BYJU’S IS FLUSH with funds and has instant recall when it comes to online education—all this in just about half a decade. When you take a moment to think about it, what is the first impression?
We might be the largest in India, but the fact remains that we have reached out to just 2 per cent of the total student population in India. We believe that education is still the best way to make it big for millions of people across the globe. Our efforts are to help children become self-initiated learners and chart their own life journeys based on their education. This is a segment where the real fun is not about creating a billion-dollar company, but helping millions think and learn better.
Did the first-mover advantage work?
Our decision to launch the app in 2015 was the turning point, because smartphone as a learning device and app as a medium gave us infinite reach for our learning programme. We realised that as the country gets more tech savvy, technology-enabled education will change the way learning is approached by students. Technology has helped us innovate the way subjects are taught, and also personalise it based on the capability of the student. One of the key reasons behind our huge adoption rate is the high-quality content we have created. Students are spending, on an average, 64 minutes per day learning from the app, which means that they find this helpful and engaging.
What was the business thought process that made you go for an advertising campaign with Shah Rukh Khan? Do you think it has achieved its objective?
We have created something truly unique, hence, it is essential that we take risks, dream big and keep high aspirations. It is also essential that when something works, we scale it up as fast as our capabilities allow. Our partnership with Shah Rukh Khan has helped us increase our reach and create deeper connect across geographies. His wide appeal among parents and children has made him a perfect fit for our brand.
Parent’s mentality, particularly when it comes to adopting a technology-based model for their kid as opposed to going to a coaching centre or having a tuition teacher at home, is a difficult challenge. How have you dealt with this?
The challenge has always been around changing the perception about how children should learn. Students should take up the initiative of learning on their own, while parents should take up supporting roles. All our efforts have been focused on demonstrating the advantages of online learning to parents and students. We also launched the Byju’s Parent Connect app, which offers real-time update on every student’s progress, allowing parents to stay up-to-date and be more involved in their child’s learning journey.
Every child is different. How does an app with no human connect deal with this?
In a conventional classroom learning system, access to high-quality education and personalisation of learning has always been an issue. In our system, children are still getting trained to solve questions and not ask questions. Learning happens because of a fear of exams, and not the love for learning. The advantage of integrating technology in education is that it not only enables you to take classes from the best teachers to every nook and corner of the country with the exact same high quality, but also personalises the way students learn.
To make this effective, we have designed a method called Knowledge Graphs—the brain of our learning system. It is a graphical representation of how different concepts are related to each other and can direct the learning journey of a student by pointing him to the relevant concepts or information based on what he is learning at that point of time. This allows students to access our content at their own pace, get personalised recommendations based on their previous learning patterns and truly fall in love with learning.
We have brought the ideal 1:1 teacher-student classroom experience to a more convenient form—on a mobile or tablet. The device they use adapts to their level of understanding, understands their learning gaps and addresses those gaps by recommending the next set of videos to watch or tests to take.
You love sports, football in particular. Are there lessons from sports which you think have come in handy while setting up, and scaling up, your business?
I played six sports in school and pursued my interest up until the university level. In fact, I still play football, badminton and table tennis regularly with my colleagues. I am a firm believer that ‘games teach you teamwork’. Sports really help in developing and honing real life skills like performance under pressure, controlled aggression and leadership. At school, while I played all day, I ensured that my studies never suffered. I can completely attribute this to the life skills that I learned on the sports field, in an unstructured environment. The sports schedule forced me to start ‘learning on my own’ by asking questions. It takes less time if students take an initiative, especially in the subjects they like.
What can you tell us about the company’s plans on going global?
We are in the process of building a product for international markets. At present, our core focus is on getting the K-3 (for 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades) product ready for launch in 2019. For the international product, we have popular YouTube teachers who are experts in their own domains. We are getting them to India to record and help us with product development, too. To start with, our target markets are English-speaking countries. We have aggressive expansion plans within India as well. We are creating learning programmes in vernacular languages. This will help us reach out to a wider set of students. There is still a long way to go before we call this a learning revolution.