Affordable Learning Next Great Leap For Edtech Industry

The Indian education system has always faced an uphill struggle. Home to the largest formal education system in the world, India has over 1.6 million schools educating approximately 260 million students, while 39,000 accredited colleges oversee 27 million undergraduate and 4 million postgraduate students. Teaching the next generation in one of the world’s most populous countries has never been an easy proposition. 

These numbers are enormous and unwieldy, capable of overwhelming the most structured system in the world. But they’re also compounded by two key bottlenecks.  The first is the lack of sufficient qualified professors and educators. The second bottleneck is an inadequate and outdated curriculum. The end result is a generation of unemployable graduates, whose skills and degrees can’t be applied to the real world. 

A report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment estimates that unemployment among individuals with a higher degree is thrice the national average. These figures are backed up by a World Bank report highlighting that up to 15.11 per cent of advanced education holders are without a job. A system in which a prohibitively expensive education doesn’t guarantee career growth, or even a stable job, simply isn’t sustainable. 

While each of these issues may seem insurmountable, the advent of online learning offered our education system a lifeline. Although traditionally education has been an entirely offline affair, the internet and increased access to the digital sphere transformed the system. E-learning and digitization opened up new and exciting pathways within the education sector and allowed vastly more people to attain knowledge and qualifications. 

Online learning is now a mature and well-established ecosystem. Its early pioneers took on the weight of the education system and focused on expanding its availability to every student with a screen. Supported by the increased proliferation of home computers and internet-capable smartphones, and the nationwide availability of affordable data, they made online learning become a viable mainstream option. The Covid-19 pandemic, and nearly two years of enforced homeschooling, only accelerated this shift. 

However, the next generation of edtech trailblazers is now faced with a new challenge. Edtech 2.0 needs to provide a solution to the issue of affordable learning. Online learning, as it currently stands, exists as a walled garden. While a monthly fee of a few thousand rupees is easily affordable for a salaried professional in the country’s metropolises, this pricing is still beyond the reach of millions in smaller cities and towns across India. For all of its talk of democratization, online learning is still unattainable for many in our nation.

The next step in the evolution of the edtech ecosystem is building learning products that level the playing field and make education accessible to all. To do that, we must first examine the factors that contribute to edtech’s current pricing. The first tranche of edtech primarily centred on a certification model that utilized pre-recorded lectures. This model, while path-breaking for its time, still excluded a huge swathe of the country due to the costs involved.

It is now incumbent on the next wave of edtech startups to tackle the issue of affordability and make online learning more financially feasible and rewarding for its users. Rather than focus on a degree or certificate as the ultimate outcome of a course, next-gen edtech platforms need to prioritize the skills their courses impart. By imparting real-world skills and learnings, learning programmes can help users achieve career goals. And instead of ending the course with another certificate, or gaining a bullet point for your CV, users have the opportunity to truly grow in a field of their choice. 

New-age edtech startups can further increase their affordability by tapping into an array of underutilized resources in the space. The best example of this is in the shape of the educators themselves. Startups have the opportunity to create a new generation of teachers, drawn from professors at smaller universities nationwide and from industry experts. By leveraging their existing knowledge base and synergising it with the technical capabilities and support of the startup, the quality of education on offer is exponentially improved. This can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of tying up with ‘celebrity’ coaches and professors. The end result is the ability to offer their services at ever more affordable rates, and as a direct result, increase their target market and future growth prospects.

The startup ecosystem has always been an incubator of innovation and entrepreneurship. Its first foray into the field of education made learning easily accessible. Now it falls on the next generation of startups to continue disrupting the industry and make education both affordable and accessible.

Divya Jain

Guest Author Co-founder, Seekho