Across India, exceptional practitioners solve complex challenges daily, like teaching in multigrade classrooms, working in tribal communities, and engaging parents in remote villages. Yet, their wisdom rarely travels beyond their own school. At the same time, school leaders often spend hours travelling for training that remains generic, top-down, and disconnected from their realities.
We saw a clear gap: India does not lack expertise; it lacks a system to recognise, capture, and share practitioner wisdom.
Existing mandated platforms provide courses, but many practitioners hesitate to create content or feel disconnected from centrally designed material. Their lived experience of what truly works in a low-resource school or a remote hilly district remains invisible in formal professional development.
We asked ourselves:
What if the most relevant solutions already exist within the system?
What if practitioners became creators, not just consumers, of knowledge?
Abhyaas was built to shift agency back to practitioners by giving them a platform to document, share, and scale their innovations. It enables leaders in last-mile geographies to access contextual content created by peers who understand their challenges.
Our purpose is simple: democratise knowledge, elevate practitioner voice, and grow India’s educational wisdom from the ground up, so that every child benefits from a school led by a confident, connected, and skilled educator.
Abhyaas functions as a practitioner-centred learning ecosystem that blends technology with peer-driven knowledge creation.
Each school begins with a self-review using its School Quality Framework. Once priorities are identified, leaders access Abhyaas to find contextual practices from peers facing similar challenges.
For example, a headteacher in Tripura watches a tutorial created by a school leader from Goa on “Building Vision and Setting Direction”. She adapts it for her tribal context, documents her approach with photos, and uploads her practice. Her resource now supports other schools, thus transforming her from a learner into a knowledge creator.
For District Officials:
In Nagaland’s NECTAR initiative, Block Officers use Sudhaar, our companion app, to track improvement priorities across all public schools. These insights directly inform Abhyaas courses, ensuring learning is targeted, data-driven, and relevant.
For State Governments:
States use Abhyaas as an innovation sandbox where practitioners develop tutorials aligned with State Quality Frameworks. Safe peer review processes help build confidence in content creation, ensuring resources are robust before scaling statewide.
In daily use, Abhyaas becomes a space where teachers and leaders continuously share, adapt, and refine practices—building a living Body of Practitioner Knowledge.
Abhyaas has scaled through strong government partnerships, practitioner demand, and demonstrable impact.
Government Systems Adoption (2022–2025):
- Nagaland (NECTAR): 1,926 schools in 463 peer groups; 763 Peer Group Leaders trained using Abhyaas self-paced content. Practitioners created contextual tutorials, strengthening local leadership capacity.
- Tripura: Reached 1,400 schools; created region-specific tutorials using local languages and practices.
- Goa: Integrated with 770+ schools; practitioner-generated resources now form part of official training.
- Arunachal Pradesh: 280 schools in tribal and hilly contexts engage with Abhyaas.
- Maharashtra (KDMC): Urban pilot in 50 schools.
Practitioner-Led Diffusion:
As practitioners create content, peers validate and adapt it. This “someone like me succeeded” effect accelerates adoption and builds confidence in local expertise.
Cross-sector Collaboration:
Civil society organisations use Abhyaas as a shared repository, reducing duplication, strengthening knowledge ecosystems, and ensuring clear attribution.
Sustainability:
States are embedding Abhyaas into EMIS systems, ensuring long-term continuity beyond project cycles.
Abhyaas has evolved through continuous feedback and iteration:
Phase 1 – Content Digitisation (2022–23):
Initial Moodle-based LMS digitised courses but lacked contextual relevance.
Phase 2 – Practitioner as Creator and Data-Linked Learning (2023–25):
- Introduced editable templates and the “Fundaar – Fundo ka Bhandaar” concept, enabling 69 practitioners to create bite-sized tutorials. This shifted the platform from consumption to co-creation.
- Integrated Sudhaar to match school priorities with relevant Abhyaas courses. In Nagaland, 256 schools identified 1,315 improvement priorities that guided rapid content creation.
Phase 3 – State Innovation Sandbox (2025):
States now use Abhyaas to develop content aligned with their Quality Frameworks and support mandatory professional development. Peer feedback loops increase practitioner confidence.
Ongoing:
• Strengthening data security
• Automated monthly reports for state officials
• Multilingual and offline capability
• Train-the-trainer models
• Customised learning pathways
Through all phases, one principle remains constant: practitioners are the primary knowledge creators.
You can begin using Abhyaas in five simple steps:
1. Create an account
Sign up on the open Abhyaas platform (https://abhyaas.org/).
2. Explore contextual practices
Browse tutorials, videos, and resources created by practitioners in similar contexts such as rural, urban, tribal, multigrade, or low-resource schools.
3. Start your learning journey
Choose a priority area, complete a self-paced module, and adapt the practice in your school.
4. Share your innovation
Upload photos, videos, or short tutorials that document what you tried and what changed. This turns you into a contributor to the growing Body of Practitioner Knowledge.
5. Join peer groups
Participate in practice-sharing circles facilitated by districts or states to deepen learning and receive feedback.
Abhyaas works best when practitioners learn from and with each other.
