Central Square Foundation�EdTech Tulna: Establishing quality standards for Edtech
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October 2025
Impact Areas
CSF: India’s Leading Education Organisation, from Innovation to Policy to Practice, at Scale
CSF’s vision: Ensuring quality school education for children in India through system-led reform
Technology in Education
Early Childhood Education
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Foundational Learning
Our network of Donors & Partners
Our Approach
Work with Governments to improve Student Learning at scale
Research and Evidence based interventions with focus on reliable Assessments
Integrated Coalition approach, in partnership with ecosystem organisations
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Critical role in salience and surround sound of FLN reform in education in India:
NEP 2020 to NIPUN Bharat to State FLN Missions
Schools Governance
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EdTech at CSF has a Four-Pronged Strategy
Shape EdTech Supply
Create Public Goods
Drive EdTech Adoption
Ensure availability of high quality EdTech for low-income settings, across multiple use cases such as remote learning for FLN, personalised adaptive learning
Generate Evidence
EdTech Strategy
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Create a body of evidence on efficacy of EdTech solutions and programs by testing what works across a product-programme-scale spectrum
Increase salience for EdTech uptake & adoption through research and advocacy; provide support to governments for EdTech implementation
Fund creation of public goods to enable the ecosystem to operate more effectively - EdTech Tulna, TicTacLearn, BaSE - Bharat EdTech Survey, Reimagine Education Through Technology, EdTech for India report
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Tulna is a pioneering systemic evaluation index fostering quality-led and evidence-based adoption of EdTech in the ecosystem
Current challenges in EdTech ecosystem
Tulna is 3-part solution
Create EdTech quality standards to define “what good looks like”
Build evaluation toolkits and trainings to support users in evaluations
Publish reviews of products that drive demand, and shape supply
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CSF partnered with IIT-Bombay to build “Tulna”
Tulna sits within IIT-D Centre for Excellence that focuses on creating awareness and engagement on issues of public interest
Necessitating need for systemic, long-term approach for driving evidence-based EdTech adoption
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CSF serves as the founding strategic and convening anchor for Tulna’s Vision by scaffolding for credibility, sustainability, and longevity
Non-profit dedicated to ensuring quality, equitable school education for all children in India.
Leverages EdTech to improve student learning by creating quality, contextual solutions, generating evidence and building public goods
Developed by academic experts | Supported by an ecosystem of funders | |
CoE MAGIC - Department of Management Studies at
IIT Delhi
Centre for Excellence for Marketing Goals, Ideas and Causes. Anchors research and marketing of social initiatives and public goods.
Wadhwani School of Data Science & AI at
IIT Madras
Working on AI capabilities for Indian languages, education
Institutional Home
AI Research Partner
Founding Strategic Anchor
Founding Academic Partner
IDP (Interdisciplinary Program) in Educational technologies at IIT Bombay
Centre for research and education in pedagogies and tools for technology-enhanced learning
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Tulna focuses on product design laying strong foundation for an impactful EdTech product
EdTech Tulna envisaged to have a product design focus to ensure:
Edtech product design
Learner / teacher product interaction
Learning outcomes in few field settings
Learning outcomes at scale
Product evaluation
Program / impact evaluation
Tulna assimilates existing insights from global research literature on teaching-learning principles, effective pedagogical strategies, and quality product design for different use-cases of EdTech; to build a common understanding and language of ‘what good looks like’.
