Winter is coming for Ed-tech !!!

What does it mean for the teachers & Students?

7 min readJun 16, 2022

The term Ed-tech refers to the use of technology for education & learning. The use of projectors, online teaching, and AR/ VR platforms are usually part of the Ed-tech domain. But in recent times, the term Ed-tech has become synonym with “online learning”.

The years 2020–2021 have been phenomenal years for the Ed-tech sector. The sector experienced spectacular growth and boomed. These two years saw a boom in startups that were catering to the needs of online learning and hundreds of online courses sprouted. You can imagine the height of the craze by the fact that people started creating courses to teach “how to teach online?” and “how to become a millionaire by online teaching?”

But after every growth, there is a period of recession. The growth in Ed-tech is slowing down and some are thinking that the plateau has arrived in Ed-tech.

Sample representation of the growth of Ed-tech platforms

When everyone was sitting at home, it was easy to convince people to learn via videos and interactive online teaching platforms. Schools and education institutions were closed and people were free with access to phones and the internet. The inertia of receiving education via phone was targeted via the motivation of doing better in the coming times.

When people started engaging in online learning, content creation boomed. With the addition of more content and better resources, more and more people started looking at the domain. It captured the interest of investors, teachers, and students equally. Now when there is so much happening in the domain, it must address the issues that are intrinsic to the domain. But while the sector will be dealing with its issues, the investors, teachers, and the students would need to bear the consequences until the equilibrium is reached.

Some of us are not prepared for these changes, and thus there is a slowness appearing in the system and people are afraid of what is going to arrive?

Ed-tech & the issues it faces

The term Ed-tech refers to the use of technology for education & learning. The use of projectors, online teaching, and AR/ VR platforms are usually part of the Ed-tech domain. But in recent times, the term Ed-tech has become synonym with “online learning”.

Lack of Teaching Standards

Teaching and learning require great effort from teachers/ mentors and the students. There is no standard for teaching despite a number of programs being offered to teachers to enable them to impart teaching in more effective ways. Each teacher has their own unique style and the success of the teacher depends on the fact that “how much the students can learn”?

The lack of teaching standards has created a problem for the platforms. They cannot judge the content for its effectiveness and the only parameter they have is to use the feedback of learners.

There are a lot of courses available for the same topic and the learners don’t know which of these courses are good or bad? It creates confusion in their mind. Also, there is no clarity on which courses would be recognized by the recruiters and which courses would not be recognized. It creates a deterrence for the learners and they prefer to join offline courses for the important topics.

Thus, the platform hosts hundreds of courses that don’t see any interest from the learners and eventually fail to create momentum. People who accidentally enroll in such courses then keep waiting for the continuation of the course and force the content creators to generate content for a handful of learners. It is not desirable for them.

Online learning is distracting

Unlike offline learning which creates a one-to-one learning channel between the learner and the teacher. Online learning involves a lot of distractions. The sessions of doubt clearing are very pathetic as compared to an offline environment.

The basic parts of accessing the modules, interacting with fellow learners, learning via the doubts raised by fellow learners, and devoting oneself fully to the learning program are highly influenced by the learners’ environment. It prevents the success of online learning.

The success of an online learning platform is highly influenced by the learner and has little to do with the content creator. But it is the teacher who is judged for the failure of the learner. It is seen that even good courses are ranked and rated as bad by a lot of learners. In absence of neutral and comprehensive feedback, the new users find it hard to judge the content.

At the same time, the system is not suited for children who are immature. They tend to engage in messaging, gaming, and social media while using their laptops and tablets. The distractions are increased with no practical preventions. The mentors cannot keep an eye on the attendees and the knowledge imparting suffers a lot. Thus, the teachers prefer teaching offline if given a chance. It is also aided by the IT issues that are faced by the learners and teachers.

The platforms would find it hard to promote their online content when offline learning will start. It would push them to give discounts on the content that is already created and that would hurt their profitability and the salaries of the content creators.

Pricing & Cost

In an offline set up the teachers go to the schools/ training institutes daily and impart learning. They are paid for the effort. But for an Ed-tech set-up, the videos can be recorded one time and it is hard to justify paying these teachers regularly.

The students resist paying high fees when they have to learn the content by themselves by looking at a recorded video. Moreover, unlike movies, learning requires doubt clearing. It requires the availability of a teacher and if the teacher is always available for doubt sessions, then they demand a high fee.

It is tricky for the platforms to demand high fees from students because a lot of them don’t face doubt in each topic. A payment model that involves a fee that is directly proportional to the engagement of the teacher is needed. But such a model is resisted by the students which are unaware of how many doubts they may have about a topic. In presence of offline teaching options, it becomes even harder to hook these students for such subscriptions.

Unlike offline teaching where the American students would pay a high fee to their training institutions and the Asian students would pay a small fee to their institutions, the online courses treat all of them equally and the courses can be bought at marginal prices. It creates an unfair advantage for some of the platforms and creates a disturbance in pricing optimization.

Static & Fixed teaching Content

The teaching content is usually static and doesn’t change much over the years. It means that the videos once recorded are good for many years to come and in practical life, this eliminates the need of the majority of the teachers.

It is a red flag because now these teachers have no means to earn more money. That’s what is happening on a large scale. A lot of these teachers are laid off by these Ed-tech platforms worldwide.

They have obtained the rights to these videos and these videos will be good for the next 5–7 years. Until then, only a fraction of teachers would be needed to address the doubt of the new students. The majority of teachers who created these contents won’t be required and thus they would have to resume their offline teaching institutions.

It will create more problems because now the teacher would find it hard to demand more money from students when his own lectures are available at a fraction of the price on the learning platform.

Need of more gadgets

Finally, the Ed-tech demands gadgets, phones, laptops, and a continuous internet connection. For parents who have multiple kids, it is hard to buy an individual product for each kid and then also pay their tuition fees, and other school charges.

Arranging for these gadgets and connectivity services adds more pain to the parents and they start preferring the offline modes of teaching.

There are more issues with respect to content standardization, online abuse, inequality of resource sharing, the absence of laws to regulate the learning and protect the rights of different parties, and the high involvement of parents to make sure their kids learn.

Unless there is proper addressing of these issues, the domain growth would be slow and restrictive.

The Ed-tech sector has great potential in terms of expansion, imparting equal learning to everyone, and addressing the problem of imparting education to marginalized societies. But now the players need to look at the existing issues and try to address them wisely. In absence of that, it will become another gimmick and would soon end up like any other online tool.

Ed-tech cannot replace offline teaching and would only act as a support system to existing teaching methods. The growth of this domain is highly selective to the professional courses. The courses where the audience is mature, have enough resources, and doesn’t have a dedicated time to attend institutions, etc.