The pandemic disrupted traditional brick-and mortar education.
Edtech companies rushed to assist schools in moving from offline to online.
KPMG reports that there are over 3,500 edtech startup in India right now.
According to RBSA Advisor (a transaction advisory company), India’s edtech industry is expected to grow to $30 billion in 10 years.The report states that vigorous growth will be the driving force behind the K-12 education edtech market opportunity.
Online learning was a popular option to keep students enrolled in classes during the epidemic.The rise of online learning has disrupted education, opening the door for startups in edtech and companies to the future.
Manan Khurma is the Chairman and founder at Cuemath, an online mathematics and coding platform.
According to reports, Byju’s platform has seen an increase of over 33,000,000 users since its lockdown to reach the 75-million mark, and Unacademy’s users base has tripled to 40,000,000 users as of January 2021.
UpGrad, an online platform offering courses to upskilling professionals, saw a 100 percent increase in users during the nine month period of FY 2020-2021.
In the highly competitive space of edtech, players have developed innovative ways to combine classroom and digital learning to offer students an individualized learning experience while still encouraging classroom participation.
We as an industry collaborated to solve the problem of high-quality education becoming affordable and more accessible for the mobile-first generation.The industry is not only supporting school curriculums and helping candidates prepare for exams, it’s also underlining value of extracurricular activities,” Vamsi, CEO, Vedantu.
“New concepts such as gamification, machine learning enhanced by data analytics will intensify as primary technological drivers of the EdTech revolution and the wider trend of personalisation,” Khurma added.
The National Education Policy (NEP), introduced by the HRD Ministry in the FY 2020-2021, integrates with edtech that can lead towards inclusive, cohesive, and productive education in the country.The NEP recognises the role of technology in making education more effective, and also for imparting training to teachers for creation of high-quality online content.
However, the tier 2 and 3 markets and rural India with patchy internet connectivity are going to be extremely crucial for the future penetration of education.
Further, the lack of uniform government policies, financial incentives for research and innovation in the edtech space are some of the impediments to the growth trajectory of this sector.Another major concern is the absence of a regulatory body for the sector.
“EdTech is a new segment that is emerging very rapidly.Within online higher education – while there are no regulatory bodies in edtech yet – higher education is governed by regulations laid down by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Ministry of Education (MoE).These regulations also apply to higher EdTech companies who need to abide by these rules to uphold the standards of higher education,” Mayank Kumar, Co-founder and MD, upGrad, told IANS.
A comprehensive ed-tech policy that provides access to learning, especially to disadvantaged groups; facilitates teacher training and continuous professional development; along with improvement in governance systems including planning, management, and monitoring processes will be key for the sector to grow.
(Rachel V.Thomas can be contacted at [email protected])
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