove legitimacy.

Key Insight 2: Access Beats Innovation

Rural schools shared a consistent message: they value reliable basics over experimental features. A stable internet connection matters more than AI-powered personalization. Simple downloadable content beats sophisticated web applications. Offline-first design wins every time.

This creates tension with urban ed-tech companies designing for perfect connectivity. The education sector serves everyone, including the 40% of Indian students with inconsistent internet access. Technology that requires pristine infrastructure excludes the majority of learners.

Key Insight 3: Teachers Need Tools, Software Tools

Teachers attend professional development workshops. They read research papers. They understand pedagogical theory. What they lack: practical software tools that actually work in real classrooms with real constraints.

The market overflows with student-facing apps. The market severely underserves teacher-facing tools. Lesson planning software, assignment grading interfaces, parent communication systems—these remain crude. Improving teacher tooling would impact student outcomes more directly than most student-facing interventions.

Key Insight 4: Skill Transfer Remains Unsolved

Students learn concepts well. They score high on subject-specific tests. Then they graduate and struggle to apply knowledge in new contexts. This transfer problem haunts education. Learning multiplication tables differs from using multiplication to solve real problems.

Project-based learning attempts to solve this. Problem-solving curricula attempt to solve this. Competency-based progression attempts to solve this. Evidence suggests partial success at best. The fundamental question remains: how do we teach in ways that produce transferable understanding?

Key Insight 5: Scale and Quality Conflict

Small experimental schools achieve remarkable outcomes. Personalized attention. Close teacher-student relationships. Flexible curricula adapted to individual needs. These schools become case studies, TED talks, inspiration stories.

Then comes the scaling question. How do we apply these methods to classes of 60+ students? How do we maintain quality with limited teacher training budgets? How do we preserve innovation while serving millions of learners? The summit offered interesting experiments but few definitive answers.

What We're Building Differently

These insights directly influence our product roadmap. We're prioritizing offline-first architecture. We're building teacher tools before student features. We're designing for classrooms with 60+ students instead of idealized cohorts of 15. We're acknowledging these create harder problems.

Most importantly: we're staying engaged with practitioners. Theory matters. Research matters. But classroom reality provides the true test case for educational software.