Why would you do an Education startup?
It has been a total of 10 months since I quit my job to find a new project to work on. I was on bed for 3 months because of a surgery, but all in all, it’s been good.
For the first time, I was consciously trying to understand the world and not just moving along. I was reading the things I wanted to read. I eventually felt inclined to education for the power it held onto humanity.
Education is the second largest industry in the world right after the medical industry but thinking about an Edtech startup? Not so fast.
Why would you go into Edtech? There is so much competition. You need money.
This is something I hear on a daily basis. And in a way, it’s a valid concern. There is an estimate of 3500 edtech startups registered in India.
There is a also big question mark on the differentiation between these companies. They target different segments but their offerings don’t change by much.
But, most of them are making money. Byju’s recently became the only unicorn in the country to generate profits displaying the power of Edtech.
All this puts a very difficult question in front of the entrepreneur. Do I just go out there and try to make money knowing that I probably won’t be able to bring much differentiation to the market? Or do I choose a different market with more complexity and differentiations?
To understand this, you have to understand the importance of education in a common Indian family.
My education
For my family, sending me to Ryan International School meant taking more local trains, travelling small distances by foot, very little expenditure on shopping, all in the hope that I would make something of myself.
My fees at Ryan was 1,20,000 for class 11th. My sister’s fees was 62,000. I was on a 100% scholarship from FIITJEE otherwise that would have cost us another 1,00,000 pa.
Total: 2,82,000
My family income in 2011: 7,50,000
%age of family income: 38%
That is ridiculously high. And let me speak on how we got to 7.5 lacs. My dad was taking trains from Malad to go to Fort. That is 33km one side. My mother was taking a bus to Dahisar at 7 in the morning. She was a teacher. Thats how they did their jobs and scraped together 7.5lakhs pa.
Estimates point at 15% of the family income goes into education but considering a family that values education highly, it would be greater than 20%.
This points towards something deep.
Education brings out a very primitive and deep seated need in us to get better and get ahead. To prove ourselves. To earn respect.
Education comes with a user behaviour that is unprecedented. It is right up there with hospital bills, marriages, funerals, baby care where the user goes beyond his/her means and spends for the best of the best.
When you look at all this, you realise that there is a terrible responsibility on top of any company that sells an education product. When you take 10,000 rupees, you are taking from the money that was saved by making a lot of sacrifices.
This is not true for hotel booking or shopping clothes online. This is serious.
When I hear of parents complaining that they took 3 years worth of Byju’s product and in 2 months, their kid doesn’t use it anymore, I know what happened here. And after speaking to multiple Byju’s sales people I know it to be true.
The primitive instinct of parents was tapped. It clouded their judgement.
By saying that Byju’s is a bad product would be like saying Udemy is a bad product. It’s not. I spend a tonne on Udemy. But, it is a resource just like any other.
And for a child like me, with that hunger inside of him, I wish Byju’s was there for me in my childhood.
But who sparked that hunger? A teacher.
That’s the job of a teacher.
If I am hungry, I don’t need animations. I will dig through books to get what I want. And if there is no hunger, it doesn’t matter how easy to digest you make it.
The fallacy
The job of a teacher is deeply misunderstood.
Consider this.
XYZ classes do well. You see posters of kids cracking IIT and that number keeps increasing each year.
Behind this cloud of success, there is a big selection bias. XYZ gets more and more applicants and their selection becomes more stringent each year and hence only the best of the best are able to get there and they score higher naturally.
And this dogma would stay around for a while. Year after year. It’s rather difficult to break the chain. It has nothing to do with the teaching over there.
That is the big problem with the education industry. We don’t see the true heroes.
A teacher’s north star
I don’t think it is the teacher’s job to create more successes. I can’t look at how much the topper scored and judge the teacher.
I need to look at how many students could the teacher spark hunger inside of and how many of them want to study.
Education doesn’t make you successful. You do that on your own. Education is only supposed to give you the tools that give you a fair chance. We, as educators need to give that tool to more and more students.
We need to spark that hunger. They will find the book, they will study on their own. They will solve questions. It will all happen.
Measuring Engagement
If i had a way to put a single entity to measure, I’d measure engagement. It’s the closest definition to hunger.
When we looked into this, we saw 3 things that are particular to increasing engagement.
- 2-way communication: Just watching a video is passive. You have to talk to the student, let him/her express.
- Competition: You have to make it less of a solo activity.
- Solving questions and participating in discussions. You can’t just sit back and chill.
To solve this in 2020, we depend on teachers a lot. And we need their attention. We need their empathy.
At Kohbee, we take online live lectures. But our focus lies on breaking down engagement. We keep the batch size at 4 particularly for the conversation part. We believe, these recorded conversations and measurement of engagement will build the database for new solutions to rise.
The learning we need for an always available AI teacher is hidden in this data of conversations and it is upto us to tap it.
It is upto us whether we can ignite that hunger that can make use of the resources that other 3500 Edtechs are curating for us.
How would you reimagine teaching? I would love to know.
