Global pandemic and its effects on e-learning in India
As COVID-19 has tightened its grip on world population, people are forced to stay indoors. This has resulted in surge of demand for online content. News channels and newspapers have already started pushing more content online and are searching for ways to monetize it. Education is another field which will have a paradigm shift due to this global pandemic.
As educational institutions can be hotspots for spread of the virus, government will not even think of opening them unless the state or country is completely out of COVID-19 threat. This means parents have to find out alternatives to make sure that their kids are ready for the shorter academic year. Also the students who are preparing for competitive exams like CAT, GMAT and NEET have to find out alternatives which will help them to get top ranks.
E-LEARNING IN INDIA
E-learning companies in India were marketing through all possible medias, thanks to deep pockets of e-learning websites like Byju’s ,Toppr, Simplilearn & Khan Academy. Moneycontrol.com reported that LIDO learning has raised funding of around $7.5 million this week (when people are talking about economic shocks and recession due to COVID effect) which gives a clear picture on how confident investors are on the future of such e-learning platforms.
E-learning platforms are thriving in India. Vedantu has reported 30x increase in customer surge in the past one week. Leverage Edu has reported its highest monthly revenue ever in March 2020( up 40% when compared to Feb 2020).
But this sudden surge in traffic has brought challenges too. As tutors are now working from home they have to be trained to provide online classes from home. Also the focus has to extended towards other subjects (as of now more focus on science) such as languages and social sciences. Finding out quality tutors is also going to be a challenge.
FUTURE OF OFFLINE COACHING CENTERS
The offline coaching centers which focused on strict surveillance and legacy curriculum to attract students are in catch 22 . They will have to recalibrate the situation and move online if they have to maintain their market share. This is due to the fact that in the next three to four months, students will become comfortable with the online classes which they can take at their convenience. When things go back to normal, at least twenty percentage of the students are going to prefer online to offline.
HOW OFFLINE COACHING CENTERS CAN SURVIVE COVID-19 ?
So the bigger institutes can go for customized LMS depending on the courses they offer and the curriculum. This will enable them to live stream classes and make e-learning more interactive. Also the recordings of the same can be made available to the students so that they can go back and watch the sections to clarify doubts.
Smaller centers can go for Wordpress based LMS platforms which are cheap and easy to maintain. All the above said facilities with moderate customization is offered by plethora of Wordpress themes. They can hire a professional wordpress developer to get this job done.
These uncertain times bring Steve Job’s words to my mind “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity –not threat”.
