Digital Education: 2020 and Beyond

Missing skills always affect us in some way or the other. Time, location, expense are all constraints to new-age education needs. In a world where academia is becoming an intellectual currency, such hurdles can derail any individual, corporation or even an entire nation.

Redundancy in the learning process will creep in if we are not able to support the growing learning population with useful resources empirically and economically. This shows that traditional teaching has reached the impasse as the orthodox classroom learning can neither support distance engagement nor a 30 yr. old man yearning to work and learn at the same time.

In this exclusive blog, we get you through the entire labyrinth of the education market: When, Where and Why.

We Need Digital Learning Infrastructure

A large Student:Teacher ratio naturally means that the teacher is overburdened which mirrors the stagnant academic performance. The ratio is even worse in remote areas: lack of support and infrastructure, force reluctance among teachers to go there and hence remain backward.

The “All India Statistics on Higher Education” survey in 2018 stated that while the student enrollment in universities have increased from 32.3 million in 2013-14 to 36.6 million in 2017-18, the total number of teachers have declined from 13,67,535 to 12,84,755.

Globally, the total expenditure on education is about $4 trillion, out of which more than 85% is estimated to be spent on brick and mortar only. There is a need to optimize on the expenditure ratio so as to gear-up the academic performance to survive the rapid developments. 

These factors necessitate an efficient paperless institute administration and academic organisation in the form of a multi-tasking Digital Learning System as the service provider for module distribution, teaching assistant and even managing homework remotely.

High Stakeholders in School Management System

Incubation of technology in the learning process by digitising the infrastructure can become the force multiplayer given the lack of infrastructure and growing learning population.

This arena has already attracted many big league players like McGraw Hill Education, Oracle Corporation, Skolaro, Blackboard Inc., Capita SIMS and many more.

Market share of the US and European segments is attributed to 2 major factors:

• Availability of Tier 1 vendors due to rapid investments flowing into the digital learning sector.
• Adoption of predictive analysis approach to the education system.

In the Asia-Pacific region apart from large advances made by China and Korea, the Indian market is estimated to grow higher, thanks to multiple digital education initiatives by the Government along with a rapidly increasing learning population.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

How is it like to have free access to learning courses from world’s leading colleges’ faculty and professional practitioners? Validating skills to hiring agencies by certifications from Google, Amazon, IBM and universities like Michigan, Harvard, Oxford and many more

This is essentially what MOOC stands for: publicly shared platform with open-ended groups. This can actually be the vaccine to the growing need for a more tangible course that any individual wants to master upon.

The University of Texas, El Paso reports that more than 6 million Americans are taking up online courses. In fact, 22 percent of graduate students in the United States exclusively study online, compared to 11 percent of undergraduates. While these programs are not limited to the students itself, the average age of users is 32 yrs.

MOOCs develop their profits on engaging larger learning communities into its course process. So, once a student takes up the course, there is always a chance that he/she might want a certification to validate himself and even take up additional paid course programmes offered. The revenue generated is distributed among the platform, content developer and instructor as per their contracts.

Students even have the choice to audit their course according to their objectives. Certifications offered are classified into Specialization, Professional and even Master Degree programmes in accordance with their respective course curriculum. 

In 2018, Class Central reported the earning of top firms in this industry:

• Coursera generated about $140 million ; 
• Udacity earned $90 million for the year; 
• edX took in about $57 million for fiscal year 2017; 
• UK-based FutureLearn made about £8.2 million in the same year.

Similarly, when an employee wants to learn and develop aptitude for benefiting his career, deploying distance learning systems has been the way for some time now and with time is expected to be a necessity rather than luxury.

Since, we have become familiar with why the learning process needs to be more engaging and wider audience supportive, let’s see it’s application circles

Demand & Supply in Education System

Rigid course structure available at the institution they are admitted to, makes the education system quite defunct. However, time constraint again rules out directly delivering extra information in the classroom.

But, with a customized e-learning in place, the teacher can themselves have access to wider information, which he/she can deliver efficiently to a greater audience.

By enabling automation in marking, digital issue tests, and track student progress with AI powered analytics topics and chapter-wise, teachers can instruct better methods to their pupil to understand: A Personalized Teaching is hence Achieved!

Hence, providing them with the know-how of this technology, the students shall be in a better place to absorb a wider spectrum of knowledge in future also.

Thus the distance metric becomes undefined when you let technology do the talking!

E-Learning World

Popularly called Ed-Tech in the digital industry which is expected to hit $252 billion in 2020, this space has been experiencing some solid booms. New-age start-ups are coming up with next generation curriculum that is hardly available at universities like block-chain, cryptocurrency, industry 4.0, robotics, AI and many more.

