How Fliplearn plans to flip the way students study in India
The platform is providing a holistic online solution for teachers, students, and parents.
Over two decades ago, Educomp set out to change the entire education system in the country. Since then, it claims to have empowered over 30 million learners and educators across over 65,000 schools.
While Educomp was continuing to overhaul the education ecosystem through its smart class programmes, the top leadership in the company realised that they needed to take education beyond the conventional classrooms. Now, instead of taking students to classrooms, they had to flip the normal course and take classrooms to students, beyond boundaries.
Divya Lal, Former COO, Educomp Smartclass, says that while technology has transformed, and continues to transform, a range of sectors like retail, transport, logistics, healthcare, payments, banking and many others, its effect on the education sector and education delivery has not been as pronounced so far. And this is where the idea for a platform like Fliplearn came from.
Bringing the classroom to students
Launched in November 2015, Fliplearn is an online subscription-based teaching and learning portal. The platform collects learning indicators in real-time for students and uses machine learning to create personalised learning pathways from curated learning resources, allowing students to maximise their potential.
“Despite investments from the government and private sector, the Indian education system has not produced the desired level of learning outcomes. Fliplearn is deploying the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a unique neuro-cognitive profile of each student. This is done from the data generated through the student interaction with the platform - in terms of education games and quizzes attempted, digital content consumed, homework assignments and class tests scores,” says Divya, Founder of Fliplearn.
She adds that as the student spends more time with the platform, the machine learning systems get increasingly more intelligent about showing tailored content, games and quizzes to the student. This leads to a transformation of learning outcomes as schools, teachers and parents can now use this platform to provide a personalised classroom for every student.
The platform is fulfilling two fundamental needs — firstly, for a personalised, curated learning platform for each student, and secondly, for a seamless, safe and secure communication environment for parents, teachers and students.
The focus of the platform is on addressing imbalances in education and improving its quality, by imparting teaching in an interesting and enticing manner to motivate students to attend classes and thus improve student retention in their desire to learn.
Product features
According to Divya, parents are always curious about what is happening to their child in school, their attendance, homework assignments, class tests, extracurricular progress, safety, and transport. The platform provides a secure and seamless way for schools, teachers and parents to connect with each other in a time-efficient manner and keep abreast of the child’s progress and needs.
The platform has four critical components - communication, performance and learning, utilitarian service, and data management.
The first component, communication, allows all stakeholders to come together in a protected space where each user is identified and identifiable and share matters of academic information and resources.
Through performance and learning, the platform can recognise the education requirement of every child and facilitate supplementary help for them accordingly.
The utilitarian services offer a bundle of services that will make the lives of teachers, students and parents easy, such as the tracking of bus locations, buying books and paying school fees online via the app.
In data management, it can provide an authentic source of data to the school, most of which struggle in trying to maintain bona fide data records of students. By using the platform, schools can maintain data on any and every interaction that they have with parents on the cloud, while able to rely on complete privacy.
Revenue model
The platform is employing various revenue models, including the pay-as-you-go and subscription-based models. However, its focus revenue model is based on product subscription.
Fliplearn offers two versions of the platform – the starter pack and the full pack.
The starter pack edition enables the school to access the features of the platform with limited storage, emails and SMS, whereas the full pack edition puts no limits on these factors.
Content access for teachers is free, while students pay an add-on annual subscription for content.
According to Fliplearn, more than 2,000 schools have already been onboarded onto the platform, with the app downloaded by more than three lakh users.
What others are doing in edtech
A report released by RedSeer Consulting in 2016 stated that the market size of the online supplemental education opportunity in India was expected to touch $2.5 billion by the yearend, and was poised to grow at 15 percent over the next three years.
According to the report, the addressable demographic of online supplemental education in the country was 20 million students between classes VI and XII. These are the students who would be willing to go online to access supplemental education.
In this market, a large number of players are catering to the considerable demand for online education in both the K-12 and test preparation segments. Byju’s, Topper Learning, Simplilearn, and Prepathon, to name a few, are some of the dominant names in the edtech category. These players have also raised large sums in funding over the past few years.
In 2016, investor interest in the edtech segment was considerable. Last year, around 58 education startups collectively raised investments of over $210 million. The top five among them were Byju’s ($125 million), EduPristine ($10 million), Avanti Learning ($5 million), CueMath ($40 million), and Simplilearn ($30 million).
According to experts, the edtech segment is evolving, and will be a driving force in bringing about a change in India's education system.