‘Life-skill courses will continue to thrive on online platforms even after normalcy is restored’.
New Delhi: Access to the internet has opened corridors for the surge of the “e-learning era”, and this trend has shown a spike during these pandemic times, with more eyeballs surfing the internet, either for hunting jobs or to locate skill development courses.
Prashant Aggarwal, who is the head of business at Edmingle, a unified platform that enables educators and institutions to handle their online as well as offline operations by creating, marketing and selling their online courses, told The Sunday Guardian that once education is diversified from the mainstream, plenty of new opportunities can be generated. “Among different segments in the market of the education sector, skill development and STEM education have turned out to yield the maximum scope for us, as other segments like K-12 education and competitive examinations are dominated by one or two giant key players.” He added, “Keeping in mind the current scenario, we are planning to launch a highly cost-effective mobile-first approach on this Teachers’ day by eliminating all unnecessary costs.”
For Archana P. Gehlot, who is the founder of Asmakam, a forum for self-led open learning space, the lockdown has pushed parents and children to introspect on building real-life skills for sustainable living beyond the four walls of formal schooling. Speaking to The Sunday Guardian, Archana said: “For the last 4-5 months, we are flooded with calls and there are back-to-back sessions. So, by mid-September, we are introducing a beta version of ‘self-learning cafe’ which would be an ecosystem of the list of learning resources and life-skill programmes by facilitators for those who want to come out of formal schooling. Initially, we had planned this cafe to have physical spaces in cities, but since we are amidst a pandemic, we are planning to launch it this way. Indeed, this will provide a framework for its physical launch after normalcy is restored.”
The shift to live classes from recorded ones is among the first few visible changes on educational platforms during the Covid pandemic. For solo entrepreneurs, the concern has moved beyond extending their monetary objectives to building an online community. Also, initially, there had been a lot of resistance from physical spaces of learning, but now people have started to experiment with online products.
Speaking about educational start-ups in the post-pandemic world, Prashant Aggarwal told this correspondent, “I believe offline education is going to stay, but in a very new avatar of blended or hybrid learning. It would be a coherent mixture of both where each medium could be utilised according to our needs. The life-skill courses shall continue to thrive on online platforms even after normalcy is restored.”
Sunny Takrani, CMO of Younity, a platform that has built a community to provide them with mentorship, internship, coaching etc., told The Sunday Guardian that though they have a robust online community, being a start-up that has started a few weeks before the nationwide lockdown was announced, they really hope for physical meetings with their community members.