Currently trending categories in Ed-Tech startups are:

• Test Preparation
• Upskilling and Online Certifications
• Primary and Higher Supplemental Education
• Distance Learning by Coaching Enterprises 
• Gamification & VR
• Social Learning
• Vocational training

Focused on shifting the education market of K-12 schools, coaching, higher education as well as corporate training to mobile phones, the ed-tech industry, specially in India, has received the best response in the market, the ed-tech industry is constructively exploiting the large scale internet penetration going on here.

Datalabs of Inc42 says that during 2014-2019, the Indian segment received $1.4 billion investment out of $9 billion worldwide and in return, the profit during the same phase stood at $1.2 billion in India. This meant an overwhelming 88% conversion of total capital inflow into profit.

The “competitive scoring mentality” in Indian education market such as the coaching industry (an INR 270,000 Cr market growing at 35% per year)  is reflected in the skewness in funding and investor interest for test prep and online certification categories of Indian ed-tech market.

According to the data provided by Stones2Milestones (an organization that aims to address the reading and learning levels of students across the country), the average reading capacity of a 4th grade student is 12.5% which drops to just 3.9 % in 6th grade. Such steep fall is also obvious in the IT sector where the gap between trainable and employable students with new-age skills (like AI, Cloud Computing, etc) stands at 7.8%. Adding further, university students often find it difficult to adapt to the enormous digital facility installed in their colleges. This results in incapacitation of the equipment which in turn is affecting him as well as the institute’s investment.

Apart from Skill India, the Indian Government has brought in several programs SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds), NDL (National Digital Library) and invested $6.2 million to this cause. Though the investment might look small, there is a plan to revamp the digital content delivery by incorporating a structure into a more interactive way.

KPMG maps the estimated market size for the online certification and the reskilling industry hitting at $463 Mn(2021) accompanied by a compounded annual growth rate(CAGR) of 38% since the year 2016.

Corporate Training: Importance & Strategies

Rethinking on how investing in your employee training can convert into higher turnover?

Hear it from LinkedIn itself: “94 percent of employees would stay with a company longer if there was an investment in learning.”

Corporate experience suggests that the iGen i.e Generation Z workers want to grow. It has been found that almost a quarter of this workforce would leave their current company if they don’t see a scope to learn and develop.

The concept of “Forgetting Curve” (given by Ebbinghaus) dents the company’s intellectual asset heavily. The curve reveals that employed men tend to forget almost 90% of what they have been trained during 1 hour sessions. Thus, an easy to approach resource management system that helps and trains the employee anytime is required.

Now you can see how training your employees can convert into not only skilled workers but also loyal employees. Having an excellent loyal employee base is one of the most important assets for any company wanting to preserve its legacy.

But the question is how to train?

It will not be feasible to learn and work at an office or attend an expensive university program to gain the required skills. Don’t worry, technology has a solution for this also: E-Learning & Learning Management System.

Key Market Players in Corporate Training (India)

Corporate Training in India is getting shaped by the service-supportive industry only, and hence is in it’s growth stage now. But, low cost of investment and lack of entry barriers for incumbents has led to rapid fragmentation and therefore competition in this market. 

Overall, we can categorize the Indian segment into 3 types based on the employee size being 0-200, 200-500 and 500+ employees. The major players here are: NIIT, Manipal Global Education, Centum Learning, Aptech Limited, Koenig Solutions and CADD Centre for Training.

The Immediate Effect: Coronavirus

With schools closed worldwide, academia might have been stuck obsolete by the enormous lockdown procedures by several nations. Not giving up on this fight, the colleges smartly adopted the digital media to deliver their lecture and notes through the World Wide Web. 

Interactive teaching sessions are being carried out on popular platforms like Zoom, Tencent and Google Classroom, Cisco Webex among many other mediums. Apart from lectures, the teachers are able to share important course-related content from online education organisations like Coursera.

These organisations have made a certain number of courses free to the students during this lockdown. Eyeing lucrative conversion of many of these free access users into actually purchasing their courses, investments are pouring in from all directions into these startups and companies.

Zishaan Hayath, chief executive officer and co-founder, Toppr, told ETBrandEquity.com that “There has been a 50% growth in subscribers of Live Classes month on month along with 30% growth in traffic.”.

In this way, these companies are saving on the cost of acquisition as new individuals are joining without any advertisements or campaigns. Abhay Gupta, co-founder, Board Infinity said that,  “We have seen a 10%-20% reduction in our cost of acquisition, owing to the increasing demand for content on our platform”.

