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How and Why well-funded Edtech Startups failed in India?

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The Edtech sector in India has experienced rapid growth, with new startups being introduced frequently in recent years. This growth can be attributed to the increased usage of smartphones and the growing demand for online education. However, many Edtech startups are facing significant challenges, leading to the closure of numerous companies.

In 2022, several Edtech companies were compelled to make difficult choices. Lido, an Edtech company that provided live online tuition classes, had to close down in February 2022 due to a lack of funds. In April 2022, Unacademy laid off over 600 employees, followed by Vedantu, which laid off over 200 employees. Additionally, over 800 employees resigned from Byju’s Edtech startup within two months after being asked to work from the office. The Edtech industry also accounted for 40% of the layoffs in 2023. Byju’s is now involved in multiple bankruptcy cases in India and abroad.

Let’s delve into the factors that led to the downfall of these heavily financed Edtech startups.

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Fierce Competition.

The Edtech sector market has become saturated with nearly 4500 Edtech startups in India. Many of these startups offer similar products and services which led to fierce competition. This increase in competition led to price wars and an increase in customer acquisition costs. Many startups invested heavily in marketing and advertising to reach potential customers, which strained their finances as acquisition costs often outpaced revenue growth, leading to unsustainable business models.

Regulatory Challenges.

The regulatory environment in India can be complex and unpredictable, with strict guidelines governing accreditation and quality assurance. Edtech startups often struggle to navigate these regulations, especially those offering formal degrees and certifications. Changes in these regulations can disrupt ongoing operations and increase operational costs. Failure to comply with these regulations could lead to various legal issues, making it challenging for startups to establish themselves in this oversaturated market.

Ineffective Marketing Strategies.

Effective marketing strategies are essential for Edtech startups to create brand awareness and establish themselves in the market. Many unsuccessful Edtech startups fail to invest in targeted marketing and communicate their value proposition effectively. In the Edtech industry, marketing should concentrate on developing relationships, demonstrating value, and creating a supportive learning environment. Authenticity and credibility are more important than flashy advertisements.

Conclusion.

Edtech is not a company or an industry but a powerful evolving concept. Despite countless failures in this sector, the future of Edtech is still promising, provided companies learn from past mistakes and address these issues through innovation, quality focus, regulatory compliance, and a commitment to user engagement.

Physics Wallah

How has tech helped Physics Wallah become a unicorn startup?

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Physics Wallah is a well-known ed-tech startup that offers online courses for students preparing for engineering and medical entrance exams in India.

Alakh Pandey, the company’s founder and a physics instructor, founded Physics Wallah in 2016 with the goal of ensuring that everyone can access high-quality education, regardless of where they live or their financial status. Physics Wallah has become a unicorn ed-tech firm thanks in large part to technology.

Physics Wallah
Image Source: indiatimes.com

With an initial expenditure of roughly Rs 30,000, PhysicsWallah began as a YouTube channel in 2016. Alakh got to work creating videos with a camera phone, tripod, whiteboard, and a few books. He began by giving lectures on physics and chemistry topics.

Also Read: Aman Gupta: Co-Founder of Billion Dollar Company boAt

He understood, however, that he would not be able to offer an extensive syllabus for competitive examinations, assign homework, and administer assessments on his own. Despite these issues, he decided to build an app that would offer a comprehensive curriculum for the JEE/NEET exams in 2017 after his channel reached 50,000 followers.

Lakshya (physics for JEE), PW’s inaugural course, received a resoundingly positive response from students all over India when it was made available for the low price of just Rs 999. For the six-month course, about 70,000 people signed up, contributing significantly to PW’s enormous financial success.

The PW app saw 2.1 million downloads in 2021. The tech business now manages 20 offline PW Pathshala centres known as PW Pathshala in 18 cities in addition to YouTube and the app. With a roughly Rs 2 crore initial investment, this arm was launched in October 2021.

