 So hi everyone, this is Sonali. Thank you all for carving out some time for attending today's webinar on COVID-19 impact and opportunity for innovation in the education industry. Just to give you a brief, we'll have two separate speaker sessions today, each about 45 minutes in duration. This would also include the live Q&A round. To all the attendees out there, please type in any questions you might have in the Q&A section and we'll try to answer as many as possible at the end of each session. Request you to keep the questions within the scope of today's discussion and not to your personal business queries. I would now like to introduce our first speaker. We have with us Dr. Akhil Shahani who's the managing director of the Shahani Group which runs a range of colleges in areas like business, media, real estate, finance and others. He's also a venture partner in Kaizen Private Equity which is India's first private equity fund focused solely on the education sector. In addition, Akhil serves as the chairman of Global Discovery Schools which are a franchise chain of 14 innovative schools. He's the director of the Sage Foundation and trustee of the Shahani Trust which both have a range of charitable initiatives in education. Akhil also sits on the board of 28 iconic colleges in Mumbai. Akhil is the recipient of many awards for his work in education and he's a regular speaker at conferences and has been extensively profiled in the media. With this, I hand it over to Dr. Akhil. A very warm welcome to you. Thank you, Sonali. I hope my 45 minutes doesn't include the very long generous introduction that you gave me. So yeah, extra time. All right, I'm just gonna start sharing my screen and hopefully you all can see it. Just reconfirm that you can. All right, is that visible? Yes, it's visible. Okay, great. Let me just bring it up to the main thing. All right, welcome everyone and welcome to the new normal, as we call it, here at the education sector. And let me just try to get this. All right. Well, I think this is a very familiar screen that most of us have been used to facing and probably sometimes once, twice a day and I think what's interesting about this is that probably I'm assuming that two months ago, a vast majority of us never used Zoom. I mean, like we used to go for physical meetings and we used to go for physical conferences, do networking, give our business cards. And we were never really looking at coming for webinars. There were a lot of webinars I was invited to last year, but as a panelist, but I never used to attend. I mean, I thought like, let me meet people face to face, but suddenly, because we're forced to be at home, we've changed our behavior. Now, when you talk about the new normal, we have to ask ourselves a question, is that does this behavior change permanently or the temporary? Let me take a step back and let's talk a bit about the September 11 attacks which happened in the US and the focus on the war on terror in the early 2000s. It was another major world-changing event because even after Osama bin Laden was killed, Al-Qaeda sort of was not as prominent as it was, people's attitude to security change. We are now used to the new normal of going to airports three hours in advance, standing in long security lines. We have to show, not take any liquids in our handbags. Everything, go to hotels, your scan, go to buildings, your scan. You are used to the new normal because the thing is, is that one major event has changed even after the event is over, your attitude and your focus has changed. Our attitude and focus has changed on security. Today, our attitude and focus and our focus on personal health and social distancing and the concern that we may be infected if we go to a public place. Now, even after the COVID pandemic dies away, you're gonna see these changes happening. But let me just talk a bit about what's happening right now. Even though a lot of us are talking about schools and colleges and all basically having online teaching, the thing is, the problem is that almost 43% of people who have their kids or our students themselves say they don't have the right equipment to deal with online education. The thing is that they may have a phone, and I know this because our own colleges and schools we've gone on to teaching our courses online. But the problem again is that it may sound great from our side that we have all the networks and we have all our teachers changing their mindset to teaching online. But we have a large majority of students who don't have good quality phones or they have bad quality internet connectivity and there's a lot of disturbance which makes their life difficult. So moving to this new pure online model is also taking time in terms of there's a digital divide in people who have the technology and people who don't have the technology. But let's talk about some of the other aspects what's happening. Let's talk about, some of you may have read the news that international colleges or students are suing these local colleges and saying that look, we want our fees back or part of our fees refunded because if you go to let's say Harvard and pay $55,000 and if Harvard say okay, you pay $55,000 but you're not gonna have classes, you're not gonna have the interactivity, you're not gonna meet your other students, you won't have the parties, you won't have the sports. Then students are asking the question is why should we pay $55,000 for that year? You're still teaching me but I want to refund a part of my fees. A lot of students in India are asking the question is that if there's no physical experience in college why should we go abroad and take part in that college because a key component of college internationally is that experience of dealing with people from other countries, a new environment that's a certain immersive experience that you will not get through a Zoom lecture. So that's what's happening in international colleges. Let's talk even a bit about globally what education organizations are facing. So you look at the left side, you see that the short term impact, a large number of education organizations are seeing, you see all the reds on the left hand side, you see that most of them feel that they will be worse or substantially worse in the short term. In the long term, majority will still be slightly worse or slightly better, but even then they're not as optimistic as we'd like to feel. So there is a crisis, there's no question about it. However, this is a Chinese character for crisis. It's called Weiji and the Chinese word for crisis has two components. The component for danger and the component for opportunity. So when we look at the crisis that we call the COVID, lockdown, the COVID pandemic, there's also an opportunity. So let's talk a bit about the opportunity. What is actually gonna be the new normal? Because as I said, when you looked at the 9-11 attacks in America, there was a huge opportunity for companies who are in the security business, in the people's safety business, who actually saw a huge jump in their business. They had like their more security cameras, more scanning devices, things like that, which were never needed before 2001. What is the opportunity with the new normal, with the change behavior that we're gonna see post pandemic? Okay, this is a Chinese classroom with the school that just recently opened. And as you can see is that it's not crowded with students, there's social distancing. That means that even after the pandemic is over, people, and forget about the fact that the vaccine may or may not happen in one year, 18 months, 24 months, the point is that a certain fear that people have, especially parents with their kids, is that I don't want my kid to come into a classroom where there are 50 other kids crowded together because I'm concerned about them being sort of infected. So every school and college will be forced to say that if I've got a classroom capacity of 60 students, I can't fit in probably not more than 15 or 20 students with at least six feet different distance between each of them, so that there's no close contact and there's social distancing. But you need to understand one thing is that you have, the college or the school has limited infrastructure. That means that where they could probably hold around maybe 500 students in one building, they now have to fit in 50 students. That means obviously the other 450 students can't disappear. They will have to start doing things like, along with social distancing, start staggering the classes. Maybe you'll have things like this thing, you'll have staggered the classroom, but some classes will be taken early in the morning, some we take in the afternoon. You may have some classes being taken on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and some we take on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The problem is that you still have the school term which is the same length, but you have to find ways to teach all the students in with less time spent in class, all right? Now that's going to change schools a lot, right? To a great extent. And that can be same ecologies. Now that means that a lot of schools, and this is quite interesting, is that education for the longest time has been the least destructible industry. You talk about, let's say, I'm talking about let's say in 18, 2019, there was the media industry, the food industry, finance industry, all were disrupted by fintech, food tech, delivery tech, all that stuff. Education was happy using the same systems that they were using for the last 200 years. I mean, the classic model was students all come in class, they sit, listening to a lecturer, and they finish that class, and they go for the next lecture, and the third lecture, and the fourth lecture, it was basically the whole process. At the end, you had, you studied, and you had your exams, and that's it. It didn't change for the last 200 years. Or the only technology that was added in those days was maybe they have like a whiteboard instead of a blackboard, or now they had PowerPoint instead of, let's say whiteboards, but the thing is that the lecture basically was the student sits down and listens to information being given by the lecturer. Now what has happened? Because you cannot, the schools and colleges do not have the, how should I say, the luxury of having 50 people in the class, they now have to start looking at new methods of education, and this is something, for example, the FIP classroom. The FIP classroom model is something that requires students to be at home, study in advance for the classroom. That means, for example, like let's say they have to learn Newton's second law of motion. They will maybe look at an animation Newton's second law of motion. There may be a, let's say, a