With governments around the world imposing extended periods of lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of COVID-19, UNESCO believes that over one and a half billion school or college-age learners are now stuck at home, representing roughly 90% of the world’s student population at one point in March 2020. Being stuck at home, however, does not necessarily mean that students cannot continue to learn. Advancements in technology, both computational and telecommunication, have enabled remote learning opportunities and may even allow students to complete their education on schedule.
How Education Platforms Are Responding to COVID-19
For many young learners, digital courses and online collaboration platforms have become the only way they can continue to learn. While financial institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities are turning their classrooms into virtual experiences, third-party entities such as MIT’s edX and Coursera are championing asynchronous, on-demand education. Khan Academy also witnessed an unprecedented surge in traffic after the US and other developed nations began issuing stay-at-home orders, serving 30 million learners in April.
Numerous other distance learning platforms made access to their platforms available to the general public for free as well.
The number of new education technology startups has shot up over the past decade, especially in developing economies such as India and China. According to a study conducted by KPMG and Google in May 2017, India’s online education market could grow to $2 billion in 2021, even before the pandemic. The valuation of startups in the space also reflects this potential. Early-stage ed-tech startup, Byju’s, for instance, has raised around $1.4 billion since its inception in 2015 from notable investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and China’s Tencent Holdings.
Changed Learning Habits: After the Pandemic
The education industry’s current response is in stark contrast to previous health crises such as the SARS epidemic and Swine Flu outbreak during which millions of learners were stuck at home with limited educational resources available to them.
According to the World Bank, however, previous health crises did prompt a handful of financial institutions to invest in information and computer technologies (ICTs). About the only sections of society that have not benefited from electronic learning platforms are the underprivileged that have limited or no access to broadband. Having said that, the number of Internet users has been on a steady climb since the turn of the century. Over time, as more and more students come online, there will already be extensive libraries of high-quality educational material available to them.
The Increasing Interest of Cloud Service Providers in the Edtech Sector
As educational platforms improve their catalogue and add new features such as progress tracking, live streams, and collaboration tools, cloud service providers are in a unique position to assist with this change in global learning habits. Edtech startups require significant amounts of bandwidth and computational resources to keep up with the thousands and millions of individuals accessing it simultaneously. Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that is also one of the most popular e-learning platforms globally, disclosed that it had spent close to $5 million on information technology (IT) in its 2018 Annual Financial Report, making it the second-largest expense area behind employee salaries. Cloud computing providers can cater to educational platforms that often have elastic demands for computational resources, depending on factors such as time of year and student interest.
For such providers, capturing a slice of this burgeoning market could solidify their foothold in the highly competitive cloud landscape that is currently dominated by the likes of Amazon and Google. The only problem, however, lies in the fact that identifying such startups can be a difficult task, especially with limited data and analytics. To assist with this, companies like Oddup are offering cloud providers clean and reliable business intelligence on up-and-coming education technology startups. Oddup also provides a wide range of proprietary metrics such as the Oddup Score and Benchmark Valuation, which act as barometers for startup health and valuation respectively.
The success stories of education platforms such as Unacademy and Byju’s in India will likely pave the way for similar startups in other parts of the world. This will be especially true in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia, where rising incomes and internet penetration will likely bring students to digital learning platforms for the very first time. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic should further accelerate this process, making online learning a household staple even long after the pandemic.
