Know how Edtech startups are boosting India's digital education and careers

The advent of digital education showcases how the Indian education system is going through a digital transformation. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the Indian education system has struggled to facilitate classes with the limited number of online resources available, causing a paradigm shift in making the Ed-Tech space a vital part of mainstream learning. As Ed-Tech was already growing, COVID-19 brought it more momentum and space to be used more actively along with providing the majority of the institutes with the capability to seamlessly recreate their classes online. Further, this has led to opening of new frontiers in the Indian Education sector and has paved the way for a comprehensive vision on education.

With growing adoption during the lockdown months, Ed-Tech services and products are expected to see an enormous growth by 2025. Report by RedSeer and Omidyar Network India states that COVID-19 has proved to be the biggest game-changer for the Ed-Tech sector. It has further reported that both paid and free users in the K-12 segment and post K-12 segment have a user base doubling from 45 million to 90 million. Research company Technavio has stated that India's online education market is set to grow by $14.3 billion between 2020 and 2024, witnessing an annual growth of over 21% during this period.

One of the key focuses of EdTech startups has been the K-12 sector, which includes education in the school domain until grade 12. These key services include adaptive learning platforms, learning management systems, smart classroom solutions and collaborative platforms. These advances ensure that students get the best opportunity to gain knowledge and build on capabilities that increasingly focus on real-world skills and complex demonstrations of understanding. It teaches students to solve problems in non-routine situations to build their potential as constructive and reflective citizens of tomorrow. 

The Bangalore- based online tutoring firm BYJU'S, offers a learning app that offers a wide variety of interactive tuitions for students from class 6 and upwards alongside preparatory classes for entrances like MBA. Another startup, GradeUp caters to more than 1.3 crore registered students across 2500 cities and is planning to make a deeper impact in K-12 space by introducing one year and two-year programs for class XI and XII students preparing for JEE and NEET. Toppr, another Ed-Tech platform, provides the widest K-12 syllabus coverage with 1.5 million course combinations and caters to over 10 million students through it's platform. It uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to study student behaviour along with creating adaptive learning paths. Vedantu, a live tutoring online platform, teaches most complex concepts with ease with the help of online video conferencing, lectures and doubt clearing sessions along with sharing the produced insights with its mentors so that they can contact the student and understand the issue.

An imperative part of the Ed-Tech startups is making assessments more digital and fun instead of the traditional paper and pen tests. The digital assessment platforms are helping schools in maintaining academic flow by facilitating remote assessments along with enhancing the quality of education. Additionally it is reducing the workload of teachers by automating the assessment process starting from creating tests until the grading of exams. The problems are based in real - world settings, which include multi-stage scenarios that simulate authentic, progressive engagement with the subject matter, which further builds cognitive thinking skills and ability to apply knowledge to solve realistic, meaningful problems. AssessPrep, an Ed-Tech startup is focussed on building a world-class platform for schools to assess their students effectively and efficiently. Their online portal has seen an exponential growth of over 150%, and is currently catering to 1.25 lakh users. Assessments are created collaboratively using videos, simulations, images and advanced tools like timer, math editor, graphing, which ensure a flexible, faster and secure platform.

Ed-Tech startups encourage digital learning and help aspirants with doubt clearing sessions, live interactive classes, preparation plans as well as mock tests for competitive exams. Further, it assists in building a growth mindset, which works on building the student's motivation, mindset and perseverance for these exam preparations. Oliveboard caters to aspirants for MBA, SSC, banking, railways, insurance and government job exams using live sessions, video lectures, live group practice sessions and test series. Recently, they introduced #GharPeCoaching, a free online course for banking exam preparations in both Hindi and English. Another similar Ed-Tech startup, Unacademy provides education for free for fields such as banking, CA, UPSC, CAT, JEE and various other subjects. In a short span of time they have over 3,00,000 students that have benefited from their video tutorials in various languages alongside having some top educators on board, such as Dr. Kiran Bedi.

The Indian EdTech companies are doing a great job of communicating the importance of constant skilling and hence skilling hundreds of thousands of students as well as professionals every year. UpGrad is designed to assist professionals through upskilling and re-skilling in categories like Data science and Blockchain. It aims to empower working professionals and individuals by providing them university education online through structured and rigorous programs.

The digital transformation of the education sector will not only enable the new virtual space of learning from home post-COVID but will also bring wide-scalability and regional education. We can see how using technology as an enabler, these Ed-Tech startups are accelerating learning for a whole generation in novel and interactive ways, thereby building creativity and applicability skills in individuals.

- By Mr Karan Gupta, Co-Founder at AssessPrep