To learn more about how technology is helping during COVID-19 pandemic, read our article on Can the IT-Industry Solve this COVID-19 Trauma?

While digital learning startups are competing one-learning platforms, there is a more modular technology developing that, in the long run, may outrun even the million dollar e-learning industry too. 

 Learning Management System (LMS)

While most of the internet fraternity is familiar with the term e-learning, LMS is a growing technology taking the digital education industry one notch ahead. The system involves a full-length management system which analyses teaching content, their delivery, the user’s grasp, their progress and even detect any gaps in learning. 

Softwares like TalentMS that lets you combine support for multiple file types and multimedia—presentations, videos, iFrame, SCORM, etc.

Software Advice, a Gartner Company, in a survey of 200 LMS using organisations, including schools, institutions and corporate industries, came with the result that a majority of those surveyed actually found that these systems are worth a significant investment. However, nearly most of them (89 percent) saw the benefits their LMS had on the overall cost of training. An even better 92 percent said employee retention improved after implementation.

From the analysis above, we see the North America region holding a major part of the market. This is due to the ready availability of technology has helped in smooth acceptance of such digital disruptions. While Asia-Pacific is catching up with an enormous learning population transition from conventional to digital teaching methods, it’s dependence on the service industry solely is responsible for the sluggish growth.

So, the software deploys intelligent ways to detect anomalies which are often overlooked during classroom sessions. Apart from being easy to deploy and cost-effective, the main advantage is that any student can customize his/her progress with not only national or global standards but also along with his own objectives using several parameters.

Key Players in LMS Market

The leading LMS providing companies are Adobe Systems, Blackboard Inc., Syprep, Docebo, Pearson, Corner OnDemand and many more.  Most of these corporations were earlier catering to traditional textbook education delivery, but with technology invasions going on, they have rightly adopted smarter learning softwares. 

These data-driven AI powered softwares are the latest innovative systems for some time now. They have integrated all digital transformations right from automatically preparing questions from existing question banks to remotely marking and further incorporated Gamifications and VR technologies like Virtual Labs into a single frame called Learning Management System.

Cloud Management : Scalable & Secure 

One of the primary concerns regarding poor productivity across different sectors is due to inconsistent training delivery. Not all employees have been equipped with the same learning process, curriculum and opportunities hence, irregularities in skills are bound to affect your company negatively.

Also, scalability of such huge resources becomes a matter of concern when faced with huge numbers of data, channels and employees. Hence, any delay in delivering to the intended audience as well as keeping the security intact is a matter of big concern.

This is where the companies can take advantage of the internet connectivity. You can upload all the required materials on the cloud-based LMS which then can be accessed by an employee sitting in London or in Delhi. So, the risk of inconsistent training ROI can be eliminated through this innovation.

For the security concern, here is what Vivek Kundra, Executive VP at Salesforce.com says: “On any day, cloud computing is far more secure than traditional computing systems because companies like Google and Amazon can attract and retain cyber-security personnel of a higher quality than many governmental agencies”.

One more thing: not only are you cutting costs on expensive university programs, but also enhancing your productivity as the employee continues to work during the training time.

Last but not Least!

Now that we have come to the end of the blog, let’s remind ourselves of some highlights worth having noted:

• Adopting digital learning can appear risky due to initial expenditure, but based on multiple trusted sources and surveys, these investments will pay you rich dividends that shall boost you to lead the curve.
• For any institution, just installing equipment isn’t enough if students are unable to take advantage of that. So it’s the administration’s duty to make sure that the students realize it’s know-how and advantages to which they can utilize it.

• For budding entrepreneurs, yes, this is a right time to venture into the e-learning space. With easy availability of tools and labour to create educational content, there is a lot of chance to grab some good capital inflow.

• Since kids are becoming more attached to digital appliances than ever, schools should step in to initiate digitization of teaching. In this way, not only shall they acquire key Digital Citizenship skills, but also be both trainable and employable when moving into the corporate world.

Here’s How Quokka Labs Can Help

The online learning method is best suited for everyone in this era. If you are also looking for an E-Solution for your School or Institution, don’t hesitate to get a free consultation from our top minds at Quokka Labs.

We have the requisite experience in developing Online Learning & Course Management Systems that allows Teachers to create course structures and enrolling students to the same.

More Features Include:

• Manage courses & Enroll students
• Create & upload course content online
• Easy upload of online tests for each course
• Students can download course content and upload responses to online tests
• Manage progress & completion of each course
• Interacting User Dashboards and App Analytics
• & more.

Do you need a demo? You can always reach out to us +91-9501620330 or send an email to letstalk@quokkalabs.com