Experts: EDUCATION REPORT (DECEMBER 2018)

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Prachi Windlass

Director, India Programs, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation India LLP

“Edtech will be called successful when it delivers impact at scale impact that can be measured through improvement in student learning outcomes or relevant success metric. We believe that the true potential of technology in education data and analytics is yet to be seen and are nudging all our companies towards becoming stronger in these areas and not focus on content alone. Scale is the biggest challenge that all education companies are facing and thats why investor interest in dwindling. There is a lot of focus on personalization of learning which leaves the teacher out of the entire product design. For the near short term at least in K-12 schools and teachers will remain to be core and it is important to design for improving their efficacy.”

Zishaan Hayath

Founder, Toppr

“New age technologies such as artificial intelligence machine learning and natural language processing eLearning companies can make learning personalized for all students. The ed-tech industry today is where the e-commerce industry was 10 years ago - in its nascent stage. There are 400 million students of school going age in India and eLearning apps have only touched a few million. Like e-commerce as time passes and awareness spreads investors will see a glimpse of the true scope of the industry. To boost private equity investment in the sector edtech companies must build a highly engaging product that personalizes learning for every student. This product should also be rich with interactive content and solve the problems of traditional learning setups through insightful features. Moreover companies must develop robust sales teams that can build a relationship with students and parents while they explain various features and benefits of eLearning products. The education sector is at the brink of a widespread change. While schools and colleges will start using smart boards digitize their assignments and tests this will be done at an institutional level. However as students start embracing afterschool learning apps like Toppr the number of coaching classes will see a decline. With enough awareness students will choose a technologically driven insightful personalized learning experience.”

Puneet Kothapa

Executive Director, Narayana Group of Educational Institutions

“Technology will play a very key role in the education sector in India and it will solve 50-60% of fundamental problems (such as personalized remediation teaching quality and transparency) faced by the sector. Having said that we have to be very practical about this and if we think that tech will solve the problem overnight then its wrong. The problem will be solved slowly steadily and over a period of time. Today the education sector is in dire need of private capital however some investors are worried about unclear regulations but prefer investing more towards edtech companies as these do not fall under any regulations. The future of the education sector seems very bright but at the same time government should be more flexible and have the motive of Service & Excellence. We should also adopt western systems where private education groups are managing the educational institutes and the quality of education is top notch.”

Namita Dalmia

Principal, Omidyar Network

“The B2C market is already being disrupted across K-12 and Upskilling professional courses. The B2B growth has been slower and will require more pioneering ideas to tackle challenges of poor demand and market fragmentation. About 390 million Indians access the internet monthly with an average mobile data consumption of 8GB per subscriber per month. This has enabled education entrepreneurs to build affordable high quality scalable solutions eg. live interactive teaching models that connects students with star teachers coupled with AI-powered platform to support students individually. These teachers are otherwise not easily accessible to everyone and often students migrate from their homes to other cities or towns. In the online environment teachers use interactive pedagogy to teach a large class and further personalize learning for individual students.”