The Ed-tech industry in India has been the biggest disruptor in the last decade. The first tranche in the industry came with the coming together of tech and education which enabled pre-recorded lectures for the mass audience. This made e-learning open for all, delivering quality education and bringing the convenience of learning to the fingertips. Primarily, this phase saw the rise of steeply-priced subscription models focused on building accessibility. However, these models provided by the Ed-tech startups did not solve for affordability. The learning solutions, while innovative, were priced so high that they omitted a large chunk of learners coming from middle to lower socio-economic backgrounds.
The next tranche in the industry should be to make quality education affordable for all. Some Ed-tech startups are making a conscious effort to democratize education at an affordable price, thus reaching the last mile audience with their innovative solutions listed below:
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Hybrid Model of Learning: Companies like Seekho.ai are associating with state-level universities to create an offline-online hybrid model of learning where students of these regional universities will get access to quality online education. The association enables new avenues of growth for the students in terms of upskilling, learning professional courses, job opportunities, and much more at a very low joining fee of INR 249 for 3 months.
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Scaling in the vernacular market: Adda247 being India’s largest vernacular test prep platform is trying to revolutionize the Ed-tech industry by offering online courses for all government competitive exams in India including Banking, SSC, Teaching, GATE, JEE, NEET, UPSC and others. These courses are available for the students of Tier 2/3 cities in 10 different languages (Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Gujarati etc) at an affordable price. Thus they are doing everything possible to make quality online education accessible as well as affordable.
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Zero enrollment cost (via Income Sharing): Startups like Newton School allow students/learners to enrol on their platform with no upfront payment and get upskilled as per the industry requirements. This model assures job opportunities for students/learners via their platform and once an individual is placed, the company signs an income sharing agreement with the individual and gets a percentage share of their monthly or annual CTC.
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Empowering the educators: Ed-tech companies like Classplus with their SaaS solutions enable teachers to build their own coaching app digitizing their end-to-end business model. This removes the mediator and enables tutors to deliver quality education to the community of students enrolled on the platform at a price point of the teacher’s preference. This in turn helps teachers to teach a larger group of learners and benefits students as they can get quality education at an affordable price point.