Abstract:

India may have nearly achieved its millennium development goal of universal access to education where enrollments are at 97% in 2016 (ASER) but, its worrying when India is ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The educational institutes are compelled to have a re-look at the existing structure where only 42.5% of Class three students can read class one text as per ASER 2016 report. Spiraling cost and burdening debts are evident seeing a 142 percent rise in bad education loans in three years. This has led to information and communication technology based learning to grow significantly circumventing the challenges of the traditional educational system. With a culmination of high quality faculty, cost and time saving, greater accessibility and convenience factors, its product is leading to increased acceptability among the students. With one of the largest education systems in the world, India is fast catching up in the online education space. According to a study by KPMG in India and Google Online Education in India: 2021, the market is set to grow to USD 1.96 billion and around 9.6 billion users by 2021, seeing a growth of 8x in five years from 2016. This newer sector called “e-learning” is leading to innovative ed-tech players in the online education space. This case study understands the multi-varied strategies adopted by Vedantu, a live tutoring application to enhance its value creation for the stakeholders i.e., management, students and the tutors. The implications of this study are that, in the nascent e-tutoring market, how are various models like freemium, subscription based, fee based or the marketplace model catering to individualized (one-to-one), one-to-few, one-to-many student segments in order to impart better quality learning. It also highlights the futuristic challenges and explores the opportunities faced by online educational players. A fundamental rejig is occurring across societal systems due to the information age catering to digital savvy students.

References:
[1] http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202016/aser_2016.pdf
[2] http://indianexpress.com/article/business/banking-and-finance/bad-education-loans-in-3-years-have-seen-142-per-cent-rise-indian-banks-4753878/
[3] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Indian-students-rank-2nd-last-in-global-test/articleshow/11492508.cms
[4] https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2017/05/Online-Education-in-India-2021.pdf

Keywords:

Edtech, e-learning, online education, personalised tutoring, freemium model, marketplace model.