4 reasons Indian market is ready for an explosion of education startups
Ed-tech is here to stay. Online education is just starting to boom in India. Test-prep market looks better than ever. Classrooms are becoming smarter by the day. Education delivery models are being innovated. Skill development has become the buzz word. We present some pointers which favor an upsurge in the number of education startups in the Indian market.
Indians love education – Indians love education and everything that promises to improve its quality. It stems from a cultural bias toward excelling in academics. Any tool, technology or service that delivers on the promise of high quality education has a very high potential of being adopted by the market. Adoption of ed-tech and other educational products and services by educational institutions is based on two major premises. One, they genuinely believe that it will help them work better and will be beneficial for students, teachers and the staff. The second premise is it presents a value proposition which may benefit in some other way. Parents are eager to get the best resources for their child’s education, while teachers are aspiring to be smarter in classrooms and keep themselves updated with new information.
Highly unregulated markets have promising potential - The unregulated education sector mainly comprises of skill development (unregulated vocational/behavioral courses) and education support services (tutoring, test prep, corporate learning, content providers, platform/ERP providers and so on). Organizations working in the unregulated skill development sector do not award a degree or certificate. But the demand for such education is enormous as India has a rapidly increasing population entering the working age group. By 2020, India is predicted to have a surplus of 47 million people in this category. The regulated education industry, in its present capacity, cannot cater to this demand. This situation poses a large growth potential for the unregulated skill development sector. Education support services make education delivery efficient and easy for various stakeholders in the education process. The unregulated education sector is thus helping the regulated sector by providing it with tools to become more productive.
Big opportunities in the mobile first economy - In metropolitan and tier one cities, startups have the opportunity to convert mobile into effective learning tools with educational games, apps and VAS. Increase in penetration of mobile networks in India is a given fact and the market size for mobile based educational products and services will increase proportionally with it. The problem of disseminating quality education to remote regions of the country can also be addressed through this network.
Demand for personalized and adaptive learning – Every student learns at a different pace, in a different style and makes unique mistakes. There has always been a demand for individual attention to students for better learning experience but with limited number of teachers and constraint of time, this concern has not been addressed effectively. Many institutions have deliberately kept the class sizes small to address it but one teacher can only do so much. Ed-tech startups with their personalized and adaptive learning models can address this need accurately. Ed-tech can also help in developing specialized learning models for children with special educational needs.
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