The cost of these centres’ one-year JEE or NEET courses ranges from Rs 30,000 to Rs 35,000. They currently employ 400 people across all of their centres, and 6,500 students attended during the most recent academic year.

Physics Wallah can now provide online classes thanks to technology, which has increased its customer base. Without having to travel great distances to attend physical lessons, students from every corner of India are able to access the courses from the convenience of their homes.

Technology is used by Physics Wallah to provide interactive educational experiences like movies, animations, simulations, and quizzes. With the aid of this strategy, students are better able to comprehend difficult ideas and interact with the subject matter more deeply.

Physics Wallah can tailor students’ educational experiences by using technology. The business monitors student performance and offers personalised comments and suggestions for development.

The web platform used by Physics Wallah enables the business to expand quickly. Without spending money on new facilities or hiring more employees, the company may offer new courses and reach more students.

To reach a larger audience and establish a strong brand, Physics Wallah has made use of social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Alakh Pandey, the company’s founder, has established a strong social media following that has aided Physics Wallah in growing its user base.

In conclusion, technology has been a key factor in Physics Wallah’s success as an ed-tech firm. It has made it possible for the business to extend its operations, offer online courses, deliver interactive and personalised learning experiences, and promote to a larger audience through social media.

Blackboard

Blackboard Inc: Leading Web-Based Educational Software And Services Supplier.

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Blackboard Inc. is the primary provider of web-based educational software and services to American postsecondary schools. The Blackboard Academic Suite and the Blackboard Commerce Suite, the company’s two primary products, enable students, professors, and administrators to connect to the Internet for a range of academic tasks, extracurricular activities, and commercial transactions. Blackboard’s core customers are colleges and universities, but it also serves K–12 schools and other education providers and student-focused merchants and publishers of textbooks. Blackboard’s products are utilized by millions of people at academic institutions in more than 60 countries worldwide, and the company is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in Boston, Phoenix, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Australia, China, and Japan.

About The Company

Matthew Pittinsky and Michael Chasen had previously worked together on a software program that assisted high school students in selecting a college. KPMG saw that schools, particularly colleges and universities, were developing Internet-based learning initiatives. They recognized a lot of potential in the online education industry and decided to start a company that would let colleges offer their classes online. Pittinsky, 24, and Chasen, 25, abandoned their jobs at KPMG and formed Blackboard Inc. in the basement of a Dupont Circle townhouse in June 1997.

Blackboard Learn, the company’s main product, is a full-featured LMS that brings together students, educators, and administrators in a comprehensive digital learning environment. Moodlerooms, Blackboard Collaborate, Bb Student, Bb Grader, Bb Planner, Blackboard Open Content, Blackboard Mass Notifications, Blackboard Transact, and Blackboard Analytics are some other tools available. In addition, Blackboard offers managed hosting, platform consulting, enterprise consulting, online program management, training, and student services. Their job is to enhance the educational experience through the use of Internet-enabled technology that unites students, teachers, researchers, and the community in a developing network of educational environments dedicated to better communication, commerce, collaboration, and content. Every day, all throughout the world, Blackboard’s huge and diverse community of practice supports enhances, and extends services. The Internet has enormous potential for education and educational experiences. While platforms play a vital role, communities of practice produce the finest solutions. The network’s worth is its connectivity. As a result of the link, each Blackboard client makes the solution of every other Blackboard client more valuable.

Blackboard
Image source: www.thesoftwarereport.com

Global Expansion

In May 2002, Blackboard established an association with LearningMate, a branch of Delhi-based Educomp Datamatics Ltd, to offer goods and services in India’s e-learning sector. In July, Company announced another long-term strategic agreement with Bell & Howell Company’s XanEdu. Blackboard Learning System ML, the company’s multilanguage course management system and the industry’s first multilanguage enterprise-class learning system, was released in August. Learning System ML enabled the user interface to show a variety of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and English. With a distribution collaboration with Australia-based Harvest Road, Blackboard maintained its push into the worldwide market and connection building in September. The company launched a strategic agreement with Learn-ingMate and World Links, an international non-profit organization, in December to enhance e-learning possibilities for instructors in rural and underserved schools across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. According to Inc. magazine’s annual top 500 rankings, Blackboard’s revenue growth from 1998 to 2002 was 11,047 percent, making it the fastest-growing private education company and the nation’s sixth fastest-growing corporation.

