The education sector has emerged as one of the top buyers of ICT products. Heena Jhingan examines how various devices and peripherals are helping make digital learning a success in the country
Personalization and interactivity are central to the learning process today. The education sector is, therefore, trying to weave these features into the process of imparting learning through the deployment of various IT devices and applications. The Indian education sector is among the biggest consumers of ICT. Consequently, vendors have come out with specialized tools including projectors, digital whiteboards and markers, printers etc that have been designed keeping the rather unique needs of this sector in mind.
ASSOCHAM has estimated that the country’s market for primary, secondary and tertiary education would be worth over $50 billion by 2015. According to a report from Springboard Research, India’s education sector will step up its IT spending to $704 million in 2012. While there is still considerable demand for PCs, servers and software in educational institutions, fresh opportunities exist in the area of e-learning, digital classrooms, educational content, campus networking, connectivity and providing high quality access devices for the consumption of digital content.
The first PCs in Indian schools changed the way that technology was perceived. Once these computers were hooked up to the Internet, they changed the paradigm of learning. Students surfing the Internet for additional information is the norm of the day; the technology has penetrated to the extent that a large number of reputed institutions the world over run online classes. There are several educational programs undertaken by the Indian Government, including the Right to Education. Virtual PC Centers in states like Andhra Pradesh that employ Desktop Virtualization have been set up so that a large number of students can benefit with a small number of PCs etc.
Projecting scale
The traditional classroom got an initial makeover with the introduction of projectors and interactive whiteboards. Today, it is the turn of personalized education and Tablet for All. That does not mean that projectors are no longer in demand in this sector. Abhilesh Guleria, Head-Multimedia Products Group, NEC, pointed out that the education vertical remained a key market with close to 46% of sales coming from the K12 segment.
LED Projectors, Interactive Projectors, Learner Response System and Portable Visualizers are some of the new technologies in this sphere. The scope for the growth of sales of interactive whiteboards is huge since this category isn’t expected to get saturated before 2015 in India as only 4-5% of this market has been captured to date.
Bullish about the projector growth, Rajeev Singh, Country Manager, BenQ India, expected a CAGR of 50% for the category over the course of the next five years.
Singh said, “We see monitors, interactive flat panels and projectors with touch displays replacing traditional panels. Projectors are the single largest contributor in our business; the revenues from the projector business are at about Rs 100 crores per annum and we expect them to double by next year. Private players contribute to 75% of our revenue from education; the rest comes from government institutions. There is still a large untapped market.”
Besides, greater scope of interactivity and collaboration, projectors are cost-effective solutions for schools at the institutional level. Interactivity will get a push as 3D penetration rises; at present it is quite low at about 0.03%, mostly due to lack of 3D content.
Singh believed that interactive whiteboards and white projectors will compete with each other for a while. Educational institutions are looking at these solutions from the standpoint of cost-efficiency; improved versions with LED lamps and lasers as the light source will only serve to further increase their popularity.
Digital slates
According to Vishal Tripathy, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, some share of the PC business has gone to the media tablets. This slice of the market is a crowded one with over forty options and almost all of them targeting the education vertical.
A closer look at the market gives an idea of the segmentation—there is an entry-level segment of ultra low cost devices available below the Rs 3,000 price mark. The mid-range segment is priced between Rs 6,000-12,000 and then there is the top-of-the-line stuff from the likes of Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung. Even the smaller names like Pantel Technologies claim to be selling about 80, 000 units per month.
The differentiation here comes in terms of the robustness of the device to support and deliver high quality content, and also the content that is preinstalled on it.The Ministry of Human Resource Development’s dream device Aakash, which in fact was among the first education tablets to make a debut in the market, received flak for its specifications and performance.
Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO, Datawind , the manufacturer of Aakash reasoned that Aakash was purely an MHRD product and they were to supply the requisite amount of units to the ministry, as per the specified requirements. Datawind is working on a new version of the tablet.
“The first version of Aakash was based on specs that were not intended to compete with the iPad but to break through price barriers that the world believed were unachievable. We successfully delivered a product that provided access to e-books, HD video and the Internet but most people compared its performance with products that were priced ten times higher. The first version of Aakash was not based on DataWind’s specifications but the second version will be based on our specifications. The government will launch Aakash 2 based on our specs next month and we are confident of its performance. It will sport significantly better processing power, memory and support a multi-touch capacitive screen. Aakash was a pure MHRD product meant for the government’s purposes only. Ubislate is our commercial product, which is available for the masses,” he explained.
Tuli believed that, in the next 24 months the tablet market would exceed the size of the computer market in India. PC sales are in the range of 10-11 million units per year. The potential is huge and, owing to vast income disparities, there is space for different players to participate, offering products at varied prices.
Vijender Singh, MD, Pantel Technologies, said that the vendors in the space had to understand the needs of the two distinct subsets of users—K12 and the higher education and those using tablets for professional training.
HCL has launched various Android tablets such as the U1 and, in the education segment, the MyEduTab in two variants for K12 (packaged with K12 curriculum mapped digital content) and Higher Education (HE) that’s an edutainment platform.
Stating that the vendor was seeing a lot of pick-up from colleges at the institutional level and also students coming online and procuring tablets as a retail device, Anand Ekabaram, VP & Business Head, HCL Learning, said that every child that was going to school, parents and educational institutions were all potential users/buyers.
