Shifting Gears in Online Learning Industry : Effect of Global Crisis

What’s burning. What’s good. And what’s next.

Everything around us is going through the change forced upon by the recent global pandemic; businesses who had their operations planned out around the year based on intelligence from historical data were forced to adopt a new strategy to function — most of all, for end user engagement.

Almost nothing is ever going to be the same — it’s an evolving fact, if not an assessment of the immediate situation — even when we’d come out of this.

And, while every other industry is dealing with it in its own way, with their specific set of challenges, today — here I want to talk about Online Learning or eLearning.

Schools, colleges, professional intuitions, coaching centers, and others on the same lines, are equally hit because their commodity is intangible knowledge and their consumers are all gone — and with that all of the tangible products, facilities, events, establishments, all of it, are no longer in demand.

So, now that the students can’t come to you, you have to go down the road of online engagement — eLearning — where there already were entities functioning well before this situation and suddenly there are so many more. So, what’s happening, and what are potential pitfalls in how now everyone has started delivering online education including schools? And will this surge die as fast as it has come up? I’ll be answering some of these questions and pose some of my own and from our friends in this business.

Forced Adaptation

Online education, not so long ago, was only an alternative for a very limited set of interests. Mostly only for high-school or college graduates who were preparing for examinations for higher studies or Govt. jobs, working professionals, and a small subset of school-going students whose parents were ‘exposed enough’ to this side of the world and wanted the best for their children.

Given above, adopting online delivery of learning, while in everyone’s road-map I’m sure, was nowhere in near future — I’m referring to schools, colleges, brick-and-mortar coaching institutes (which we have so many), and other specialized learning centers.

With COVID-19 hitting and people going into isolation and lock-down, things came to a halt, of course except for those players who were already delivering content online, and everyone else had to move quickly to adapt to a plan that was baked or half-baked, but meant for 5 years in the future. Neither the platform nor the faculty were ready, so came a spike in the number of requests to application developers, content creators, and to other parties in this taking-you-online business, from all sides.

Even, businesses already running an online platform had to change the rules of engagement for now the instructor or teacher were no longer in a broadband plugged-in classroom but streaming from their home over wifi or even mobile hotspot, and on platform side they saw a rise in incoming footfall on their site or app; most of it were browsers but the consumer base did grow by a certain percentage. So, they also had to scale up which is directly proportional to expenses more than it is to revenue; and managing the pre-sales cycle and post-sales engagement would dictate finding new ways of reducing cost — which is to mainly adapt to their optimization or scale-up strategy stuck in whatever stage, may be even somewhere in formulation, really fast!

Quality Content and Protecting IP/ DR

Not everyone had the quality content to deliver or any content to deliver for the online format — learners behave & engage differently on such platform, the classroom model wouldn’t work here and concepts and lessons are to be modularized, revamped, and made more-visual & engaging.

With your end users, now ‘pseudo-consumers’ also being the direct decision makers (parents can, and do, also watch what type of content online providers are delivering) the game has completely changed. Now their loyalty or affinity is not towards a brand — reputed school, good locality etc — but for the content quality itself. There is simply too much that goes on into creating the quality content and with that came the need to protect that content from piracy, redistribution, reproduction or rebroadcast.

The above concern gives rise to although necessary but an additional expense for the providers — management and protection of IP or Digital Rights (DR). This comes at a cost, setting up methods necessary to protect the IP/ DR and the means to track infringement and take action. I won’t talk much about it but to quote quickly there is yet another market segment, not new but now very strongly building, to provide Digital Rights Management (DRM), Dynamic Visual Watermarking, and Forensic Fingerprinting services.

Teacher’s Plight

While everyone is talking about a boom in the sector, one very ignored part of the whole process are the teachers. Once very revered by their students, and delivering in their own unique style, now they are forced to stick to a script — pattern and method — and to top it all, they have to prepare for 4 hrs for a 2 hrs class, sit in front of webcams every day no matter how unfamiliar with the technology.

A flip side of this issue is bad teaching. There were certainly some bad teachers, and bad teaching coupled with a bad delivery format or simply with an online delivery medium is far impacting than when it was inside a classroom. As mentioned above, the pseudo-consumers are also watching and this is either going to reflect poorly on the provider in terms of churns or worse — to form a negative opinion on the overall industry, that this simply doesn’t work!

Infrastructure — what’s in your control?

There is a pressure on providers to maintain the delivery quality which also includes faster loading of content, less buffering issues, and faster closing of customer feedback loop.

Now the experience online is directly dependent on type of device and network connection speed more than type of content. And a bad experience could be result of a bad connection, bad product, or lesser motivation to innovate which would cause some of the new businesses, with underdeveloped product or delivery channel, to shut down as quickly as they came up. How the network conditions are in your target region is beyond anyone’s control but you can reduce some of these choking issue by using platform-agnostic content format, package your content into multiple bit-rates, get a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your content — which will take the load off of your hand and scale on demand — and then get your application to switch between different content bitrates based on device’s available bandwidth. And when you choose your delivery partner make sure to know the if they are present in the regions where your target audience is and how deep are they penetrating into the last-mile delivery.

Lowering Cost of Acquisition

Right now, all your consumers, with their newfound motivation — needless to say the pandemic, are searching for a place to ‘land at’, and start their consumer journey; from their viewpoint they are not looking to make a commitment unless they have tasted the waters, which is a sentiment fueled mostly by availability of so many choices, and in doing so they end up signing up for trial content and put a significant load, and thus add into the cost of operation without making even their first transaction. So, at this high point businesses need to find the balance between how much of their content is to be made available for free consumption, if at all, to attract what % of the newly swollen market segment. Some might even not offer any content for free at all while their are platforms serving a lot of content for free for whom this is working as lead generation model, and mind you at this point the revenue from ads are also not hot. So at this point if you already have the right product and right marketing, it’s time to make a move towards making most of your content paid.

Another side of this story is, if the window-shopping users stumble upon a lot of bad products initially before getting to two or three good ones they might turn-away quite early in their search stage and not find you at all. So, once again having the right marketing is the key.

Create Product Variance

You had good content, good product, and good marketing so now you are one of the challengers. The next step is to get your consumers to buy the product on your terms, which is never easy, for different consumer type and different needs you can’t be selling one-size-fits-all, cliche — I know! So, what you can rather do is — create variance of your products — build SKUs/ packages which will give your users a choice and you can continue to be in the game.

Finally, something we all should think of…

In a country where only ~30% population has smartphones (~401 Mn out of ~1370 Mn) it is quite evident that not all of the potential end-users have access to online learning, and in even those cases where smartphones are available, it is easily assumable that majority of them don’t have spare phones or right kind of bandwidth — for example in some cases, the users only get 1 GB daily quota from telecom provider which quickly ends up draining or have access to the device only at certain hours.

We ought to find solutions for these problems from the point of sustainability. One solution is for the online content provider to sell their own devices, and simultaneously adopt to streaming technologies which are faster, and stream in formats which are lighter on internet — one such format being LL-HLS and CMAF.

As always, I remain committed to bringing you new insights and talk about new tech. Feel free to drop a note or connect over LinkedIn if you want to talk about it more.