Going beyond rote learning with Creya Learning

While our politicians have been busy debating over the political correctness of the cartoons used in the NCERT textbooks, the good work among education startups in the Indian startup ecosystem continues. “I believe that academic excellence alone, which is by far the most focused aspect of education in India, plays a very little role in our children growing up to be successful and happy in life,” says Hari K Verma, CEO & Co-founder Creya Learning.

Focused on equipping children with competencies required for success in their school, college, career and life, Creya Learning system is designed to take them beyond the rote learning of the existing education system. True to their name, Creya, meaning active learning by doing, imparts its curriculum through immersive and experiential learning. The 45 years of combined experience in diverse organization and roles along with all their prior experience in the education space led Hari, Venky and Praveen to start Creya Learning about two years ago and launch their product in March 2012 with summer camps.

Based on the Dr. Robert Marzano’s taxonomy, Creya Learning is aligned with several boards including CBSE, ICSE, State Boards, IB and IGCSE and interdisciplinary helping the child build on his knowledge and lead him through the cognitive, meta-cognitive and self-systems. They offer their programs to school going children between 6 to 18years of age through the classroom learning in schools and their own, Creya Center currently set up only in Hyderabad.“Our marketing efforts are primarily centered on a limited geography right now. We are focused in around 10-12 Cities that include both tier-1 and tier-2 cities. We have a very small sales team right now and most of the time our sales efforts are about introducing Creya and telling the schools what we do, walking them through our curriculum, rubrics, our professional development program and our implementation etc,” says Hari explaining their marketing strategy. While they do invest on both online and offline options for marketing, their main focus is on gaining traction on Facebook and Youtube.

Now with 400 students attending their program, they intend to impact around 5million children in the next five years with their curriculum. They also have 5 schools who have signed up to implement the Creya program in the current academic year.With a spurt of education startups coming up in various parts of India, do you think the schools and parents are receptive enough? How long will it take the phenomenon to percolate to the tier-2 and 3 cities? Leave your comments below.

For more information, take a look at their website.