graduate lecture, or something that they'll see on their mobile phone and their laptop. They prepare the content in advance, then with the understanding of the content, they come to class, and then they'll have a project on Newton's second law of motion. They may discuss it in smaller groups of let's say five, 10 people, where they are sitting separately from each other, but they're less people in the classroom and they're managing that. What happens is that instead of having a day long, let's say, six hour set of lectures in class, you will have students study the content online or on before the classroom. They come in for the short interactive session which may not last more than half an hour, one hour. That means that the same amount of content can be done within two, three hours, across the whole day. That means the amount of time a student spends in class is much less than what they learn outside. And they can do projects. They can ask their questions to their professors online. They can ask questions on WhatsApp. Along the interactivity that they will have in class, they're having outside of class. So I believe that the flipped classroom model is going to get more and more prevalent even after the colleges and schools open and we roll out education. And I believe that this is going to be the new normal for schools and colleges. Now that means that even when you look at synchronous or asynchronous learning, you need to ask yourself, what are the two methods of learning? Now, each of these have opportunities for education technology companies. Let's talk about this. Synchronous learning means that students will all come together at the same time for online class, like a classic live Zoom class. The teacher is there. The teacher will, let's say, give a lecture or give the talk. The students are there listening and they're asking questions live. There may be live chats. There may be instant messaging going on. But once the lecture is over, the lecture is over. They all come at the same time and they all end the lecture at the same time. That is synchronous. They all learn synchronously. Asynchronously, it means that basically the student will read the content beforehand. Maybe they will access a prerecorded video on YouTube or the learning management system of the college. They may actually see a prerecorded, let's say some sort of animation or something provided by a tech company. They may have a discussion forum where they're posting messages on a group and answering and asking questions. The faculty is giving them assignments to complete where they're uploading their answers on the learning management system and they're sort of reading articles. That is at their own time. I mean, some students can do it at 12 o'clock at night. One student can do it at 7 o'clock in the morning but the point is asynchronous. They're not there at the same time. That means for a tech company, synchronous learning means people who are providing learning platforms that provide video or like live classes have a chance of actually getting access to the synchronous learning where students are looking for synchronous learning. There's an opportunity for a tech company there. A synchronous learning is more like when you are, let's say a provider of education content, curriculum content, things like let's say prerecorded videos. Why do you need to get the video of let's say Professor Sharma in your school when you can actually get, let's say one of the top professors of MIT teaching you the second law of motion on a prerecorded video. You don't have to limit yourself to your own professors in your college. That means that you can get access to content from anywhere. And again, a tech company that can provide that content in a structured format would also have a chance to interact. But that is just an example of what would happen with synchronous and asynchronous learning and what the opportunities are. But let's talk about, let's say what's happening currently. The thing is that as you can see, you already know this, is that Zoom is being downloaded. I think there are roughly 62 million downloads of Zoom in the last week. The numbers have come out. You have many more students starting up for online classes. People are starting for online courses like skilling and upgrade where they learn new programming languages, they learn new things, new skills to upgrade themselves. The point is people are getting more and more used to learning content online. But agree. So now we know that's a new normal. The new normal is basically people will be using your online learning or blended learning flip classroom where there's some online, some offline. But the point is that for all EdTech companies in this space, what is the opportunity? Now, this is the EdTech market map that you can see which talks about education technology companies globally. What the opportunity, how they're divided into different sections. Now, obviously all EdTech is not the same. Same way like in finance, someone who's a bank and let's say an NBSC are slightly different. So let's look at the EdTech market map and let's talk about the actual opportunities for EdTech companies in each space. Now, if you are in an EdTech company or looking at education technology, figure out where you fit into this map and what the opportunity is, right? So let's start from the left-hand side, the learning management systems. These are basically the complete platforms that schools and college will incorporate into their own system. And they'll be one all-in-one platforms. That means that they can have discussion forums, they can have places to upload their assignments, you can do exams on there, you can have live videos, synchronous learning, you can have asynchronous videos happening. So these are when you are a very advanced institution, you incorporate a complete learning management system. All of it is done at the same time. The most popular ones being, let's say Moodle and Blackboard. Now learning management systems at the moment are a little more advanced. So schools who are currently, and colleges are currently adapting to Zoom and free options like Google Classroom, they're already happy dealing with those two things. They'll take a bit of time for them to start incorporating learning management systems into their pedagogy. So the learning management systems companies may get a benefit, but over a slightly longer period of time, not immediately. Moving next to early childhood education, these are again these little content providers that help preschools and younger kids to actually learn concepts. Again, there may be a little bump to them, but the thing is, that preschools tend to be more experiential. So it will take a bit of time for the early childhood education guys to get a lot more content provided to these parents and their kids. There will be a little bump for them as well. There'll be an upscale for them, but not as much. The broad online learning platforms like, let's say Educard, Udemy, which are providing online courses, they I think will get a decent rise in business because what will happen is that as people are getting used to learning online by default, they've changed their behavior. Therefore, by default, they're going to start learning more and more content on these online platforms. And they'll start getting used to taking courses. What used to be a smaller, minor activity is now becoming more mainstream. People will be used to learning online. However, let's not forget is that once people get back to their office and back to their day-to-day work, the amount of free time they have available to learn online may actually come down. So there will be people getting used to learning online on these platforms, but the focus of just learning because you're bored may come down a lot. So you may have a bump soon after the pandemic is over, but it may go down to normal, but slightly more. Enterprise Learning, which is the next group of companies in that tech, would again be companies that provide online learning for companies in a P2P model. That means they'll go to a company and say, okay, we will train your, here's an information platform that we can use to train your sales people all in one company. Company will buy the lessons from them. I don't see a lot of that changing because companies already doing that and they're providing this online education for their people. I think a lot of companies are happy to say we will just give them as much learning as they need to upgrade their skills, but not more because we need them to spend time actually working in the company, not just they can learn on their own time, but not necessarily extra time being given. Next generation schools, which are already incorporating some of the flip classroom models I was talking about earlier. They may not get a big bump in student missions, but I think they will benefit. At least their models become more mainstream. In fact, there will be more schools offering flip classrooms. So therefore it's likely that these schools will face some competition because other schools are doing similar things. Tech learning on the extreme right, we have Udacity and Codecom, which is where we're learning, we're teaching students to actually build up skills in programming and technology. I think that in any case has been an up friend swing because what happens is that any case as a lot of work gets automated, a lot more technology is needed to be created, a lot more apps being developed, a lot more business software being developed, and they all need coders for that. So therefore there is a demand for good quality coders who understand Ruby on Rails programs like Python and things like that, data analytics. So there will be an ups trail in tech learning, not necessarily just because of code, but generally because the future work will be more tech-enabled and they'll require more programmers and tech-enabled people. Below at the bottom, the test prep guys, the guys who do tuition content, I think they're getting a big bump already, by Jews on top are doing very well. They're getting a lot of funding, a lot of Chinese companies are getting the same thing. So I think there's a good position for them, I think we already know. Next to that is search, that is identifying good colleges and schools to send your kid to. I don't see a much change happening there because any case people are using these platforms to identify good colleges and schools. Like for example, like let's say at shiqshaw.com or other platforms like that. It won't get a huge jump in the traffic. School administration software again will be like learning management systems. I think schools are already trying to deal with, trying to move themselves to providing online for classroom