How EdTech can help learners

As businesses across urban India attempt to resume goods and services, many are likely to have been impacted in one way or another permanently. Yet, for some sectors like EdTech, this is an opportunity to forge a new path.

Over the last couple of years, EdTech has been reaching students directly through quality after-school solutions. Their growth has been aided by high internet penetration, easy availability of smartphones, and cheap data plans. Parents and students are increasingly opting for these solutions.

A majority of youngsters from middle and lower-income segments as well as those from Tier 2 cities are using technology for education for the first time. Enabled by cheap smartphones and data, these users are looking for products and services to serve their everyday needs.

These are some aspects that can make EdTech a useful tool for students:

Assistance: Assist students in the learning process by enabling live interaction with teachers to understand concepts, clarify doubts, and with other students to facilitate peer interaction. Self-paced learning can be hard for most students and assisted learning helps provide guidance and structure in the learning process.

Instructional language: Offer multilingual solutions to cater to students who are more comfortable studying in their mother tongue or local language.

Modular products: It is recommended to create modular products or to offer large-group live sessions which helps keep costs down while maintaining a high level of personalised teaching.

Outcomes: Deliver on promised outcomes. This will include better marks in school and competitive exams for curriculum-focused solutions and improvement in cognitive thinking and life skills for extra-curricular solutions.

Constrained environments: While smartphone and internet penetration has been increasing, it is not ubiquitous yet. While expensive private schools can implement live learning solutions, public schools and budget private schools require products that can work asynchronously. For example, a product that allows teachers to create and share assignments, videos etc. with students, who can view, practice and submit their responses when feasible during the day.

Contextualise: It is critical for products to be designed to make the lives of teachers easier by integrating with their everyday workflow. A key step towards that is to align the product’s curriculum with the school syllabus. Apart from that, products need to be easy-to-use, low-cost, and be available in a modular format so schools can choose specific products depending upon their requirement. For example, some schools might want to opt only for a Mathematics product while others might want a solution that helps improve spoken English as well.

Collaborate: Companies should aim to collaborate with existing channel partners like publishers, school financiers or other solution providers to tap into each other’s existing relationships with schools and help with consolidated reach in a fragmented market.

There are significant tailwinds for EdTech companies to disrupt the status quo in the education system, across both in-school and after-school offerings. The existing system has been ineffective in providing quality at scale and reaching students across the spectrum.

EdTech has the potential to bridge this gap and make quality education accessible to all, and its moment has clearly arrived.

(The authors are with an investment firm)