How is India's online education industry coping with the pandemic?
In today's newsletter, we talk about the ed-tech industry in India and some of the biggest problems plaguing the sector.
The Story
The EdTech industry in India has had an adoption problem. Despite good initial traction, parents, teachers and students are still sceptical of adopting it on a massive scale. Most products have largely been used to supplement regular lessons at school and they never got the love they probably deserved. But when coronavirus forced schools to shut down, all that changed rather quickly.
In fact, as soon as India adopted a nationwide lockdown, EdTech platforms witnessed a surge in user registrations and website traffic. A study of the 35 top online learning platforms revealed that the segment saw a 26% increase in user visits between April 2019 and March 2020, compared to the year before.
India’s EdTech market leader Byju's saw a 3X increase in the number of students accessing its app and other startups in the space started growing exponentially as well. Exam preparation platform Gradeup launched a campaign called #PadhaiNahiRukegi, and Toppr, which prepares students for entrance exams such as IIT-JEE, BITSAT, and NEET saw a 100% growth in monthly paid users.
But there’s one big problem. Everybody wants to talk about the future of online education in India without necessarily taking stock of the present-day situation.
As Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava write in the Harvard Business Review
So many of us whose daily schedules have become a list of virtual meetings can attest, there are hardware and software issues that must be addressed before remote learning can really take off. We have no doubt that digital technologies (mobile, cloud, AI, etc.) can be deployed at scale, yet we also know that much more needs to be done. On the hardware side, bandwidth capacity and digital inequalities need addressing. The F2F (Face to Face) setting levels lots of differences, because students in the same class get the same delivery. Online education, however, amplifies the digital divide. Rich students have the latest laptops, better bandwidths, more stable wifi connections, and more sophisticated audio-visual gadgets.
And this digital divide is particularly steep in India.
The National Sample Survey on Education indicates that only 24% of households have Internet access and a mere 11% own computers. And according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, even though about 78% of Indians have mobile phones, the density of this distribution in rural areas (where a bulk of the population resides) only tallies up to around 57%. Also, mobile phones are convenient for a variety of reasons but try completing a lengthy assignment or writing your exam in one. It doesn’t work quite as well. A recent survey by QS also found that out of 7500 students, 72.6% used mobile phone hotspots to access the Internet- and roughly 97% of them faced connectivity and signal issues. Only 15% had access to broadband.
But even before we consider gadget availability and internet connection, there’s a more fundamental consideration — electricity. Power supply in rural areas is notoriously patchy. 16% of India’s households received 1–8 hours of electricity daily, 33% received 9–12 hours, and only 47% received more than 12 hours.
And besides, schools often provide essential support beyond academics. Think — Nutrition. Mid-day meals are a boon to most families living near the poverty line. It’s literally a lifesaver. But with the lockdown in place, 9.12 crore Indian children have lost access to midday meals. It’s tragic.
Now obviously that doesn’t mean the likes of Toppr and Gradeup aren’t useful. They obviously are. But they target a very specific niche. They aren’t necessarily solving the biggest problem in the industry since it’s festering at the bottom of the pyramid — the foundation on which this country is built. And if you don’t account for this large consumer segment, how can you make progress?
Now obviously you can’t expect the private sector do all the heavy lifting here. State governments have to chip in and some of them are stepping up in fact. Several states including Assam, Punjab, West Bengal, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh — as well as the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir — have already announced that they will ensure the delivery of mid-day meals to students.
The Delhi government recently chalked out a plan under the ‘Learning with human feel’ scheme to bridge the digital divide.
1. KG to 8th grade: Teacher will guide students through WhatsApp
2. 9th to class 10: Teachers will prepare study material and share it on WhatsApp
3. Class 11 to 12th: Teachers will take an online period of 45 minutes
Even others are trying to figure out how best to impart education if the lockdown persists. But the bottom line is this — The future of online education in India will depend on how we accommodate the largely under-served population of this country. And we won’t make considerable progress if we don’t address some of the systemic challenges plaguing this sector.
Until next time…