Current focus of Edtech Tulna
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Product design evaluated across 3 dimensions, and 10 clusters
Each cluster has 3-5 criterias with objective indicators/checkpoints
Intuitive to Use | 8 |
Accessible for All | 9 |
Safe | 10 |
Ensuring presence of high quality content
C: Content Quality
P: Pedagogical Alignment
T: Technology & Design
Product Design
3 | Learner Centric Approach |
4 | Meaningful Assessment & Practice |
5 | Engaging |
6 | Adaptive Learning Pathways |
7 | Supporting Teachers, Parents |
1 | Content Accuracy and Comprehensibility |
2 | Alignment to National Standards |
Ensuring product design is easy to use, safe and accessible for all
Creation of standards for AI integrated EdTech products underway with IIT Madras
Ensuring use of pedagogical strategies informed by learning science research and educational policies
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Tulna can support multiple use cases across stakeholders via facilitating quality based adoption decision of EdTech
Schools, parents and students
Enable informed decision making on EdTech adoption
Primary use case: Government
Government Bodies
To feed into the technical criteria and facilitatie comprehensive product evaluation for software procurement
Funders
To offer quick insights into exciting products and hence enable exploration
Secondary use case: Retail
Products
Serve as a first-principle evaluation / feedback;
Encourage build of standards aligned products
Foundations / NGOs
Operate as a quality filter before partnering with or investing in EdTech software
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Tulna has gathered significant traction in the Indian EdTech ecosystem and continues to drive large-scale EdTech decisions
12 frameworks developed across key use-cases that Govts are procuring
Tulna adopted by State Govts for procuring quality EdTech solutions for their education programs
| Subjects: Math, English, Science Grade ranges: 1-2 | 3-5 | 6-8 | 9-10 |
| Haryana | Madhya Pradesh | Uttar Pradesh (PAL) | Uttar Pradesh (DCR) | Andhra Pradesh (PAL) | HP (PAL) |
Govt spend influenced (USD) | | | | | | |
# of Children reached | | | | | | |
100 M
13.3 M
5 M
55 M
500K
109K
50K
4.4 M
Evaluations published for top EdTech products in every category
USD 190M+ govt spend influenced and 5M children reached
15M
140K
Currently in active adoption discussion with 3 Indian states + MoE + Other Global South countries
1.5M
38K
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Expanding internationally, Tulna has signed an MoU with the Government of Nigeria to support meaningful EdTech adoption in the country
In order to deploy Tulna for country specific requirements, we envisage the following journey
Identify a local technical/academic body in Nigeria that can contextualise the tool
The Tulna technical team at IIT-B and IIT-D will conduct capacity building with the local team
* Details of the pathways for Tulna in Nigeria and implementation will be finalised between the local academic partner and the government once capacity has been established.
Tulna will be contextualised for the Nigerian context and implemented* in partnership with the government
Tulna MoU with Govt of Nigeria
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Tulna is referenced widely and informs public discourse on ‘quality EdTech’ globally
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Leading media outlets covered Tulna to guide narrative on the necessity of quality standards in EdTech
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Tulna continues to be referenced extensively by global EdTech leaders informing policy and adoption
Keen interest around Tulna shown by leading international organizations in the EdTech ecosystem
Tulna framework included as best practice in University of Oxford coursework for their executive education program for senior policy makers from 30 countries
Tulna: focus of the Keynote at MIT Solve
Tulna research published and featured ted in leading journals and reports
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In the next 3 years, Tulna aims to expand to all procurement use-case and scale to
12 Indian States to enhance quality of EdTech procurement at systems scale
AI Standards Foster demand for and supply of high-quality EdTech products, including those integrating AI technologies by building AI standards for ensuring responsible and effective use of AI in EdTech | |
Expand Tulna to cover all EdTech procurement use-cases Build standards for all use-cases procured by the govt and conduct rigorous and credible evaluations with high fidelity at scale targeting at least 50% of relevant products | |
Scale Government Adoption Inform large-scale decision making on EdTech by supporting at least 12 state governments in procurement of high-quality EdTech solutions | |
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| Content quality | Pedagogical alignment | Technology and design | | AI (New) |
Generate | Eg. Content accuracy | Eg. content in context | Eg. Intuitive design | Eg. Labelling of GenAI content | |
Reason | | | | ||
Translate | | | | ||
Transcribe | | | | ||
Synthesize | | | | ||
Extract information | | | |
Indicative mapping of applicability of existing Tulna criteria to AI capabilities
Existing Tulna Applicable parts of existing Tulna AI Dimension (new)
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Tulna evaluations have empowered governments to make informed EdTech selection and procurement decisions
“The training and evaluation structure was highly beneficial – very easy to understand and use”
– Teacher, from Evaluation Committee , UP
Governments that adopted Tulna standards | Testimonials |
NITI Aayog | Govt of Haryana | Govt of Uttar Pradesh |
Govt of Madhya Pradesh | Govt of Andhra Pradesh | Govt of Himachal Pradesh |
Govt of Odisha | Govt of Nigeria | Ghana |
“We wanted to ensure that only the best quality solutions are provided to our students. The EdTech Tulna toolkit helped us conduct rigorous evaluations to identify best in-class solutions. The EdTech Tulna team has been very supportive throughout the process and we appreciate their cooperation”
Dr. J. Ganesan, Former Director Sec. Education, Haryana
“The indicators and examples with each criteria were very helpful for me to evaluate Edtech products - do include more language examples in addition to science and maths”
– Teacher, from Evaluation Committee , AP
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