education. So they already gonna have to deal with getting LMS systems in place. So school administration software will be there but may not be as widespread. They won't get a huge jump because of COVID panic. Language learning, any case is growing. In fact, China's a massive market for language learning, which I'm gonna talk about later. But there's gonna be a huge jump. There will be people who want to learn English. That's gonna be already there. Let's talk about next end study tools or just basic tools that help students study. Not that additionally useful. I mean, it's gonna not be that useful. And again, you have the other online to offline education. Again, those are, let's say varsity tutors would be example of online tutors in other countries, but like Tutor Vista, where they're teaching American students how to study. Again, not a big jump, but they'll get some benefit. So the thing is that overall, there are more or less benefits for the tech industry. And I think when you look at this next slide, this actually maps out the education technology industry in India. Again, that's less complex than what's there internationally because they're not as many strong LMSs or a school administrator software that's really done well. But even then the kid to drive education, the test prep guys are gonna do well. The online learning guys are doing well. Apps and games for kids will do okay because that's already being used. Language learning already has that tailwind that helps it grow because people want to learn more and more English to get into white collar jobs. Education finance, I think, in credit and all those guys who provide student loans may have to start changing some of their models a bit because right now I don't know if they provide loans for online education. They may have to start looking at that and there will be some changes in the models to some extent. Networking portal is again not a major chain. That's really more information stuff that people are looking at. Tech learning again is coding, which I said already because there's a big demand over the longer term for the future of work. People are gonna require coding skills so that's gonna keep on increasing. However, let's talk about something. A lot of people don't know this but the largest education tech market in the world is China, not US. Now you need to understand this. If you are in the education or education technology space in India, stop looking at US models. Start looking at China and I'll tell you why. Because China and India have a lot of few commonalities that make India more likely to be like the Chinese model than the US model. Let's talk about the Chinese model. The China's model of great huge population with a growing middle class, which India also has. The second thing is, is that China has a huge amount of respect for high education, which India has. So for example, in India, if you drop a textbook on the floor, you will pick it up and you will ask for forgiveness. No other country in the world except China do people ask for forgiveness if they are seen insulting education. So India and China have a huge amount of respect for education. The third thing is that China has a few selective colleges and they have these very, very stringent exams for thousands of kids to get into very few number of policies. There's a Gaokao examination which is in China which hundreds of thousands of Chinese students take to get into the college of their choice. Same thing like in India, we have a few colleges which are high in demand like the IM and the IITs and all which thousands of kids sort of give up two, three years of their lives to make sure that they get into these colleges which is why the test prep industry in India is doing well, very similar to China. So what you should really look at is that if you want to figure out what is the best strategy to follow. And I know that that information not that easy available as information that you get on America and the UK, but start looking at information about the Chinese education market. But there's a great site called Holon IQ which is the guys who came up with this chart which is quite useful in knowing about the Chinese education market or the Asian education market in general. In fact, this is just a little more illustrative. If you look at the top 10 edtech unicorns in the world the top five are Chinese. There was only one by Jews in India. There are six Chinese, three American, one Indian. So that shows the amount of ability that these Chinese companies have. And again, companies like VIP kid and ITU group again are doing similar to things like India. They're doing English language training. They're doing vocational training. They're doing test prep to some extent. So a lot of commonalities in India and China. So these are, this is actually the latest information. So these are the venture capital funds who are very, very interested in education technology companies. In fact, as you may be seeing the buzz going along is that of all the industries that are going to benefit out of COVID education is going to be one of them. And edtech has suddenly become sort of like the golden, the golden child for most of these funds. So, and you can see like, these are a lot of these names. I mean, familiar names like Bloom and Sequoia and Nexus. What's also interesting is that Omidia network, the third one on the list they are what's called an impact fund because what is interesting is that impact fund means that they invest money but they like to see impact. Education and healthcare are the two sectors where you can show impact. It's not just let's say if you're providing, let's say if you like Zomato for example, like let's say you're providing restaurants and resources. That's a good technology model but there's not much impact you can show. Versus saying that if you're a tech company you can say there's not just the fact that I've got a great model, I'm earning money. I've actually got a lot of impact to actually share because a lot of students have been upgraded. A lot of young people have been upgraded and they can learn skills to actually get good jobs to upgrade themselves. So a lot of impact funds like Omidia network, Michael Susan Dell Foundation are looking at education companies to a great extent. So again, there's a lot of potential in that space. Now let's talk about, this is my final slide before I get into Q and A. Let's talk a bit about what venture capitalists look for. The thing is that with respect to the education market. Now obviously the first point is that you need an unmet need and a large and growing market. I don't think anybody can argue that the Indian education market is huge. We've all heard the numbers that we have something like I think almost 500 million people under the age of 25 or 28 who will be looking at education, huge middle class. So there's definitely no question there's a huge demand in education. In fact, we are the largest market next to China for requiring education. In fact, I think we'll be growing more than China because our population is growing. Unlike China, which has because of the one child policy there, the number of young people they have is actually reducing. Their birth rate has dropped down drastically. So we actually have the largest growing market for education in the world. So there's no question there. The second point is where you may have an issue. Now the problem is that let's say for example you are in a test prep. Let's say you have to show you have a differentiated solution. What makes you different from the players? Now let's say for example, you say, hey, you know, I'm in the test prep market. I'm providing the best K-12 education content for kids to learn how to pass the exams. So then the VC will ask you, okay, good. But then already Vedantu, there's already Baiju, there's already Topper. All these guys are well-funded and they all have education. They all have content which has been mapped to the ICSE curriculum, CVSE curriculum right from a KG to a trust standard. What makes your product different? Now you can't just say, yes, I'm better than Baiju. You can't say that unless you can prove it in some way. So make sure that whatever solution you're providing, remember there are a lot of edtech players in the market. Allow them out well-funded. Make sure that whatever you're providing is validated in something. If you say you're better than Baiju, prove it. Why? Is that better outcome? Something you can prove, not just because you say so. The third point is customer validation of pain and gain. Now the thing is that, and I think we know this for most industries, is that if you say that, okay, look the customer has this problem. Let's say for example, my company asked careers, we work in the employability space, right? So for us, we know the fact that, okay, there are a lot of graduates who are graduating who are not employable from colleges. And a lot of companies which had a lot of open jobs, I've talked about this a few months ago, which were looking to hire skilled graduates, but they could not find those skilled graduates. So we defined our pain as, okay, a lot of companies have a lot of open jobs and they're looking for skilled graduates versus the pain that says, okay, the students are looking for jobs. Because a lot of people are helping students get jobs. Very few people are finding the right graduates for companies and training them. So we define what the customer pain was. And again, the fourth thing about today is that it's not enough to have models that just burn cash left, right and center. You have to make sure that you have a model that generates a good return on investment. You can't say, okay, look, my cost of producing this product is let's say 100 rupees, but I'm selling to the customer for 50 bucks and I'm losing 50 bucks per sale. That is not a model that a lot of venture capitalists are happy with anymore. The days of just burning money with unicorns have just gone unfortunately. And of course the last thing is that a focus team with ability to execute. Now this is something that a lot of you guys should think of as tech players. I've always seen a tech companies who basically have seen a people who is let's say one guy or one girl who is the entrepreneur, let's say the visually the marketing person. And one person who is a tech genius, the CTO, the person who's created the product. I always ask them, okay, who's the academic in your senior team? And more often than not, they don't have an academic in their senior team, which is why a lot of times when tech companies were trying to sell to schools and colleges, because they didn't understand the customer mindset, what schools were looking for, what the colleges were looking for. Because they're no