William L. Ballhaus – CEO

Bill serves as the chairman, president, and CEO of Blackboard. Bill is deeply committed to developing an industry-leading suite of solutions and products serving students and educators, as well as innovating on their behalf to expand student reach and improve learning outcomes within the education community, based on his experience leading global technology businesses.

Prior to joining Blackboard, he was President and CEO of SRA International, where he developed an innovative culture that focused on anticipating client demands and expanded the company’s portfolio in agile system development, mobilization, cloud computing, cyber security, and data analytics, and ERP.

Udayy

Edtech Startup Udayy Shuts Shop In India, Fires All The Employees.

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New businesses over the nation over are finding it hard to stay aware of the inflation. After Unacademy, Vedantu, another ed-tech startup, Udayy, fails horrendously. While Vedantu and Unacademy have just laid off a specific level of their labour force, Udayy has totally closed its business in India. The ed-tech organization experienced colossal misfortunes when the schools returned following a break of two years.

Udayy, which offered a web-based learning stage for grades 1 to 8, has laid off the entirety of its 100 workers as the firm couldn’t oversee supportable development in a hyper-cutthroat ed-tech competition.

Udayy
Image source: amazonaws.com

Udayy’s prime supporter and CEO Saumya Yadav affirmed the improvement. To date, the company has raised more than $10 million in financing, including conspicuous financial backers like AlphaWave, InfoEdge, and Better Capital.

Established in 2019 by Karan Varshney, Mahak Garg, and Yadav, the ed-tech stage offered maths and English preparation to youngsters in the age groups of 6-11 years involving an intuitive web-based study hall of 3-5 kids in each cluster. It likewise sent off a free application giving day-to-day worksheets to understudies.

As indicated by the organization’s site which is presently outdated, it has directed in excess of 130,000 classes with north of 200 qualified educators and 50,000 children have learned from them as of 2022.

Yadav let people know that after the organization shut down activities in April, it proceeded to give outplacement administrations to every one of the impacted workers. Udayy likewise offered a severance bundle to workers, and a medical coverage bundle, as per Yadav.

“It was a very difficult decision but we did it in the best way possible so everyone finds a good place. We started during the pandemic and were doing very well during the pandemic. But, after the pandemic when offline schools opened up, growth stalled and it became very expensive to get new customers and service the old ones,” she mentions.

Source: www.financialexpress.com

Saumya Yadav, a fellow benefactor of the organization, said that Udayy was confronting obstructions in growing the model of online school when the schools started reopening.

“Udayy was witnessing the post-pandemic world for the first time. As the kids went back to school, we faced roadblocks in growing the original model of online, live learning. We evaluated multiple strategies and adjacent pivots. However, none of them were promising enough,” she said.

Source: entrackr.com

Udayy was established by IIT Delhi and Stanford University graduates, Yadav, Mahak Garg, and Karan Varshney. Uday joins the rundown of new companies that had terminated representatives in the primary quarter of 2022. Up until this point, the Indian start-ups have terminated in excess of 5600 workers.

Numerous tech new companies have either closed down or rebuilt tasks.

In February, ed-tech start-up Lido Learning likewise reported that it was closing down, due to comparable reasons. Last week, edtech stage FrontRow reported cutbacks as the organization went into rebuilding mode to increment efficiencies and protract its runway.

Following quite a while of hypergrowth, ed-tech firms are presently preparing for a stoppage in subsidizing, and a couple, including Unacademy and Vedantu, have conserved workers to reduce expenses.

