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Ed-Tech Surges As Students Learn From Home Amid Coronavirus

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Rajan Sarma

The Novel Cororanavirus (COVID-19), since its initial outbreak in December 2019 has made a tremendous impact on the global market. The global pandemic has given the world market it's worst beating since the financial crisis of 2008. As of March 2019, the Novel Coronavirus has put over 300 million students and educators out of the training and education institutions , as communities and countries are desperately making an effort to contain the spread of the virus.

As schools and colleges are being shut down amid Coronavirus scare, Ed-Tech companies are stepping up their efforts to provide innovative online learning solutions amid Coronavirus to all kinds of educational institutions across the world.

Global Ed-Tech Trends:
Ed-Tech companies that offer remote learning solutions are witnessing a sudden surge in the usage of online learning platforms and are capitalizing on the trends. From Brisbane to Boston to Barcelona, education institutions all around the globe are adapting to alternative teaching practices and learning practices. For instance, Adobe is offering free access to cloud tools up until the month of May for students who are unable to attend schools due to the deadly disease outbreak.

A global giant Google, on the other hand, is allowing education customers to use the Hangouts Meet Premium Functionality App available at G-suite for free up to July. This app enables 250 people to host a virtual meeting that can be streamed by 100,000 viewers at a time. Microsoft too has been proactively tackling the Coronavirus by offering free Office 365 E1 to educational institutions with no end date specified.

Having free access to these features offered by tech giants has enabled training institutions and organizations to at least perform their basic functions such as to conduct online training sessions through remote learning modules, online tests, and Webinars.

The Indian Scenario:
Fearing that schools, colleges, and Universities could potentially be a fertile background for the further spread of the Coronavirus, several educational institutions across India in places such as Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Kerala, and Mumbai, among many others have been asked to be shut-down indefinitely by the government of India. There are more than 250 million school going kids in India, and March-April is generally the exam season across entire India. Therefore, the Coronavirus outbreak in India has disrupted the education sector significantly.

With an air of uncertainty prevailing across the educations sector, Ed-Tech companies hailing from India have stepped out to the plate by offering students staying at home with their innovative education technology solutions. Edtech startups like BYJUS, Vedantu , Toppr and Lido Learning are offering various online courses so that students staying at home do not have to compromise with their studies. To this end, Ed-Tech startup BYJUS recently announced that they will be providing free access to its app to students from class 1 to classes 12 in India. Mumbai based Toppr is also making free provisions for students from classes 5 to 12. Bengaluru based Vedantu – a live and personalised learning platform is joining hands with schools from Bengaluru, New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Kerala to deliver uninterrupted classes.

Ed-Tech Domain is on the cusp of a revolution already, and in a couple of decades, traditional learning institutes are going to be replaced by personalizing online learning platforms anyway. The latest outbreak of the Coronavirus has given the opportunity for edutech companies to achieve the long term plan to digitise government schools and other learning institutions.

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