academic in their team who actually understood their mindset, they were not able to sell very effectively. So therefore, whenever you have a product that you're trying to sell or trying to come up with a model, make sure that your team has got the skill sets that are needed, not just in terms of technology and financial skills, but academic skills or something that is relevant to the tech industry, all right? So I think that gives me a great overview of the tech space and the education space. I think at this point, we can open it up to questions. That's Nali. Thank you so much for such a wonderful session, Dr. Akhil. It was absolutely great. You shared some very valuable insights. And I hope it was helpful to everyone attending today. So yeah, we have quite a few questions already lined up with us. So I'll just read out the questions and I'll make sure that no question is repeated again. Oh, the first question is from Anjali. She says, how do you think that Indian K-12 system will adapt to the use of technology when the percentage of students using technology after school is only 12% according to your previous screen? American schools provide tablets to all the students in most school districts. Does Indian schools have that ability according to you? Correct. So obviously, you have to be right. The thing is that if you ask me today, do they have ability? I would say no, obviously. Probably 50%, especially the rural schools and the ones which are the budget schools may have a tough time providing technology. But also you need to understand is that because they're gonna be forced to move towards adapting technology, they will find ways to adapt to it. So for example, like you may have either, if we're lucky, the government subsidizes technology for the students. You may have NGOs who are providing tablets and smartphones for the kids. But also don't forget, is that the cost of data has dropped down drastically. The cost of smartphones have dropped down drastically. Finally, is that if you walk into, and again, may sound a little critical, the summer area, you will actually walk into the summer area. Maybe people who don't have toilets, they have a common toilet, but they all have cable connections. So trust me, people will adapt to technology. It will happen. It may not be easy or be painful, but they will adapt to technology. They'll find a way to get it. So the next question is, you talked about flip classrooms. It's not yet a concept introduced in Indian K-12 and higher education system. Even in American universities, it's not yet widely accepted and most faculty is not prepared to flip the classroom. What are your views on that? Well, I think my first view is that all these people who thought that faculty can't change would have to sort of eat their hats because all these faculty have started using Zoom classrooms. And I know that because, for example, we are on the board of 24 colleges, which have been Bombay University, driven colleges, traditional education, chalk and talk lecture model, been there since 1950s. Majority of faculty have adapted to Zoom and are doing online classes. So that whole excuse of saying that schools cannot adapt, faculty cannot adapt, I think, through that other window. Because the thing is that the majority of schools have adapted some better than others, but that mindset or that mental barrier that they can't adapt, I think, has gone out of the window. Today, we ourselves are adapting to Zoom. I mean, how many of you were in Zoom, let's say, one year ago? How many people were going on webinars one year ago? Suddenly, it all happened. So, new normal, new habits. The next question is, what's your take on home teaching platform where students can learn on live videos and in vernacular languages? Target audience are school children of standard fifth to 10, studying in tier two or tier three cities, learning in vernacular languages. Okay, so as I said, the thing is that when you're looking at home tuition for vernacular languages, now the thing is that there are a lot of ideas out there. In fact, this is not the first time I've heard that idea. There are people providing home tuition in vernacular languages. Vernacular is actually one of the big, untapped spaces in India, not as competitive. So whoever asked that question, if you're looking and asking in terms of their own business model, you probably need to make sure that you map out the market and say, okay, like the vernacular language market for fifth to 12 standard kids, how huge is it? Who are the other players and why is my product better than what's out there? Like what all VCs look for. But also don't forget, is that unlike, let's say, let's say Facebook or Google where the last man standing or one size fit solid, basically the biggest guy gets 80% of the market. Education is a very fragmented market. So even if you look at, let's say, even the biggest player like, let's say, Baijus, still has a small component of the market. It doesn't dominate India. So everybody will have space. If you're better at selling any of your differentiated product, you can make money in any model. Next question is, can you please throw some light about foreign education industry? How are parents thinking now will they set a broad for higher education? Anybody into education abroad, can you please help us understand how this industry will progress? Well, the funny thing is, is that like a lot of the education industry, most of the colleges abroad are panicking, right? Because they're saying that they're two things right now. So, okay, let's, let's walk through this, right? If you are a Harvard and one of the top 10 colleges, you know for a fact you will get people applying because if you get your kid to Harvard or MIT, you're done. I mean, like, you're not going to say, okay, I'm not going to join Harvard because it's online for the first semester, right? So they're fine. The mid tier guys, the guys used to depend on foreign students coming in. They're having a tough time. Why? Because what's happening is that, okay, if you're mid, so like a lot of kids used to go to mid tier colleges in Australia, UK, Canada, because they knew that there was a chance getting a job in that country and they said, we just take any college. Most of those colleges had to subsidize the fees for their own students in the UK or Canada and used to get a highly inflated fees from the Indian students, the Chinese students, that used to fund their operations, right? Now that these foreign students are not coming in, these people are short of money. So what all of them are doing, they're now actually rolling out and offering courses online. So suddenly you're going to see a lot of these international universities in the mid tier ones trying to get students in their home countries through online education. But the problem is that for a lot of students, they say it's like, okay, maybe I'll defer here. Maybe instead of me actually paying the money for this year, let me take a break. Let me take a gap year. Let me do some internship or something like that. And then just join next year when at least I get the college experience that I'm paying a huge amount of money. At that point, things may stabilize a bit. So yeah, temporary disruption, but finally people have to go to college. See, what you remember is that in school and college, people do not give up their education. You will not say I will give up college because the coronavirus. At some point you'll have to go to college, right? Wherever you go. Next question is, can you tell the steps to convert our college physical classrooms to online classrooms and how much time will it take according to you? I think the question is really based on the mindset of the trustee or the owner of the college. The thing is that if the person wants to go slow and steady, it could take too long. If the person is proactive, it could take a week. Because frankly speaking, again, we've done this in our own colleges, right? All you have to do is download a paid version of Zoom. Get your teachers to start sending out Zoom invites to all your students. Get your teachers to start creating WhatsApp groups for each class to start asking questions. Get onto Google Classroom, which is a free platform where you can send assignments and stuff. All the software is there and most of it is free or incredibly cheap. It's just your mindset and willingness to get your people to do it. So it's one week or one year or never. Up to you. So I guess we'll just take the last question now because of the shortage of time. So the last question is, most learning softwares that are there are of tutoring models such as Baiju's and Vedantu. Do you know any softwares that are bringing teachers and students on the same platform? When you say bringing teachers and students on the same platform, that means that that really means in terms of for what purpose, right? So if you're talking about let's say tutoring, like for example, if a student wants to log in and gets a live tutor, they're planning a platform. I mean, that's, I mean, any online platform which has teachers teaching you synchronous or asynchronous learning is a platform. It's quite crowded. But the biggest player in India right now, the most funded guy is Unacademy, which provides teachers, providing teaching videos to students again. But again, back to the ritual point is that unless you have a model that differentiated from these guys, you'll have a tough time raising money. Very interesting perspectives, Dr. Akhil. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for answering all the questions very patiently. Thank you. And please request you to attend the rest of the session as well. I will be there. I'll be there. I'll put up a video and listen to the rest of the session. Thank you. Everyone, if you have any questions at all, if you would, you can just mail them to me. And, you know, if you would like to connect, please let me know. Yeah, I'm happy to answer the questions post after this. So now I'm off. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Akhil. We'll just start with our next session in a minute. So, our next session would be more of a one-on-one interactive session. We have jotted down some of the most frequently asked questions of this time, questions that are on everyone's minds and we'll hear our experts and sites on the same. So, we just begin once again. I would now like to introduce our second speaker. We have with us Mr. Vikram Pandya, who's the director of Pentech at SPJN School of Global Management, where he has designed Asia's first interactive classroom-led Pentech program featuring blockchain, API, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT labs. He has authored several white papers and articles on Pentech domain. He has extensive experience in banking, financial services, Pentech, consultancy, and training domain. He's also associated as a mentor with various Pentech startups and Pentech-focused funds across the globe. He's a Pentech ambassador for Maharashtra Government's Pentech platform. With this, I hand it over to Mr. Vikram. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Vikram. Yeah, hi, Sonali. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you very well. Very welcome. Okay, great. Thanks. During this difficult time, you know, knowing what to do is very hard right now and there's no one answer. So, would you like to start by saying something about the current scenario of education at this moment and then we can start with the questions as well? Sure, thanks. So, I will very simply divide this answer into two parts. Number one is that, of course, we have got more time at our hand. At the same point in time, we need to make sure that that time is utilized in a productive manner. And when you look at, there are so many avenues to learn. Specifically, in today's digital era, we are looking at multiple different websites which are available, different tools are available. And today, even as you know, like you have a games which are teaching in a VR manner to students. So, Half-Life Elix is a very famous example where students are taught through online gaming. And that is also a different way of teaching students, right? We have different avenues available and students are having these avenues. It is more about knowing these avenues and utilizing these avenues in the right manner. That is one part. Second part is that, sometimes what happens, people don't know what to learn and how to learn it, right? So, the majority of the people have so many things to learn that they can't decide. It is like you have so many choices to make that you are now not able to make any right choice. So, I will suggest that you look at what you want to achieve in maybe complementary manner in your curriculum or your career. And based on that, you decide that, okay, this is the right program for me. And also, don't just look at ratings. I will say that, just understand there are always preview lectures available. Look at the style of teaching, understand whether it fits your style of learning. And then only you should go ahead with that. Right, absolutely. So, firstly, I would like to ask you a very generic question. So, according to you, how has COVID-19 impacted regular education as we know it? We all know it's been fixed severely, but what are your thoughts on that? Sure, so I will divide this into pre-school or let's say pre-high school and then high school and then whatever graduation and et cetera, we'll discuss very quickly. So, physical education is not possible as you know. So, when you are talking about face-to-face education, that has gone for a toss. But when you look at the ways and means in which people are trying to deliver it, right? That approach is very different when it comes to normal private school or let's say schools which are having technology which was already there, even pre-COVID, the technology was there, right? For them it is very different than for schools which are public schools and the technology was not that great for this course. It is very different. We will discuss that more in detail later. But when you look at how this entire thing is panning out for students, parents, as well as teacher. So, we need to look at teachers are having some issues aligning themselves in online education because the way you deliver face-to-face education is very different than the way you want to deliver online education. Not only it matters in the way you want to approach the student, but it also matters the way you want to divide your concepts, divide your learning outcome and then teach student in a interactive manner. That is very different. And second thing is that that feedback loop which normally happens in classroom environment is not there. What happens is that sometimes people are not sharing your screen and that video is not visible and because of that, and you can't even force them, right? So, because of that, sometimes it is not easy to get the reaction and that also has some limitation and because of that, I personally believe that it is not as good as physical education or face-to-face education, but still there are ways and means you can improve. So, we'll also discuss that more in detail later. But this is the change which we have seen with the end post-COVID. So, for the next question, we'll be using two terminologies. One would be Bharat, which would refer to the rural and the public sector. And one would be India, which would refer to the urban and private sector. So, how education institutes, according to you, across Bharat versus India are dealing with this pandemic challenge and how are they adapting to it according to you? A really good question. I will tell you, when you look at the real Bharat, right? Where today, you don't have that great bandwidth while 4G is there, people say, but the bandwidth is not yet that great in some of the remote areas. Second thing, most of the students don't even have a laptop or a mobile phone of their own, right? When you are looking at student, this high school student or pre-high school student, they don't have their own mobile phone or laptop and they rely on their parents to provide that device. Third thing is that these students are not that much tech savvy because for them, as a part of their education, the computer education is not covered that high because when you look at the way they teach and they learn, it is very different than how the private schools are being taught, right? So, there is a challenge which this segment faces and I will tell you today, even the BMC schools, public sector schools, they have mandate that you need to provide online learning. But the issue is that, while teacher can somehow teach online, students cannot learn online. So, these people are now resorting to WhatsApp. So, WhatsApp is the easiest way to reach out to these students and I have seen people also doing WhatsApp call and WhatsApp chat through which they are trying to teach the student. Given there is a limit on how many students can join a live WhatsApp call, these students are now also getting online through this say Namaste and some of the other platforms. But again, the issue becomes how to have a device, dedicated device for the student. This is from the student side. Now, from the teacher side, these teachers have never taught online. In their, most of the teachers have never taught online in their life, right? So, for them, the training becomes an issue. So, when you start with, let's say in February, late February, you started with online teaching. The entire one month time was spent in teaching the teacher how to do certain online tasks. That was the number one issue. Second thing is that, how do you make sure the parents are also on this? Most of the teachers who are there today can't even call these parents easily and the issue is that they are not approachable. These parents are busy with their lives and they are not able to even provide the support because they themselves are living on a daily basis, right? So, this becomes an issue when the opportunity comes into picture and the last part is that these parents are also not tech savvy themselves. So, they can't help the student, right? So, this is the Bharat picture. How they are providing this online education? As I said, through some of this online test and online WhatsApp, Medium, et cetera. But when you look at the private sector, the India segment, they were much more ready than the public sector. And today, when you look at, they started with some groundwork and that allowed them to jumpstart in this area and then they started with even Google Classroom or they had their own LMSs. They had also some of these third-party tools which are available. And then they started doing this online within, let's say, one week or so. That did not take that long. But for public sector, it already took more than a month to get up and running. So, that was a challenge. And somehow, I personally believe that this is a blessing in disguise because people are now going to have, in public sector specifically, some readiness over the period of time which allows them to also offer this online education, right? Which is also good. Very well explained. The next question is, so online learning market is often considered as a cheap and convenient avenue which complements traditional learning rather than the market that can substitute traditional face-to-face learning. So, how do you see this changing post the pandemic world and what should students consider while opting for various synchronous and asynchronous online learning options, according to you? Right. So, I will tell you, when you look at online learning, normally people just look at the way content is aligned, the way content is delivered, right? I personally believe any education, whether it is online or offline, you should start with the consideration that what is being taught and how it is being taught. Now, whoever is teaching, right? These two qualities will be very critical because another day, the way you can communicate, the way you can deliver the message which you want will only happen through engagement, active engagement and through the way you are able to design the entire curriculum across multiple different tasks and multiple different activities. Now, when you look at online, online normally faces some challenges in this area because since there is no face-to-face interaction which is possible, people always believe that it is just that something is recorded and then asynchronous learning, for example, something is recorded and then something is being taught maybe for a couple of hours and then it is done. That is one way of teaching and you have limits of the world, you have course setters of the world doing something similar to this where the content is recorded and it is delivered, right? Now, it is not bad as such but the idea behind what you want to learn versus what is being delivered, there can be a mismatch because there is no interactive session which is going on and because of that, you are not able to ask the question, verify the doubts, et cetera and because of that, today we are looking at a shift from that traditional learning, online learning to new age online learning which we normally call as a premium learning experience online. So, when we look at premium learning experience online, we want to make sure that whatever is theory, theory is given to students beforehand so that it is a flip class concept, theory is always given to student beforehand and