Vingish Vijay is the founder and curator of 90+ My Tuition App, an initiative of Daskalos Virtual Academy. He is a management professional and driving force behind 90+ My Tuition App. Leading with the key objective of helping students, nationwide, to achieve exceptional grades, Vingish has lead the formulation of the App and has curated a passionate team to carry out the business operations. Vingish has an overall experience of 13 years in the food product and telecom industry. He started his career with Idea cellular and his earlier stints were with Swad Food product, where he contributed towards building the organisation nationally and internationally. He is an MBA holder from Chartered Financial Analyst of India and ESA Paris, France.
We didn’t choose technology, technology chose us is a line that every millennial will subscribe to. From shopping online to making payments to watching movies, almost everything has become online. Then, why should education stay behind? We are living in a generation equipped with robust technology which has made learning a boundless experience. You don’t need to be confined to a desk if you’re are curious to learn. Learning is happening on the go with technology being an enabler. This successful association of education and technology has paved way for what is known as technology enhanced education (TEL) or simply as digital education or e-learning.
Opportunity ahead
In a study by KPMG in India and Google, titled “Online Education in India: 2021”, highlights India’s online education market size to grow from USD 247 million and around 1.6 million users in 2016 to USD 1.96 billion and around 9.6 million users by the end of 2021, only next to USA. Out of which, primary & secondary supplemental education is pegged to grow at a CAGR of 60%, making it the largest category by 2021. Factors driving this growth are increased internet penetration, a prevalent tuition culture, higher demand for textbook oriented course content and rising demand from Tier 2 and 3 cities.
This is a great opportunity which Edtech entrepreneurs can tap. They should create a business model which with help of technological innovation allow them to replace the existing physical tuition and transform it to a digital model tailored for a generation born with technology. The existing tuition culture is marred with numerous problems like lack of well qualified tutors, exorbitant charges for per subject per month, monotonous way of teaching, lower retention, and low collaboration and so on. It is said that an average human has an attention span equivalent to that of a gold fish. Just, imagine what could be the case for, say, a student studying in K-12 standards. The problem of losing focus can have a domino impact and can lead to secondary problems of dropping out of the tutorial mid-way, which would be a waste of learning efforts for the students and waste of monetary resources for the parents. So how do we undo this problem? The answer lies in cutting edge technology.
Key differentiating technology
There is a humungous scope for technology in reforming the tuition landscape. The pandemic has indeed allowed us to explore this in numerous ways. We should focus on how we can bridge the gap between experiential classroom learning and tuitions, so that the latter truly complements the classroom and textbook-oriented learning. One way could be to use a collaborative interface where students interact via Gamified learning. Just imagine two students playing a game that helps them understand Titration in Chemistry wherein both can see their figurines inside the screen performing the titration by just by a click. The idea should be to gamify the learning experience where homework becomes like a multiplayer game. What will it solve? Well, it will definitely solve the problem of tuition being seen as another post school cumbersome activity and project it like as level in a game. A challenge which every gamer would like to overcome.
This is the vision that we ought to have to bring sweeping changing that will revolutionize the supplemental education landscape. Course customization through AI, attendance through facial recognition software, virtual reality for an immersive lab based experience could be few other ways to imbibe technology in enhancing digital tuitions.
Role of Government
Government too have shown a great deal of interest in supplemental education through means of initiatives to supplement school and college education. The government can further help in shaping this ecosystem by partnering with edtech to provide them a platform to help revamp the existing public education set up by means of technology which can make learning more efficient. Government by focusing on extra academic learning can improve learning outcomes for students across age groups and subjects lines post school hours. The hiccup that the government may face is in identifying qualified tutors for students and this is where edtech startups in the tutoring space can pitch in.
Growing investor support
Entrepreneurs will be motivated to innovate as long as they get support. Edtech can received enormous backing for investors due to its huge potential. A whitepaper published by Metaari on “The 2019 Global Learning Technology Investment Patterns: Another Record Shattering Year” talked about how 2019 saw a global rise in Edtech investment in the year 2019 and believe me this rise will only get higher. Another interesting trend was the fact that there has been a shift in investments from the traditional self-paced learning to Edtech companies which are focusing on bring innovation in terms of mixed reality learning, AI based learning, Game based learning, Mobile learning, and even bots, in the last four years. From this we can infer that edtech that brings in innovative technology to navigate the existing challenges in edtech will have no dearth of support.
Way forward
The tuition culture in India is here to stay. But, there is a pressing need to restructure it where the use technology will become an important parameter to assess its success. Players in this domain will have to ensure their positioning as a replacement of physical tuitions rather than being any learning app. Only this way they will be able to differentiate themselves in an overcrowded edtech market.