“MyEduTab offers an innovative learning ecosystem, which enable students, teachers and parents to connect, collaborate and share content over a Cloud-based system,” he said.
Unlike most edutainment tablet players in the fray, Micromax took the conscious decision to not restrict buyers to a particular content offering.
Deepak Mehrotra, CEO, Micromax claimed to have sold nearly 1.2 lakh units within the first hundred days of the launch of the Funbook. Mehrotra stressed that these devices were up for grabs as consumer products. While educational institutions had expressed interest, B2B sales have a long gestation period. “Also most decisions for every academic year are usually closed by May and we launched our product after that. Therefore, we should see bulk orders commencing from the next year,” he added.
For Global schools like Venkateshwar International School, affordability is not a major concern.
Mrinalini Kaura, Principal, Sri Venkateshwara International School, said that the world was headed towards digital, connected classrooms and that having a high quality access device was vital as it had an important role to play in engaging the students.
Samsung India’s former Country Head -Mobile & IT, Ranjit Yadav, had said that there were certain unique things like the S-pen that empowered students, professional trainers and learners.
Printers in schools
It’s not just about how kids are taught. Even the assessment process has been transformed by the influx of ICT. Unlike in the traditional model, in a digital classroom, assignments are devised not just to reproduce is what was taught in the classroom. Rather, it is more engaging and tends to involve learning by doing. Working models and charts are the new modes of teaching and learning. That’s driving sales of Printers and Scanners.
Devan Sarma, Assistant Director-Inkjet Products Division, Canon India, observed that there was tremendous potential for the vendor in the Indian education sector. “Creativity, knowledge and collaboration are the new dimensions in learning. This year, we expect to get business to the tune of Rs 10 crores for our Inkjet Products Division from the education sector alone,” he informed.
Nitin Hiranandani, Director, Printing Systems, PPS, HP India, pointed out that a recent survey by the company had found that, when exposed to the idea of creative work using printers, close to 80% of both parents and kids liked the idea because it would be a new platform for learning and gaining knowledge that would help kids become more creative.
“The share of kids printing stuff for creative or learning purposes on PC is quite high,” he said.
Sarma was of the opinion that increased levels of interest from the students could be attributed to a transformation in the printing space. “The credit goes to the software and platform layers that helped printers become smarter, making them interactive by opening up a plethora of possibilities including social media collaboration and image management. Our offerings like the My Image Garden and the Creative Park platforms are small steps in this direction,” he said.
Ruggedizing hardware
Digital education is driving faster growth of the Internet and vice versa. Progressive educational institutions are trying to put a robust IT set-up in place and they are employing best-in-class tech solutions providers to achieve this.
Toban Varghese, Marketing Head – Public and Global Segment, Dell India, said that although the hardware component was the first level of interaction between the user and the system, software and applications had a strong supporting role to play. It was typically a 60:40 ratio. In that sense, the role of an OEM goes beyond simply providing or provisioning hardware to providing service and upgrade support so that the system becomes more robust and offers a superior level of performance. Dell runs a school connect program for about 5,000 schools across the country.
Annie Mathew, Head of Alliances, RIM, said that OEMs had to innovate on the hardware capabilities while maintaining competitive price points and devise APIs where the battery, bandwidth usage and performance were all optimal. Mathew stressed that RIM was well placed to plant its flag in the education space, especially considering the company’s strength on the enterprise side. It looks at this segment in two ways—educational institutions are digitizing and mobilizing their processes, resulting in a rise for need of content on the tablet and mobile device front. Then there’s the consumer side of the equation.
“An institution that wishes to mobilize and provide particular content to, say, a select 2,000 students requires device management to control the content that students view on the device and to secure the content. That’s a fundamental feature of BlackBerry Server. Building on the core platform is our strategy for the education vertical,” said Mathew.
RIM, along with Vodafone, recently launched an application called StudyBuddy. This app aims to bring the entire content of IMS, a provider of management entrance training, exclusively to BlackBerry smartphones. This app helps students prepare for competitive exams by taking mock tests for premier MBA entrance exams such as CAT and CMAT. It also includes placement tests used by leading IT and other organizations for campus recruitment.
Device, connectivity & content
Despite the strides taken in developing devices, the Indian education market is still sluggish in terms of ICT penetration. In no small part, that’s due to the lack of synergies between various components of the ICT fabric.
Although the access devices are available at affordable price points, poor connectivity remains an issue, particularly in smaller cities and semi-urban locales.
Disparate efforts are being made to generate rich content by several companies; standardization is required. Agencies like CSBE need to be involved, especially for the K-12 education material. On the B2C front, OEMs are building on the partner ecosystem to build education-focused applications.
Tablets are being bundled with telco 3G plans to overcome the connectivity issues. Micromax’s Funbook was bundled with the Tata Photon and Pantel has partnered with pan-India service provider, BSNL.
Despite all the hiccups, e-leaning is expected to mature and some elements of edutainment to pass on to the screens of smartphones and tablets. Content, connectivity and devices will have to come together in a perfect storm and while the ingredients are there, nobody’s baked the perfect cake to whet the education sector’s appetite yet.
