Indian education technology startup seeks to democratize learning with unique marketplace model

Classroom teaching has always typically been a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which is not effective for all students, as each student has a different capability to learn and understand. However, if technology can enable personalized or customized training, then the ability to understand increases dramatically.

Vedantu, an Indian education technology startup, is looking to do just that, with a unique model, that allows students to have a personal teacher who would teach them according to their need, pace and level. Using Vedantu’s platform, students can learn from the convenience of their homes, select a teacher of their choice, rate the sessions and change the teacher if need be. Similarly, teachers have complete flexibility to teach according to their convenience, create their own packages and set the cost of each session.

The idea for the startup was born out of the experience of the founders, when they were students. The founders were sure about the need for a transformational change in the education sector in India, and hence they took the plunge and started their first venture in education, Lakshya. Initially, the team started by teaching children from a small place called Barnala in rural Punjab and launched their first venture in education, Lakshya, a highly successful test-prep institution.

At Lakshya, the team expanded to four locations and created an organization of over 200 like-minded people catering to over 5000 students annually. However, the founders realized that their impact remained limited to a geographical region due to the brick-and-mortar setup. To overcome the geographical limits and offer more ‘choice’ to teachers and students without the prevailing institutional constraints, there was a need for a different approach.

States Vamsi Krishna, CEO & Co-Founder, Vedantu Innovations, “Our experiences led us to rethink our approach and we found the solution to these challenges in technology. That’s when Vedantu was launched to create a world of learning that’s democratized and personalized. With our deep understanding of teaching-learning process, we were able to create a platform that’s optimized for learning and teaching live and online on a one-one basis.”  For the tuition segment, Vedantu primarily focuses on grades 6th to 12th in both, CBSE & ICSE curriculum. Students also have an option to enrol for competitive exam courses such as NTSE, PSA, IIT JEE Main etc. Additionally, Vedantu offers a unique feature called ‘InstaLearn’ and is used by students for on demand doubt clearing.

The market opportunity
According to industry reports, there are over 250 million kids in k12 segment in India out of which 80 million are studying in private schools and likely go for some or the other kind of supplementary tuitions. India’s tutoring market is slated to grow to $16B by 2017.

Most of the competitors for Vedantu offer recorded content or are focused on traditional delivery approach of one-to-many. “In a traditional brick-and-mortar set-up, a teacher is not able to tailor teaching to an individual student’s requirements. Students often have to travel long distance, resulting in waste of productive time and resources. Affordability of a personal tutor is often a challenge too. Offline personal tutoring is also not scalable due to time and distance constraints. Our model addresses key challenges faced by students and teachers by offering convenience, personalization and democratization and creates value,” states Vamsi Krishna.

On Vedantu’s platform, a teacher can teach multiple students on a one-one basis, as per their need, pace and requirements. For example, a teacher based in Chandigarh can teach a student in Shillong or Guwahati at a mutually convenient time, completely overcoming barriers of time and place.

Vedantu has built the technology for this platform from scratch, and believes that the technology can scale without compromising the experience for students as well as teachers. Both teachers and students can write on the Whiteboard. Teachers can upload content and images and also use other online resources to make teaching more effective.

Platform built for Indian conditions
Understanding the fact that a major percentage of the demand could come from rural or Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities or towns, the technology has been built in such a way that a session can happen seamlessly on even low and fluctuating bandwidths to suit the Indian conditions.

“If the speed is 1 Mbps, all three elements [Whiteboard, Audio, Video] work, but if the speed falls below that [say 512 Kbps] then the platform can be switched only to the Whiteboard & Audio mode. If the speed drops below 100 kbps then, click–to–call feature on the platform can be used to initiate a two way all connecting the teacher and the student on their mobile phones while they continue to use the Whiteboard functionality via Internet. What’s more, an hour-long recording can be stored in a few KBs for future reference,” explains Vamsi Krishna.

Democratizing learning

Today, in just over a year since the launch, over 66,500 hours of live online teaching-learning sessions have been completed on the platform. The startup has more than 30,000 registered students, students from more than 250 cities and towns in India and more than 200 qualified teachers on the platform. More than 300 sessions are conducted every day.

From the new academic year (2016-17), Vedantu is expanding its offerings to include new boards [IB, IGCSE], more grades [ 4th & 5th], new subjects and languages [computer science, social science, EVS and Sanskrit, French, German, Hindi, English]

Keeping in mind the explosive growth of smartphones, Vedanu is aggressively working towards bringing the experience to mobile devices with teacher and student facing apps soon so that students in the remotest part of the country can have access to quality teachers and benefit from personalized teaching-learning. The firm is also in the process of developing an algorithm to assess quality of the live online sessions mathematically. The algorithm will help in monitoring session quality across thousands of sessions which would otherwise be impossible to track manually. It will not only help monitor session quality but also help teachers in improving their teaching style with useful feedback.