Covid-19 impact: Hybrid model to be the next chapter in edtech sector

The edtech sector saw it all in 2020 — decacorns, unicorns, consolidations, and legal battles. 

Though online education has seen over 15 years of meaningful existence, 2020 will be known as a milestone year for the sector, with the Covid-19 pandemic forcing students and parents to embrace e-learning as the most viable way of studying. While the world is expected to come out of the impact of the pandemic sooner than later, experts believe that e-learning is going to be part and parcel of everyone’s life co-existing with class-room or face-to-face teaching giving rise to a hybrid model. 

“The future will see a leap from the traditional one-to-many approach to blended one-on-one learning experiences, providing students the best of both physical and digital worlds,” says Mrinal Mohit, chief operating officer at Byju’s. “The proliferation of smart devices, coupled with the democratisation of the internet will fasten this process. The classrooms of tomorrow will have technology at its core, empowering students to cross over from passive to active learning.” 

2020 was in fact the most exciting year for edtech start-ups, which brought online education to the mainstream. In total, the sector attracted over $2 billion in fundings. While Byju’s raised over $1 billion from several top notch PE investors to become the first edtech decacorn of the country, Unacademy became a unicorn. At least two other edtech players — Eruditus and Vedantu — are on the brink of joining the unicorn club in 2021. The space has already started seeing consolidations with Byju’s acquiring coding start-up WhiteHat Jr for $300 million. WhiteHat Jr, on the other hand, had to withdraw some advertisements for making insubstantial claims and also got into two lawsuits for alleged infringement of trademarks, invasion of privacy, and defamation. 

Education and edtech market in India can be divided into five segments — Pre-K, K-12 and test preparation, higher education, continued learning, and B2B edtech. 

According to a Redseer and Omidyar Network India report, online education offerings across Classes 1 to 12 are likely to increase 6.3 times by 2022, to create a $1.7-billion market, while the post-K-12 market is set to grow 3.7 times, touching $1.8 billion. But with the total education market being pegged to touch $117 billion in India, edtech companies have merely scratched the surface in India.

“There is a lot of room for more players to come and grow, be it in upskilling, reskilling, co-curricular, and more,” says Mohit of Byju’s. 

Edtech players feel the changes edtech has brought will continue to influence classroom teaching even after schools reopen. “It is now hard to imagine any education offering without an online component. Classroom education, however, will continue to be important for achieving learning outcomes. A hybrid mode of learning would now be the preferred mode, where students who are unable to come to class, now have access to teachers and learning content,” says Shripati Acharya, managing partner, Prime Venture Partners. 

More schools will be using technology in their day-to-day classes. After-school market — coaching and tuitions, will be completely reimagined. “Since students are now more open to learning online, edtech players will now have a bigger share of that pie and will start to consolidate. Currently, India has about 70 million students who are paying for after-school learning. We predict, over the next 2-3 years, 20 million paying subscribers from this segment will migrate to digital learning,” says Zishaan Hayath, founder and CEO of Toppr. 

While online providers in co-curricular and extracurricular spaces could see a drop in demand as schools reopen, higher education, especially in the skilling space is likely to see more adoption of online. “We are already seeing IITs and IIMs offering online courses. And, with the new education policy, online degrees will also be offered. Hence, there will be an acceleration of online learning in higher education even after the pandemic,” says Ashwin Damera, co-founder and CEO of Eruditus.

Expanding their scope of growth, edtech firms have also started focusing on small towns as internet penetration allows companies to spread their presence. While Vedantu invested $2 million in doubt solving app Instasolv to increase presence in tier-3, tier-4 markets, upGrad is planning to focus on delivering personalised career outcomes for learners not only in the metro cities but in small towns as well.

“Every learner has a different capacity and way he or she excels at a few subjects. Therefore, we are here to understand the need of the individual learner and analyse and curate customised content along with outcome guarantee,” says Arjun Mohan, CEO-India, upGrad. 

The pandemic has also accelerated the shift towards digital across industries, resulting in greater demand for professionals who excel in the latest technology skills. Because of this, more and more students and working professionals are gravitating towards learning these new skills in areas like analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, and cyber security.

“By 2021, we aim to create a bigger impact by launching several new comprehensive and robust programmes in both technical and non-technical domains. We are also looking at collaborations with national and international universities in order to make high-quality programmes accessible to our learners,” says Hari Krishnan Nair, co-founder of online professional course provider Great Learning. The start-up has seen a 10-fold rise in user base since the lockdown.