Until now in ed-tech, Unacademy has laid off around 1,000 representatives, while Lido has closed shop in the wake of relinquishing around 150 workers. Most of late, Vedantu terminated 624 workers, referring to an intense macroeconomic scenery and difficulties from disconnected training places recovering unmistakable quality. On Monday, people group learning start-up FrontRow laid off 150 representatives of its all-out labour force of 500, due to an apparent money crunch. Aside from this, the much-advertised metaverse-based edtech fire up, Metaversity, established by previous Twitter India boss Manish Maheshwari laid off another 20 representatives last week as the organization failed to take off. Last week, the founder of Unacademy, Gaurav Munjal, whose organization let go north of 1,000 on-roll and authoritative staff as of late, informed the workers in an email that “winter is here” and that cost-cutting would be the organization’s vital concentration as subsidizing would stay scant for essentially the following 12-year and a half.

A few ed-tech firms are by and by wandering into hybrid learning models that include both on the web and disconnected learning. Nonetheless, Udayy couldn’t take advantage of that portion.

Growth of e-Learning Industry & Why Moodle is still the best LMS?

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E-learning is an electronic learning which involves delivering either part or a complete course using a computer in schools, universities  or delivering important technical and business training in companies. Earlier, e-learning growth was hindered by the thought that it would essentially inhibit the human element that some learners need, however with time there has been a variety of technological developments leading to many people embracing the use of smartphones, tablets and computers in classrooms and offices. The growth of interactive designs have made e-learning engaging and a good medium for course delivery. Moreover, most learning and business organizations have enhanced their e-learning through the partnership with course or training providers together with building their own technical team to ensure a smooth learning experience for their learners.

E-learning is widely used in many companies for employees’ effective and efficient training. Over the years, the use of e-learning in companies has increasingly grown. Companies have practically discovered that every money spent on online employee training increases the employee productivity and efficiency. In last decade E-learning has seen tremendous growth worldwide. According to a new survey, by 2020 the global market of corporate e-learning will be worth more than 31 billion US dollars. Recently, many traditional schools around the world have adopted eLearning.

The growth of e-learning has been effectively necessitated by its benefits to both the individual users and the organizations- Cost effectiveness,  24/7 learning that can be done anywhere without necessarily attending specific classrooms, tracking of course progress for learners and its discreet nature which allows each individual learner to learn at their own preferred pace.

The Moodle LMS and reasons why it is still relevant
Moodle Learning Managemnet System(LMS) can be defined as not only the world’s most popular but also the  most used LMS which was developed back in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas. The reason for its global popularity is the user-friendly nature of its e-learning platform. Moodle LMS is open source & free to download with full liberty to customize and develop further. Since its inception, Moodle LMS has strongly remained the educator’s relevant platform for providing online learning in more personal environment that easily boosts interaction and collaboration-

  • Moodle is free open source technology that enables its users to personally choose their own perfect LMS schedule so as to achieve their organizational goals
  • Its certification and gamification features and tools help many organizations to meet the increasingly common requirement of offering the course certification
  • The ability to centralize multiple course providers and systems, has always been the reason why Moodle has been persistently relevant and the best option to many organizations
  • Support for SCORM and third party plugins makes it obvious choice for educators and admins

Moodle features, customization and development options.
With the aim of organizations to working in specific and efficient ways, Moodle LMS has various customization and configuration features to cater to organizational needs and demands. It offers lot of freedom in custom development and design customization. As a Moodle admin you can build an amazing learning environment by adding a variety of your personal favorite plugins which can be either individually developed or from the community. You can also opt for Moodle development services offered by different Moodle experts.

Today’s Moodle is none less than any paid or custom LMSs being offered by different EdTech firms. Moodle have features that efficiently and effectively serve both the students and the administration. The open source learning management system offers excellent web support tools to ensure effective collaborative learning. Moodle has the ability to integrate with a good number of enterprise system to facilitate continuous integration flows.