More than 89% Users Willing to Pay for Education Apps in India, says a mobile EdTech Report

Gray Matters Capital, an impact investor focused on investing in enterprises working to improve access to affordable quality education and employability in India, has released a report titled ‘Efficacy of Mobile EdTech in India: Mapping User Engagement to Learning Outcomes’ outlining the key learnings

The report is based on the hands-on work done by Gray Matters Capital and the mentors of its Mobile EdTech Accelerator Program for Education and Skilling enterprises with Mobile solutions – GMC Calibrator, with the 8 companies of the first cohort which fall under the education segments of Govt. Job Test Prep, Early Childhood Education (ECE), Teacher Capacity Building and Vocational Training.

The behavioural blueprint and user labs conducted in conjunction with Behavioural Architecture expert firm Final Mile Consulting; the user testing with over 2000 users enabled by Career Launcher (CL Educate); insights from 42 Education entrepreneurs as well as inputs by market data analysis and expert views have contributed to this report.

Learnings and Recommendations

• TEST PREP (Govt. Jobs Entrance Exams): Products need to showcase the differentiated value vs. the ecosystem. E.g. Personalized learning, Answering questions in native languages. Tasks on the apps can be broken down into smaller milestones to reduce the anxiety leading up to the demanding exams.

• Early Childhood Education: Parents have a high aspiration for their children, independent of income and learning English remains a critical aspiration. It is important for apps in the ECE space to build more emotional payoffs in short periods of interactions to build continuous engagement with age-appropriate content.

• Teacher Capacity Building: From a behavioural standpoint, teachers feel they do not need to use anything apart from textbooks to prepare for a class. Micro-teaching modules, optimized for space on mobile and local language are key requirements for apps in this space to succeed.

• Skilling and Vocational Training: From an engagement viewpoint, the apps need to align with the job goal and change focus from exam orientation. When it comes to skilling adults, many hold a strong mental model of age as a barrier for them to learn something new. UI/UX that is easy, coupled with motivational behavioral nudges and adopting learning techniques familiar to the users are requisites for apps in this space.

Speaking at the report launch, Ragini Chaudhary, India CEO, Gray Matters Capital said, “At GMC Calibrator, we work for 6 months with companies across the Education-Employability spectrum who are trying to bring improved learning outcomes and employment opportunities using both offline solutions along with digital mediums and mobile devices. Our hypothesis was that if we could help them focus on just three things – improve the user engagement, help enhance monetization and ensure optimization of the performance, we could pave the way for more scale.” She added, “This report helps us get perspectives of entrepreneurs and users, so as to help us with insights to calibrate the EdTech solutions.”

Releasing the report on the culmination of the first cohort of the GMC Calibrator, Debleena Majumdar, Director -Research and Growth, Gray Matters Capital, said, “The GMC Calibrator was launched with an objective to promote ‘Self Learning to Self Earning’. Traditional viewpoint says that only the ones categorized as the self-motivated learners can benefit from mobile self learning. We believe, the ones categorized as ‘those who need a nudge’ above can also engage with mobile self learning to earning opportunities, given the right inputs and motivation. And that starts with behavioural understanding of users. This report encapsulates these learnings of the last six months.”