“The past few months,” Ramandeep Arora, the founder & CEO of Edwisor, says, “have been good in terms of business, but great in terms of the learning set his team has developed.”
The live method of delivery of online classes, he argues, is the future.
Edwisor is an edtech platform, which started as an e-learning company in 2015-16. During the first two years the focus primarily was on providing e-learning content to college students and working professionals who wanted to upskill. “Along the way, we found that while there was huge growth in terms of the number of students who were coming onto our platform, the completion rates were not very good,” Arora says.
By mid-2018, completion rates on the Edwisor platform ranged at 25-30%. While these were still better as compared to 10-12% for the massive open online courses (MOOCs), Arora says a rethinking in terms of disseminating quality education and making people employable was needed. “If you have to truly make employees ready for industry, a mere video-delivery method of teaching doesn’t work.”
Since then, Edwisor has focused on live classes with a small batch size.
“We now focus on small batch size, and have found that these are much better in terms of completion rate,” Arora says. “In fact, in a smaller class size of 10-12 students, the completion rate can be as high as 75%. When every student is different, teaching—be it in a college, school or even online—has to become personalised.”
Edwisor has conducted more than 12,000 hours of live classes, arranged over 10,000 interviews, with the help of 1,000-plus mentors from the industry—who not only teach, but also act as the connect between students and employers.
As far as student numbers are concerned, before Covid-19 the Edwisor platform used to get about 30,000 students per month, but after that it has increased to around 55,000 per month. “In terms of paid subscribers we have seen a 30% jump,” Arora adds.
The future, he says, is live classes in smaller batch sizes, where teachers/mentors can deliver a more personalised learning experience to student, ensuring they are job-ready.