during the classroom session, only the discussion activities are going to happen and all this online learning session becomes more interactive because of that. Given that online learning, most of the people are going to get distracted because they are at home so it is very difficult to keep them engaged for more than two hours a day or even three hours a day, right? So, the way you want to structure this online learning defines the way you want to also make sure the student is engaged. So, in this case, normally interactive activities, group discussion, you have breakout rooms online also possible. So, all these activities when you do and when you make it engaging, interactive, then only it will make more sense for everyone. Next question is what according to you are the options available for students who are planned for international education and their current key standard? Yeah. Okay, I will tell you that online education, sometimes when you look at specifically for international, whatever they had thought, right? Wherever they had decided to go. Most of the places, they are also offering online education now. So, in case you are interested and you are comfortable with online education, you can continue and start with that online education. However, in some of the scenarios you may not want to continue and you may want to still go there physically and you want to participate in that university in a physical manner. For that, you may need to wait till one year and during that one year period, I would strongly recommend this students to get upskilled in certain areas. Number one, today in any area you go, whether it is business or science or technology, certain technologies are creating a fabric on which entire businesses are created. For example, APIs, you have blockchain, AIML, big data, ARVR, IoT, all these technologies are everywhere, wherever you look at, right? So, you need to understand these technologies in more detail and once you understand, it is not like you need to do programming, but you need to understand the technology considerations behind these technologies and once you know about them, then it becomes much more easier for you to go ahead in future, understand the business strategies around it and then create certain good business models. Next question is, so, Atec industry was already booming, but do you think due to this pandemic, it has provided a further boost to the sector? Absolutely. So, I will tell you that you have seen multiple acquisitions also happening during this time, there are multiple VC rounds also happening in Atec. So, Atec was always about making sure that you are able to achieve scale by also providing something innovative and something with quality. That was always has been the aim from the Atec companies. When you look at today's Atec companies, you can divide them into content companies versus platform companies. So, content company normally have content with them and they just provide a content as a service and then you have a platform companies or marketplace companies which are allowing others to come and then deliver sessions or provide some content and then share with the community. So, when you look at this content companies, these companies were doing something and now suddenly the content demand is much higher. So, for them the valuation has gone up because of the higher demand. However, for the platform company, it has become even more profitable because even all these people who are sitting at home, teachers who can't teach physically, all these people are coming to these platform companies and starting their teaching career online for the first time. And this new to business or new to segment customers are helping this Atec sector very much. If you look at the values and increase in platform companies, it has been more than 50 to 60% values and increase. However, on the content side, it has been around 30 to 40%. So, this has been the trend and when we look at the current scenario, likes of GEO or ATL, they are also partnering with these companies to provide certain educational content to their customers. So, it is always a B2B approach also, which is working good. So, B2B2C approach is right now getting more traction. What are the salient features of Atecs which are attracting the current generation according to you? Right. So, earlier what used to happen? Atec only used to mean that you are taking some online session or you are just dumping certain PPTs or dumping certain references for students to read. Under today's Atec, you are more worried about interaction and the feedback that is very critical. Interaction with the student, the experience of the student overall which includes the feedback and for the company which is taking this, right? And for example, for the teachers also and for parents, for them, analytics is very critical. Analyzing how the student is fearing, where he is lacking and where should I focus more, right? So, all these things are today, possible using big data analytics, using certain interactive tools. So, I'll give you one simple example. So, when you look at mathematics, right? Mathematics can become very boring and there are people who are trying to teach this in an interactive manner through games, through drag and drop interfaces, through VR. So, they are also providing some applications which you can use to experience that in AR. So, you can understand, okay, this is a cube, I can understand this is a cube face in my room itself, right? And I can play with that. So, all those things are becoming more and more mainstream and because of that, you are able to now play with these figures, science also, right? Science used to be very difficult for most of the people to understand. And when you look at today, most of this chemical reaction which happens, right? You can do all those things in the virtual lab and this provides that technical experience to the student and experience learning is provided through all these new platforms. So, the ad take of the future will be also very different than what we are looking at today. Ad take of the future will more rely on micro learning. Today, when we are looking at learning, it becomes group learning. But then, what happens after that? That student, let's say after one hour of online learning, you realize that one student is having only 10% learning and there are five students who are with 50% learning and then you have a different learning level across multiple people. The moment you look at micro learning, once the lecture is over, once the group lecture is over, this micro learning can take over and the students who are not doing good can be given assignments specifically for them and you can also do a matchmaking where students who are good can also help them out because peer learning helps a lot because students are not going to learn that well from teacher who they can't connect with. But when you are talking about students with their own ages, then they are going to interact much easily. It's very important and something that hasn't been covered here yet. So what strategic considerations do you think are critical for investors who would like to invest or bands or NDFCs who would like to provide lending to the education sector entities? Great question. I will say that look today as we know most of the banks even if you look at the numbers almost 8.9 trillion rupees are now parked with RBI. They are not looking forward to lending to any most of the sectors you will see, they are not looking for lending. So when you look at education sector, you can see that mainly into education sector, earlier education loans were given and when you look at the current scenario, people are not sure whether there is a visibility for employment in future or there is a visibility when you look at whether it is going to have a good ROI for that loan. So that's what people look at. So I will divide this into two parts. One is the face-to-face education or traditional education I will say. And traditional education, people are not yet sure whether to go ahead or not. They want to wait and watch before they start lending. So banks and BFCs, they are still waiting for that clarity before they start lending to this sector. Now let's look at the online learning sector. What happens here is that when you look at online learning, earlier also, likes of Coursera and Udemy, they had partnered with some of the online education institutions where online education institutes had partnered with banks or finance institutions and they were providing micro lending to all the students. Once they finished the program, they were able to get the loan and then it was like 50-50 or 70-30 loan sharing, which they used to do. In this segment, I see that there is a promise and today also online fintechs which are there, fintech sector specifically, they are very versatile, they are very flexible enough to go ahead and offer certain services in this area. And when you look at them, they are already starting on this area and they have started providing services with small micro loans, like you have a 5000 rupee program. So sometimes people may not be able to even pay that much. So they are paying let's say 3000 rupee out of 5000 or when there is a 10,000 rupee program, then they are providing let's say 1000 out of 10,000, something like that. So this is already happening as we speak. Now from the investor perspective or venture capital perspective, whether you should invest in at-take or not, right? So there are at-takes which are like me too. They just wanted to start because there is a grace going on and they want to engage on that, right? You need to look at three fundamental sectors before you start investing into anything. So in this sector, when you divide the sector into subdomains, the first subdomain as I already mentioned is mostly on the content marketplace side. In content marketplace, you need to first check the quality of content and relevance of that content in the current scenario, right? Content gets obsolete very quickly. Given the dynamic nature of today's education, it is very difficult to have a content which is let's say relevant even after five years or let's say three years, right? Earlier it used to be okay, but today it is not such, right? So you need to make sure that the content is relevant and easily updateable. That's number one. So when you invest in that content company, look at the quality and dynamic nature of the content. Second thing is that when you look at the revenue model, right? Sometimes it is just that they want to grow people and most of the company today, when you look at in COVID environment, they're offering free services which is not wrong, but you should have a concrete business model behind it. How are you going to