For the Rs.23,000 crore-plus coaching class and private tuition market in the country, new media might well translate into the next engine of growth, or at least that?s what the coaching institutes are hoping for.
Constricted by the increasing demands of space and infrastructure?the perils of a growing industry?or with just an eye on expanding target base and revenues, coaching institutes are aggressively offering their services online. So much so that the future hinges on the new media for the numerous institutes offering coaching for every competitive exam on the roster.
Consider this: If Aakash Chaudhry, director of Aakash Educational Services, which offers coaching for engineering and medical entrances, expects about 30-40% of his total revenue to come from the online coaching segment in the next five years, MBA coaching centre VistaMind hopes to have 50% of all its students in its online programmes in the next three years or so. And, they have a gameplan to match their aspirations.
Aakash has entered into an alliance with DTH service provider Bharti Airtel?s new iTV service, iExam, for providing coaching services through Airtel digital TV. With the launch of Aakash TV Tutoring, Aakash is providing a one-year test series course for medical entrance exams to be held in 2013. ?With online tutoring, we can reach out to students at distant locations who can?t invest in coaching but have a DTH set top box at home. This is a service for the masses at an affordable cost,? says Chaudhry.
The service, costing R7 per day, was rolled out in July and already 2,000 students in tier-II and III towns have subscribed to it. At present, the institute is focusing on medical test papers and notes on physics, chemistry, botany and zoology only, which are prepared by the Aakash faculty, and a question bank of 1,000 questions. ?Increasingly, institutes are waking up to the fact that they need to deliver the best quality material in coaching to their students, no matter where they are in the country. For a major city like Delhi that?s not a problem as very good faculty is available, but what about the smaller towns? Institutes are now making efforts to give students in those towns the same quality of training and education that is available in a major city. This just enhances the credibility as well as consistency of a coaching institute,? says Chaudhry.
He adds that work is on in full swing with their software content developer to make video lectures available on the DTH platform at the earliest and the institute has set itself a deadline of April 2013 for it. Apart from testing waters in the DTH platform, Aakash is also pushing its coaching content through its tablet service, wherein the institute provides tablets to students which are pre-loaded with coaching content. The price band for the service is R14,000-30,000 for one year, which includes the cost of the device. Within two months of its launch, the service has found more than 500 takers. However, multimedia content and coaching material is not really there on the website of the institute. To this, Chaudhry says, ?Streaming of heavy multimedia content is still a big challenge in India. But as time progresses and as broadband speeds and penetration improves, we will progressively add these features to our web service as well.?
This is a far cry from the days when web-based coaching primarily meant online test papers and series, and study material in downloadable e-book format, but sans the modern audio-visual and graphic aid. In other words, just soft copies of physical study material and booklets. One of the biggest players in the engineering coaching space, FIIT JEE while still sticking to the test-series-and-study-material-only definition of online coaching, is also exploring the newer realms of technology-aided coaching. FIIT JEE, started offering online coaching at its Jaipur centre almost two years back and RL Trikha, director of the institute, says the process of converting a classroom into a smart classroom came because students in classes XI and XII deal with immense paucity of time. ?We have 68 online tests catering to various engineering competitive exams like IIT JEE, AIEEE and BIT SAT,? Trikha adds. Enrollments at FIIT JEE increase to 40,000 this year and it’s growing very fast. Almost 50% of the students refer to online tests.
While there are other major institutes providing coaching to school students for engineering and medical entrances, like Vidya Mandir Classes, that are increasingly using online multimedia tools and video lectures, the trend is more clearly seen in the MBA coaching space. This, industry insiders say, has been primarily fuelled by the CAT going online a few years ago. A major player in this space, Career Launcher (CL) has been running online programmes beefed up with live streaming of classroom sessions, pre-recorded lectures, and online doubt clearing sessions since the past four years or so. CL offers different programmes in the domain and has very recently started doing web seminars or ?webinars?, for which they are reporting a pretty enthusiastic response. ?We recently started a series of three-hour webinars for CAT (MBA), CLAT (law), CSAT (civil services), wherein students can register online from anywhere in the country and can participate through various modes like video,?text chat questions, live streaming via their webcams, voice chat questions, forums, blog interactions, etc. We?ve already done seven to eight over the last month and more than 5,000 students participated from across India, by paying as much as for a film show in a theatre,?for each of these sessions. We have also?partnered with Airtel to reach out to students over their mobile network with one-hour interactive sessions. The explosion of technology gives immense power in our hands to reach out to every child in the remotest parts of the country with quality interventions. We have a long way to go,? says R Sreenivasan, head of innovation and design, CL Educate Ltd. He adds that apart from having various programmes already in the online space, services like live video dissection of the CAT test paper by CL experts, audio-conferencing with faculty and experts and even a smartphone app are on the anvil.
Arks Srinivas, CEO of VistaMind, explains that though there was an initial resistance to online coaching, the pedagogy is gaining momentum as it is possible to check the understanding and get feedback immediately on a real-time basis. ?The kind of flexibility that the online mode provides can?t be accessed in any other way. Of course, there might be some initial resistance as people are set in their conventional ways. It?s not just with parents and students, even teachers suffer from a mental block when it comes to online teaching. But attitudes are slowly changing and already we are seeing a beeline of interested students,? he says. VistaMind is a fairly new entrant in the space and is hugely banking upon online coaching aids not just to supplement students in its classroom programme, but also as a mode of expansion by enrolling students in towns and cities where the institute does not have a branch.
?I consider virtual training far better than the physical offline mode. While in a classroom, where 60 students are being taught together, individual attention is hardly ever a possibility. However, in an online set-up, while the teacher is addressing many students at the same time, say through a live video lecture, the students are isolated from one another and for them it ends up being like a one-on-one interaction. This primarily means more attention and less distraction for the student as well as the teacher. Virtual classrooms, with various technological aids, can be made highly personalised and individual-centric,? says Srinivas.
VistaMind is offering online coaching for MBA exams at present, but plans to expand to science subjects for classes XI and XII too, besides the civil services aptitude test. The facility was rolled out in May this year across six cities and the first batch comprises 80 students. Now VistaMind has 1,600 students in its offline classroom programmes, while more than 100 students are enrolled in their online programme. Apart from having live online classes and study material in various formats, including pre-recorded video lectures, VistaMind is also working on enhancing the student experience by including file sharing, online multimedia doubt indicators for teachers, individual chat function during a virtual class for individual doubt-clearing and more.
And while industry insiders and analysts are not willing to put any numbers on the table yet regarding this segment, they say it’s a trend to reckon with, which is substantiated by the growing number of institutes devising newer and more tech-savvy ways of reaching their prospective students. ?The online test prep market is in its nascent stage in India and is predominantly in the engineering and MBA space. But it is expected to see good growth in the time to come. This is due to technological growth, increased Internet penetration and more devices being introduced,? explains Bharat Gulia, senior manager at consulting firm Ernst & Young.
Another important aspect that cannot go amiss is the cost factor. Online programmes, as they do not require physical space and infrastructure, are a much more cost-effective medium for the institutes, which in turn make them cheaper for students as well. VistaMind?s online one-year programme for CAT preparation costs about R15,000, while its physical offline classroom programme is upwards of R20,000. CL, which offers different variants in its online programmes, has priced them at just 1/4th of the average price for a one-year regular classroom programme. The average cost of CL?s online MBA preparation programme is about R5,000 while the regular classroom programme costs around R20,000.
