Limelight-e4m webinar: 'E-learning market will exponentially grow post-Covid'

On September 3, exchange4media joined forces with Limelight Network to organise a webinar on ''Enhancing the User Experience in Online Education Through Quality Digital Content Delivery 2.0' where leaders from the industry spoke about how COVID-19 has enhanced e-learning experience in the country and other related topics.

The panel featured Amit Bhadbhade, Co-Founder & CTO, Utter App; Ankush Singla, Co-Founder & CEO, Coding Ninjas; Panchdeo Pandey, Product Marketing Manager, Teno App; Bhaswat Agarwal, Co-Founder, Classplus; Kashyap Dalal, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, Simplilearn; Mohammad Mohtashim, Founder & CEO, Tutorix;  Praveen Tyagi, Founder & CEO, Stepapp;  Sumeet Verma, CEO, Kopy Kitab and Aizaz Shaikh, Regional Manager, Limelight Networks; and Shikhar Goel, CTO, GeeksforGeeks. The discussion was moderated by Faisal Kawoosa, Founder & Chief Analyst, techARC.

Opening the discussion, Kawoosa said, “The ratio of the number of students studying online has changed because of COVID now. There are 70% online classes and 30% offline. We are moving from Digital skilling to Digitally skilled. This situation has led us to point there is no difference between production and development environment." He then questioned the panellists on COVID-19 enhancing the e-learning landscape in the country.

Sumeet Verma agreed to Kawoosa’s statement and added, “Consumer behaviours have changed over the months. The demands have grown in multifold for us."

"We are seeing very strong demand in people towards Digital skilling and getting ready for the transformation that's going to happen in their career in the next couple of years”, added Kashyap Dalal.

Kawoosa then quizzed the panellists on the elements responsible for rapid expansion and how the companies achieved such growth within the shortest possible time.

Goel informed the audience, “We built the technology in a way that it can work with the limited network as well”.

Singla put the spotlight on the setbacks they faced: "The biggest challenge for us was not really technology, it was mostly around being able to operationally scale the numbers of teachers from 100 to 1000 in a short span of time.”

Speaking about COVID incubating the right environment for e-learning, Dalal added: "In some sense when you are taking a new product to market, you want to do sampling. So, COVID-19 is your dream sampling event cause everybody will be forced to online education".

Shaikh then spoke about initiatives undertaken by Limelight to provide data to most places: "To resolve the issue in tier 2 and tier 4 cities of not getting data at the optimum speed, Limelight is investing in ISP peering and setting up Smart bots in these regions”.

"We saw a larger uptake in recorded videos being shared and students consuming content at their own pace”, added Agarwal.

Mohtashim informed the audience that Tutorix was always an online platform. He added, "There has been no dip neither again during this pandemic, If we see previous years trend then I can say late last year it was quite High but right now it's very constant".

Taking the discussion forward, the session chair asked about quality digital content delivery various players in the market.

Singla talked about recorded content. He said, "When you are learning to code everybody has their own learning curve, they take their own time. All our experiments have shown that recorded content works better". He further added, "As an edtech player I don't think content is what we are really selling".

Bhadbhade applauded Youtube saying,” If you are talking about recorded content, I don't think any tech platform has done a better job than what YouTube has done so far and it is not wise enough to even try to clash or anything of that sort.”

Moving towards the end of the insightful discussion, Kawoosa asked the panellist about the challenges to live stream with the classroom and long term impact on the e-learning sector.

The panellists presented their views. Tyagi added, "COVID has preponed everything. And we want to bring the gamification into learning, as there is more engagement."

"We need the proper infrastructure to deliver the content with optimum quality. You need security to protect your user database. You cant anticipate when anybody can attack your system. It is the same as having Life insurance,” pointed out Shaikh.

"Post covid, I don’t see any difference in tutorials point except working students and professionals who are using content, they just moved from their office to their home,” added Mohtashim.

Verma highlighted the need to stay relevant. He said, "People will pay if you offer what they want rather than portraying we are better than others. Relevancy and Curation are they key points."

"One very clear direction that I see is for many years is that online learning made continuously inroad and captured a higher share of the market", concluded Dalal.