To discuss the different challenges and opportunities in the education sector, BW Education hosted a panel discussion with the stalwarts of the domain, as a part of its Top Education Brands Awards.

The pandemic has significantly disrupted the higher education sector as well, which is a critical determinant of a country’s economic future. To discuss the different challenges and opportunities in the education sector, BW Education hosted a panel discussion with the stalwarts of the domain - Minal Anand, CEO, GuruQ; Vineet Patawari, Co-Founder, Elearnmarkets.com; Achin Bhattacharyya, Founder & CEO, Notebook; Manoj Chawla, CBO, Tribyte Technologies and Kounal Gupta, Founder and CEO, Henry Harvin Education (Session Chair). The session was a part of the Top Education Brands Awards presented by BW Education.

Explaining the impact of COVID, Chawala said, “The pandemic has hit everyone very hard, but in terms of the business, I think we are transitional was more about how do we ramp up to serve our customers. I think that Pandemic made a significant difference because I used to say once upon a time earlier that education is a very high involvement category and it affects carriers and therefore the adoption of Technology takes time. Now that sentence is no more valid. It's an invalid statement after the pandemic because I think the pandemic has worked as an enabler for technology.” 

Talking about the online transition, Patawari said, “The transition for all the Ed-Tech firms has been pleasant, unlike for the rest of the businesses. With lots of time in hand and sitting at home, people got this mindset that's skilling is essential. I think it was the first time when every individual takes skilling seriously. The earlier perception was I need a long time, I need to get out of the office and do a program, but this time the notion was completely shaken. Additionally, the vocational training is being taken very seriously now because people have this understanding that training can be done over online platforms also especially in the blended way.” 

Stressing on the challenges of the pandemic, Bhattacharya said, “Initially, the pandemic was very challenging for us because of our old business model. We were trying to reach out to the students through schools and quite successfully like more than 200-250 schools were working with us. It is all of a sudden these were completely different. First of all, the students were not coming to schools anymore. So schools couldn't be our touchpoint. So we recently understood that our business model needs to be realigned and we sat in various initiatives of trying to do to reach out to students. So finally, from the B2B model, we shifted to the B2C model. After realigning, now I can tell you our efficiency has actually gone up by 20%. So, it was a huge learning for us also.” 

Talking about acceptance of online learning, Anand said, “Being an Ed-tech company, people actually seamlessly started working about in week after lockdown, because for the first 10 days there was a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen. It was a little challenging because we just didn't know when things are going to restart a when they could open. One important thing is education and learning never stops. Only because of this pandemic, parents have actually been forced to accept online teachers. Indian parents don't want their children sitting in front of a screen for long hours. Obviously, you know, they are of that mentality and that is the bottom line. Now, they have really started seeing the benefits out of these online classes.”