convert this customer into a paying customer later on in any model? It can be any model, it can be bulk model, group model, doesn't matter, but you just need to have a model and it is not like that 100% of the new customers are going to be a paying customer for you. But what you need to do at least is that, you need to make sure that 10%, 5%, 3% also is okay, but you need to convert them in future in a paying customer business. And then when you look at the second segment which is a platform content or platform plus content play, right? When you look at this segment, most of the people are going online, teaching to their students and there is a commission which is getting subjected from this entire thing and given to the ultimate platform company. So when you look at this model, this model is pure play commission model, right? And the model will only work when you are able to scale up very quickly. So you need to look at as a VC company, you need to look at the scalability part. You need to look at how robust this platform is in a way you can scale it and what are the features available so that even the teachers can track and trace certain things and even students are engaged enough. Otherwise online education, people always say that there is a dropout rate of 18, 90%, right? Which is very high than the traditional segment. So all these things you need to manage. The platform which are able to manage this successfully are getting higher valuation. And the last segment which is very new segment in education is that people are providing certain mentorship, right? The way we are today providing this common session, there are paid one-on-one mentors and this mentorship platforms are upcoming. And in this scenario, when you are investing, you need to look at the quality of the network which these guys are able to bring on the platform, right? And there has to be a proper revenue model besides whatever you are talking about quality quantity is one thing. But revenue model also for this one is very critical. So this three you need to look at. The next question is, can you please provide some light on the collaboration happening across various edtech and fintech firms and this pandemic? Sure. I will give you a couple of examples. So number one, as I said in the scenario today, this micro lending which we were talking about, right? So that micro lending space, there are companies, one is great with the, there was one company that that trade with you is also now talking about identifying the straight risk, how to identify great risk. And then they are tying up with NBFC for providing loan, right? So this is one example. Then there is another company which also looks into the same area. They also provide lending through partnerships because some of this fintechs can't take lending on their own books. So they are partnering with NBFCs and banks to provide this micro lending. But the way they are looking at this great quality is very interesting because earlier what used to happen is that people just used to look at the earning capacity or let's say the way you can provide some proof, right? Whether you have a bank balance or whether you have a constant revenue stream. So when you look at micro lending, people don't worry that much on your continuous revenue stream. They are looking at your trade score, traditional trade score plus your other trade score which is alternative trade score. And there are multiple ways and means you can achieve that. So people are already using that to identify the score plus most of the people are looking at how you can engage this in the future. How can you make sure that this can really upscale or upscale this entire learning experience for that student and whether the career enhancement is possible. That is another thing people look at. So this is one example. Second example is in case of fintechs, they are trying to identify how to give loans to trainers, how to give loans to trainers so that they can start earning using the online platforms or setting up the online business. This is the new thing which has happened only during the pandemic. So this is a micro loan, short-term loan given against revenue. So what they are saying, okay, you want to set up your online classroom, they will give you certain fees and then once you start your classroom, based on your earning, you are supposed to give us 10% of the earning, 20% of the earning and that's how they are structuring this deal. And it is normally a short-term loan. So interest rate is normally lower than the traditional models, but it is not lower than the personal loan. That is also an issue. This could be the last question from Aayen and after that we can take some questions from the audience as well. So the last question is, how should government machinery and NGOs provide support to educational institutes to fight and survive this pandemic? According to you. A very good question. I will tell you that today, as you speak, government is already helping in some of the areas. Government through Ministry of Health and Family welfare section are issuing certain advisories and certain ways through which you can provide certain education. And then you have also government machinery on the education side. Which also is providing you certain tools. So those tools are available free of cost online. You can look at the websites I will share with you all. And those tools are used by even public schools today, which is much more easier to provide and let's say online education is much more achievable. So that is what they are focusing on. However, where they are lacking today, there are three areas where government is lacking. Number one. Today, trend trainer is not sufficient for teachers who are, let's say, not that much tech savvy and over 40 years, for example. They need to provide more focused training to teachers who are above 40 years of age. They are not that tech savvy and it will not be much easier for them to know these new technologies, right? So they need to have a greater hand holding required. And because of that, they are facing challenges. So that is number one. Second thing is that parents. So there has to be campaigns running on TV or radios, whatever is possible to tell them that, okay, during also this pandemic, online education is possible and you need to still support your child for online education. There is no campaign which is happening through monkey bath or whether anything else you also look at, right? This campaign should be there because parents will only understand the importance of education, whether it is a post-lockdown or pre-lockdown, doesn't matter. You need to still have this requirement that students are able to do online sessions with help of their parents because these students, proper Bharat students are not able to learn online otherwise. Third thing is more about the BMC school or public school machinery itself where normally what happens, right? These are the centers through which government distributes even the essentials. So when you look at essential distribution through this public schools or through this machinery which we are talking about, at that point in time also, you can distribute certain hand, let's say hard copy material and then these hard copy materials can be used by students for pre-learning. That is right now not happening. So those things I believe is required. On NGO side, they are already doing much more than what they normally do. So teach for India, for example, is one NGO which is right now helping out this BMC school teachers and there are a couple of more NGOs which are really helping out in some of the new technologies. For example, setting up Zoom calls for teachers, right? They do it for them and then they help them out. Teaching through certain different interactive modes like you have Wolfram, Mathematica or Wolfram Alpha. All those things are not well known even in private schools, right? So these NGOs are helping both private and public schools in exploring this interactive new online materials and then based on that they are teaching. Thank you so much for answering all our questions, Mr. Vikram. You were very patient in answering all of them and we actually have some very interesting questions from some of our audiences as well. So if you don't mind, we can just carry on with some of their questions as well. Sure. So the first question comes from Mr. Kartik Sharma. He says, what kind of IoT cloud-based technology you think is best suitable in the current and post-COVID era? And what's the potential of business automation products? How can education institution make the best use of cloud-based, IoT-based automation products to enhance interaction and engage students? Good question. I will divide this into two parts because one is the cloud computing electorate and second is IoT. So I will start with cloud first because it is normally used by everyone with or without knowing, right? So cloud computing or cloud-based teaching or cloud-based hosting, whatever you say is nothing but just making sure that you are using internet-based or you are using third-party-based server farms and this server farms are then not your headache, right? So you are focusing on what you are required to do and you are allowing professionals to manage what they are best at. So that is number one. So in this pandemic era, whether you are a small online tutor or whether you are a big school or university, all of you should consider outsourcing your hosting to cloud providers and there are also companies which help you out in migration. So why not, right? They can help you out with the migration from physical environment if you are having to the digital cloud environment. So that is number one. Second thing is that when you look at IoT, IoT is internet of things as we know and it really means that you are converting any physical parameters to digital parameter. That is number one. So when I said physical to digital, for example, temperature, humidity, all these are physical parameters. Using IoT devices, you are able to convert them into digital parameters so that you can then analyze them, you can predict certain things and you can do certain actions based on that, right? So with IoT, you can do multiple things. During this COVID era, for example, your phone is also IoT device, for example, because you have so many sensors within that that phone can also be considered as IoT device. When you look at phone, as we know, already uses Bluetooth and it uses certain different parameters like GPS and encryption to share data when two people are meeting each other or they are passing through. So what happens using that is that automatically the sensor identifies that there is a nearby device and if that person is identified as COVID