Edtech startup Talentedge offers more that 250 courses to working professionals, from 70 plus premium Indian and international institutes. The company has partnered with leading institutions like IIMs, XLRI, Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI), MICA, IIIT-Bangalore, IIT Roorkee, London School of Business and Finance, among many others. Talentedge has also launched its UAE Operations with the University of Dubai Partnership. “Talentedge has been transforming the way India learns since seven years, with five years in providing live and interactive digital learning in partnership with leading institutes. We have provided above 17.5 million learning hours of training in above 2100 cohorts to about 450K learners across the globe. We have made a strategic investment in a global professional certification edtech company last year,” says Aditya Malik, CEO & Co-Founder, Talentedge.
Talentedge partners with premier institutes and provide them the infrastructure to recreate the physical classroom setup in dedicated virtual environment. “Our artificial intelligence and machine learning powered platform provides highly interactive virtual classrooms with learning at par if not better than the physical classrooms. The faculty is able to get better assessment about the students and the status of their learning through sentiment analysis (facial recognition capabilities), predictive analysis and individual student dashboards,” explains Malik.
Speaking about the benefits to the student community, Malik points out that the courses are making the premium learning reach thousands of students who don’t get access to these premier institutes and thus democratising the education. “Our virtual classrooms provide anywhere learning with rigour of classrooms and benefits of peer learning. More than 92 per cent of our students are satisfied with learning and more than 90 per cent say that they have benefited from interactive learning in their current roles or have earned their career jumps,” he affirms.
It win-win for educational institutes also, who are no longer constrained by class sizes and infrastructure constraints. The learning can be imparted to many more in virtual classrooms. Malik believes that the faculty as well looks to broaden their horizon and with these courses are able to interact with learners with even 20 plus years experience, and thus get new perspectives with students having rich experience. “Further the new streams of revenue provides institutes to improve their infrastructure and facilities and invest in scholarships and R&D, further raising the bar of learning quality,” he reminds.
The company has partnered with the premier institutes, primarily in India and in US & EMEA. “We are further in talks with international institutes to make international quality learning better accessible to Indian students,” states Malik. He informs that Indian institutes are now more pragmatic and open to technical advancements and ways to provide better learning to their students. The Talentedge model provides them access to more students with low infrastructure requirements and near zero set-up cost, thus is an easy adoption decision.
He states with pride that students in multiple batches with XLRI in domains of HR, Finance, Analytics and Leadership with average experience of above 10 years have been benefited with few faculty becoming a beacon of learning in the country. “With MICA as well in domains of Marketing, Advertising and Media & Entertainment we have had a satisfaction rates of more than 92 per cent because of interactivity in learning and enthusiastic engagement with faculty amongst students of average six plus years exp enjoying course completion rates of more than 95 per cent. These numbers are unprecedented in the industry and at the scale which is a benchmark,” Mailk asserts.
Sharing the future plans, Malik reveals that they have a clear roadmap for their platform to make learning a continuous and interesting proposition. “We are developing a feedback engine for both learners and the faculty to improve the adoption and delivery of learning. AI will be able to identify the requirements of the students and provide bridge content to bring all students in a batch at par,” he says, adding that they are opening frontiers for Indian institutes and taking these course international, and also working with international universities and institutes to create custom courses for Indian professionals.
Edtech has ben a focus areas in the education sector and with fintech has been the most active segments in terms of investments and looked upon as a new horizon area, points out Malik, adding that the students as well expect a lot and being tech savvy they are used to an environment which requires technology smoothening the process and enriching the learning. Technical advancements creating higher levels of interactivity, improving content quality, making learning practical oriented and personalised for their area of interest at the same time making them understand and helping them implement that in their jobs instantly. “Thus the times are challenging and as we have found our areas of expertise, the industry needs to find their feet and collectively the segment can grow and deliver to make the workforce of the country bridge the highly publicised gaps and become the leaders we expect them to be,” concludes Malik.