With K-12 focus, Tata cranks up on online education

Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) plans step up focus on the kindergarten-to-class 12 (K-12) space, hitherto dominated by players like Educomp Solutions, Everonn Education and NIIT.
K-12 is a vast space, with the market for digital classrooms growing at 60% per year, TIS chief executive officer Sanjaya Sharma said. “There is space for countless firms as the potential is huge.”

The company aims to be the leader in this segment, said Sharma. TIS, started in 1990, forayed into this space with an initial investment of `100 crore from Tata Industries. The company has mostly been in the e-learning space, providing training modules for corporates and government organisations, apart from creating digital material for educational publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill.

“Our current forte is our product ClassEdge with which we want to reach out to 1,000 schools in the next one year,” said Sharma. “We are looking at covering all the states and over 100 cities in the near future.”

ClassEdge was launched in February and is a platform which provides assistance to teachers working in the K-12 domain to teach topics in an interactive manner.

Consulting firm Technopak estimates the education sector in the country to grow from $40 billion in 2008 to a whopping $115 billion by 2018.

K-12 comprises as much as 60% of the education sector in India.
The country has about 80,000 private schools and 225,000 partially aided schools, apart from more than a million government schools.

“Of these, less than 10,000 are currently taking various digital learning platforms,” said Sharma.

TIS will approach private and partially aided schools before reaching out to government schools, he said.

ClassEdge creates a lesson plan for syllabi of state board, ICSE, and CBSE schools for topics in every subject, which detail the activities and assessments that are to be given by the teacher, along with video clips explaining concepts, worksheets, quiz questions, animated media, etc.

Sharma said 10-12 new lessons are created by the 225 member team at TIS every week and these lessons get mounted into the school servers, which are directly connected with the company’s central server.

“The idea is to assist the teacher in making learning interesting. We are seeing very good demand from all stakeholders including parents, students, teachers, principals,” said Sharma.

Industry experts say the potential of digital classrooms is huge given the poor quality of education in several schools.

Arundhati Chavan, chairperson, Parent Teacher Association (Maharashtra), said parents believe kids will grasp concepts easily through online modules. “Modules which make mundane concepts attractive are always welcome. However, teachers should not just rely on those materials, but use them as supporting mediums while simultaneously bringing out their own innovative methods of making learning interesting.”

Despite the attractive opportunities, getting a strong foothold in the K-12 segment is tough due to the costs involved, say experts.
“Scaling up in this business is not very easy as several schools are often reluctant to spend on such mediums. Moreover, if firms partner governments, then often dedicating adequate expenditure becomes a rarity,” said Srishti Anand, analyst with Angel Broking.

Firms like Educomp, NIIT and Everonn have entered into public private partnerships with state governments under the build-own-operate-transfer model to get contracts for schools and provide technology intensive infrastructure.

Anand said the established players are adding 3,000-4,000 schools per year to their K-12 kitty, with an average of eight classrooms per school. “So, for a new player, 1,000 schools in the first year is a reasonable number.”