Coding Education In India Is Still In Infancy: Rahul Ranjan, LeapLearner India

Upasana Sharan Apr 13, 2020

How relevant do you think Ed-Techs are in regard to conventional courses in India?

With internet penetration growing by almost 18 per cent YoY, Ed-Tech is a great tool to democratize access to high-quality education. I would split the Ed-Tech journey in India into two broad timelines – Pre-Corona and COVID-19 onwards.

Pre-Corona, Ed-Tech was primarily used for supplementary courses and test prep in India. But now, it is being used for delivery of conventional courses from pre-school education to university lectures.

Tell us in detail about ‘LeapLearner’. From where did you derive the inspiration and idea to set-up the firm? 

LeapLearner as an idea was conceived by Ami Dror, the Global CEO & Founder about 6 years ago when he found his children struggling with coding courses offered in public schools in Israel.

Ami wanted to make Computational Thinking & Algorithmic Intelligence (CTAI) highly intuitive and fun to learn and ensure that it's proliferated widely across the world since CTAI is the Skills of Future.

I have been an education entrepreneur for a large part of my life and always wanted to ensure that Indian children get access to CTAI skills, making them globally competitive. I was looking for a global partner with high-quality content and teaching-learning pedagogy and that how’s LeapLearner India was born. Ami and I decided to partner together and set up a coding education company, LeapLearner India.

How do you stand out from the crowd of other such companies?

From a global context, there are very few companies which can offer a complete range of CTAI courses on one single platform. LeapLearner offers courses starting from Block-based coding for children aged 5 to Advanced Python for children aged 14+.

This ensures that our Learners get a seamless and scaffolded learning journey.

From an Indian context, coding education is still in infancy. Almost all companies including heavily funded ones use open source tools for their teaching-learning delivery. We at LeapLearner have our own proprietary learning platform; allowing us to customize the teaching-learning experience for age groups and different type of learners.

We have also partnered with iCode, a US-based non-profit which is an authority in CTAI for independent assessment and certification of all our learners.

What are the various courses that you offer? What is the fee structure of the same?

We offer Block Coding, App Development, Python, Robotics and AI for aged 5-14 years in India. For individual learners, the fee starts as low as Rs 2500 and for institutional partners, we offer our courses in the licensing model starting Rs 150 per child per month.

What’s the credibility of those courses and how much helpful are they when it comes to employability?

LeapLearner being a global Ed-Tech company has ensured that we adhere to CSTA, USA standards for our curriculum.

CTAI skills form the foundation of artificial intelligence education and hence from an employability perspective, CTAI skills are as critical for employment in future as literacy and numeracy skills.

What is the current market presence of the firm? Share some success story.

Globally LeapLearner has over a million students across 20 Countries. We work with governments, institutions, K-12 schools and individual learners.

In India, since we started operations in Jan 2020, we already have over 3000 students across 25 learning centres, 6 K-12 school partners and live online classes. We already have children as young as 8 years creating their own android apps and 9-year-olds creating autonomous robots.

What was your initial capital investment?

We have invested over $10 million in the teaching-learning technology and also invested substantial growth capital.

What’s the annual turnover of the firm?

It's very early days for us in India but we have seen strong early traction with about $45,000 as revenues in the January quarter.

What is your future plan towards the expansion of the company?

We plan to grow the following verticals in India to reach 1 million students in the next 5 years.