If we look at the edtech standpoint, India is on the cusp of growth. With the rise of internet and smartphone penetration, it is seen that digital education is getting tremendous adoption in last few years. If we talk about figures, online learning space in India is estimated to grow from current $4 billion to $40 billion by 2030.

And you know what contributes to this number? It is the need for working professionals to continue to upgrade their knowledge. Yes, with the evergreen subjects like marketing , HR, finance going strong and with the advent of new areas like big data, data science, digital marketing, working professional needs to upgrade their knowledge and emerging startups in edtech help them to learn from the convenience of their home or office.

The online learning space was revolutionized by the introduction of recorded lectures by players like Coursera and Edx. A participant enrolls in the course and by its completion time, there are hardly 10 % participants left.The completion rate is poor. This is a challenge for the ed-tech companies as they fall into the bubble of providing just the study material and not the experience.

Beyond the bubble of edtech companies providing course material online, players like Talentedge are offering interactive learning solutions to the participants.

Inception


Founded in 2012 by Aditya Malik, Talentedge is present in Mumbai, Gurgaon and Bengaluru and has a strong international presence in over 12 countries. Company provides value-adding, premium and affordable education solutions to students, institutions and enterprise workforce through its interactive technology platform ‘Direct to Device’. It claims to be India’s first company to provide this technology solution that enables virtual learning anytime and anywhere.

Offering a suite of online programs, the company is disrupting the conventional brick and mortar format of learning, to offer a progressive interactive virtual classroom environment that is better than a real classroom.

The participants have the professor online at the same time and can ask questions using message board. Since it is an interactive session- students don’t miss out the experience of making friends like we do in regular classroom. Participants can interact with themselves over the message board too.

“Our platform is completely based on a service oriented architecture which gives us the flexibility and agility to port the functionalities on all the devices and across all the businesses. With our kind of experience, user data in the domain and technical expertise in general there's no one in the edtech segment who have exploited big data, ML, AI, Virtual and mixed reality together collectively to achieve one goal - "put a highly effective learning eco system in place,” says Aditya Malik, CEO and MD of Talentedge.

Meet The Brains Behind The Company


team talentedge

Malik, is a successful tech-entrepreneur. The diversity of roles that his career spans across fields like sales, ops, risk management and HR, at the national and international level, has endowed him with a 360 degree experience. This has held him in good stead in his startup entrepreneurial journey. Talentedge is Aditya’s third venture after leaving a corporate job to join Lumis Partners. His strong process orientation skills thanks to his strategic knowledge of Six Sigma has further anchored him in handling the operations of Bank of America and GE SBI’s consumer finance segment’s establishment in India, before he went on to foster a new enterprise with Talentedge.

Technology- Facilitating Flexible Learning For Professional


Talentedge’s technology enabled infrastructure ensures state of the art synchronous e-learning, collaborative learning management system, with online assessments and peer-to-peer collaboration, thus facilitating flexible learning for professionals as well as students as per their comfort and preference.

Malik believes that they use best of the technology to make the platform competitive and completely in-align with newer capabilities and this is the reason why they have been distributed technology platform to build the platform.

“Our platform is completely based on a service oriented architecture which gives us the flexibility and agility to port the functionalities on all the devices and across all the businesses.
With our kind of experience, user data in the domain and technical expertise in general there's no one in the edtech segment who have exploited big data, ML, AI, Virtual and mixed reality together collectively to achieve one goal - "put a highly effective learning eco system in place", says Malik.

Take on Using AI & IoT


A typical learning ecosystem will have diverse forms of learners. Different learning styles/ preferences, varying IQ s, attention span etc. are serious challenges which need addressing in order to confer effective and uniform learning experience on an edtech set up. The same platform needs to adapt and guide individual learners differently in a manner suiting their learning preferences, biases and existing knowledge. It’s like having 1:1 teacher to student ratio in a physical classroom, in terms of personal attention being given to individual student.

“At Talentedge we have provided certificates to 0.5 million students on various professional courses, in the process we have acquired good amount of data which has led us devise number of predictive models with respect to difference learner sets (across all courses) around effective learning paths with a goal for the learner to improve upon his/ her performance in terms of his/ her assessment performance and course involvement, says Malik.

Talentedge has developed machine learning framework using AWS lambda framework which tracks the actual learner scores vs the predicted learner scores and guides the learners through effective learning paths thereby ultimately providing a highly effectively learning delivery.

If we talk about Internet of Things, it will globally play a vital role in enhancing UX in the edtech domain, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the learning process. “We at Talentedge are leveraging embedded technology to provide companion apps on apple and android watch. Apart from keeping an enrolled user updated on day to day updates related to the enrolled course the companion apps shall also keep the user updated on the relevant happenings around the user and globally as well,” says Malik.

With the advancements in the field of big data, IoT, ML, AI, VR and mixed reality edtech domain per se is witnessing rapid evolution in terms of learner experience, communication and collaboration (Instructor - Learner, Learner - Learner) etc. And therefore many startups are mushrooming in this space to tap the untapped market.

On asking Ajay Revaila, Head-technology at Talentedge about the challenges they face, he said, “All of these much evolving technologies collectively firing to achieve evolution of the learner quality along the highly effective learning process. For us in terms technology the biggest challenge is for us to keep pace with the growth we are getting. It is an exciting place to be in and we are enjoying our work everyday to exceed expectations of business growth”.

But company’s world class learning pedagogy, best-in-class interactive IP solutions, cutting edge, Direct to Device technology, alliances with top institutes, in- depth industry expertise and gamified assessments and intelligent analytics are the path-breaking attributes that keep the company at an edge over its peers.

Road Ahead


Talentedge’s target audience falls under the age group of 18 to 40 years and is present in India as well as abroad. Also, the company’s prospective customers include aspirational and progressive, tech-savvy individuals, new age learners, students and young professionals. Talentedge has a tie up with the following institutes XLRI Jamshedpur, IIT Roorkee, IIFT New Delhi, IIM Kozhikode, MICA and SMU to provide seamlessly education to its users.

Malik plans to carve a niche place for Talentedge as India’s first online interactive education company. He wishes to achieve a phenomenal growth rate of 35% every year for the company by changing the way India learns while disrupting the category. With a bandwidth of 150 to 200 employees, he wishes to double the consumer-college partnerships from 6 to 12, which will eventually lead to an increased consumer business. Besides this, he also envisages working with top 15 organisations across sectors like FMCG, Telecom, BSFI and IT.

“We are growing at the CAGR of 100% year on year. In this FY 2017-18. We are also looking to expand inorganically and are looking at some opportunities to acquire few businesses which complement our offerings," concludes Malik.
Advertisements

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post
Like this content? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get latest updates.