Supplementary Education
The phenomenon of after school learning and the rise of online learning platforms
The Indian education ecosystem is primarily driven by competition. India has one of the worlds highest demographic dividend, “the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger, and 65 and older)”. This means there is a large skilled workforce ready to get their hands on the best opportunities available. But the employment generation has not seen much improvement in the recent decades. That means there is a limited number of highly sought-after opportunities — IIT-JEE, CLAT, NEET (formally AIPMT), etc. This increasingly widening divide in the number of students applying and the number of seats available has made these competitive exams fierce and cutthroat.
Parents of these children realize this divide, they, therefore, want their children to have a competitive edge over other students. Some parents enroll their kids in after-school tuitions, others opt for private home tuitions, some go to the extent of enrolling their kids in foundational classes.
Factors like lack of time, inability to understand the curriculum, and the feeling that parents and schools are not well-equipped to give their kids the competitive edge, are increasingly encouraging parents to opt for after-school tutoring for their kids, both online and offline.
While some parents are open to the idea of letting their kids explore different fields in their school days, others have very specific goals of preparing their child to be an engineer or a doctor from the very beginning. Irrespective of this, most parents and often the students themselves opt for coaching institutes that run programs to “coach” these students to “crack” competitive exams like JEE, CLAT, NEET, etc. The coaching classes for a student can start as early as 11 yrs of age, where the children prepare for an exam they MIGHT appear for 6 years later! These classes are called “foundational classes”. These students are expected to not only keep up with their curriculum at school but also prepare for competitive exams with no time for self-learning or holistic personality development.
Instead of helping students get excited about the subject and understand its concepts and how to utilize them, the focus of these tuition and coaching institutions has been on equipping students to score well on exams. These institutions teach you how to solve the most MCQs in the least time because that’s what the competitive exam will be about. Students are given new question banks and archive books containing hundreds of questions based on the previous year’s exam papers. Even the teachers in these institutes focus more on tips and tricks to do well in exams instead of helping students develop a practical understanding of concepts.
This is what platforms like Khan academy and Byju’s have wanted to change. To cultivate a love for learning among students, online learning platforms like Byju’s try to provide a better, more engaging addition to tuitions and coachings. The platforms promote self-learning among students, intending to give them a deeper understanding of the concepts, which the schools, as well as the after-school coaching institutes, have been lacking. Innovations like Byju’s Parent Connect app, which was launched in 2017, have also included parents in this online learning revolution by helping them track their child’s learning throughout courses, making them feel in control of their child’s education. This made Byju’s an even more compelling option for parents.
This was complemented by the explosion of Internet reach in India because of inexpensive unlimited Internet plans by telecom services like Jio, which have served as catalysts for the online learning efforts to become mainstream in the last few years.
Education soon became a 3 legged stool, where students started juggling their learning needs between their school, coaching institute, and e-learning platforms.
Which learning methods do you prefer? Do you think primary learning can be improved so that there is no need for supplements? Do share your ideas and help us create an education ecosystem where supplements are actually supplementary, using them is a choice, not a necessity!