positive, then your mobile will also understand without sharing the data directly to the government, it will understand that you have been in contact with someone who is having COVID-19. Once you look at this analysis, then the contact tracing becomes very easy and you are able to provide medical assistance to entire contact chain. That is number one. Second thing is that in education, normally what happens is that, look, IoT devices are very, very cheap also and when you look at phones, they are very, very costly. But when you just look at certain things which are available within the phone, like accelerometer or gyroscope, they allow you to do certain things in an interactive manner, like you have ARVR, so you can just use ARVR. So IoT is already being used in ARVR without you knowing. So that is number two. I assume that answers your question. And just following up on that question, he also says, can we use technology like KNX, ZB and Z-Wave in educational institutions? Will education institutes accept these automation platforms? So I know a couple of them, so I will discuss more on that. So I will tell you, look, educational institutions are normally open to new innovation provided there is a proper justification justification in order to provide this tool. Normally what happens if you are creating any business model where a student needs to pay and there is a tangible benefit for the student, then schools will automatically accept that, they will not worry about it. But if you say that school will need to provide this as a part of the program, you need to provide proper justification and cost saving. That is the general answer to all the different software you can think about, right? Whether it is automation, whether it is let's say new key learning module or whether it is some 3D learning, whatever you talk about, any business model should be able to provide some cost advantage to the school or better experience where parents are ready to pay because automation is out of it. It comes from Mr. Abhishek Chen. He says, how can we compensate students for physical experience of college so that we should not reduce the fee structure which was taken for that experience and not alone for teaching them? Good question. So I partially covered this when I spoke about premium learning online experience. So when you look at, make sure that students are engaged throughout the session. So let's say if this is an interactive session, I will make sure that after and before every topic, of course you need to divide your session in multiple subtopics, right? It cannot be a lengthy discussion. Otherwise everybody will just lose off. So you need to make sure that you are able to divide your learning outcomes or teaching material in such a manner that you can divide that into bite-sized portions and then once you are teaching it, you need to always keep them engaged. So one way of keeping them engaged is that you do some polling or do some activity with them and second method is that while you are doing something, you also make sure that they are doing it, right? And always provide theory, whatever they can read beforehand, you can provide them earlier and then they can, once they come, you can just do revision rather than covering everything again to just do revision and then you do activity-based training. That is what we call. So when I look at the way I teach or where I provide the sessions after this COVID-19 pandemic, number one is that you start with your session, the entire session you wish you want to teach and try to make sure that that session learning outcome is properly defined then you divide that learning outcome into three areas. Things to read, things to watch and things to do. Provide these three parts prior to they come to the session and once they go through these things, they will get some basic idea and there is always pre-read and post-read. So once the topic is covered, this things to read, things to watch and things to do will be there for prior to the session and after the session. During the session, you will only discuss and debate with them. You will make sure that you provide some case studies, you provide some real-life examples and let them discuss and decide on the outcome. That way, they will be more engaged in whatever you are doing and two hours will be gone like this. So this helps a lot. There is a proper way of doing this. That's what I believe. Next question comes from Sasmita Pandey. She says, so how to teach e-learning to the students in this pandemic situation? Where students used to go to computer centers for learning basics of computers. So to become tech savvy also in Bharat, students need to go for computer courses which is now stopped. Excellent question. I will tell you that you can use certain tools like Tim Ewell or NEDES for example and then you can also control students' PC, right? There are tools like GoToMitting where even in group calls you can control students' PC. These are the tools which are better suited for this. So what happens is that, let's say you are doing classroom, online classroom, number one thing what you want to do is that you don't want to have more than 10 students in this classroom when it is something where you are doing something on their behalf, right? So you should not have more than 10 at a time, otherwise it becomes chaos. So you go, you try to teach them a concept and you do it on their PC, help them out in doing so and that way they will learn it much faster. That is number one. Second thing is that basics of computer education, for example, you can always share certain videos and material which they can watch and learn. Very basics and fundamental of computer, you can always share links to the videos, right? And that is manageable. But beyond that, something which is difficult to teach, you need to go ahead and help them out one-on-one or maybe in a small group. That's the answer. So the next question is very short. It just says, what do you think will be the substitute for subjective tests, I mean, exams for students? Sorry, can you repeat it? I could not get the last one. Sure. So the question is what, according to you, will be the substitute for subjective exams in this scenario? It depends on which level of education you are providing. Let's say you are providing it to primary school or pre-primary school. There, you don't need to provide something which is very complex and complicated. You can always take online Viva or you can just take certain things, activity-based learning you can provide. That is possible. But for higher education, post-graduates and graduate, you need to provide something which is case study-driven, research-driven because specifically during this pandemic, since they have time, you can provide them research-based learning outcomes. And when you teach something and you give them the project and when they do some research, they learn even more. They will come up with their own questions. They will be more curious because the moment you make a curious child, he will learn on his own. Suddenly you are teaching him something well beyond the traditional learning. While learning something online, he may identify 10 different new topics and he may come back to you asking new questions, right? This is the way you should teach them. So the next question comes from Mr. Abhishek Jain. He says, what do you think will happen to colleges which are not in professional courses like offering B.com and other similar courses? Also, will the customer choose more to go to college with more fees now? Or will they choose the colleges with lesser fees options and they will not be going to colleges physically? Okay, so when you look at education which is delivered online, normally the traditional mindset which our corporate world has is that online education is not similar to face-to-face education and it is given lower weighting, right? However, I personally believe post this pandemic, given that even the likes of Harvard and Wharton and others are providing online education, it will make people to change their mindset. This corporate will also now accept this as a learning which is valid learning and this will help people to provide education on a higher scale, greater scale, as well as reduce the fee because once the scale is high, you can reduce the fee, right? Even for the quality topmost institutions, I'm talking that this will happen. So for you, I personally believe going forward in the long run, even after let's say 2 or 3 years, you will see more and more institutes providing quality online courses and people will also start accepting them. So for you, if you are really thinking about going online or physical, you should think for the quality of the education which you are going to get through the quality of the institutes. So think on that first. If you are convinced on that, then it doesn't matter whether it is online or face-to-face. The question is, what online courses should educators do or what courses can they do to upskill themselves? Okay, so if you are again teaching, let's say from 5th standard to 8th standard, then the main courses you want to do is that, look, it is always your topic which you are teaching, right? So you need to make sure that I'm able to give certain real-life examples and for giving that real-life example, look at some of the YouTube channels. You will be amazed by the quality at which they provide this session, right? So there is a channel called 3Blue1Brown or something like that. So that channel, for example, provides you amazing education. And once you learn through that, you look at the same concept like Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean theorem, you just look at the same simple concept and then you are able to apply it to multiple scenarios, right, from the basics to very advanced, right? And then you can decide, you can choose which concept you want to deliver to your audience. So audience, let's say your audience participation is going to be very critical and their experience is going to be very critical and because of that, you need to learn how to do effective communication. That's number one. Effective communication is something which you should learn and second is that how to teach digitally. That's the number two part because I'm sure you are good at whatever you are doing. There is no way I can tell you that you should learn that again. What you should learn is how to deliver what you already know and how to best make use of online medium. So we'll just take the last two questions now because we are reaching the end of time. So the second last question is, what according to you will be the scenario for early child education, preschool sector, what should one do and what future do you see for preschool franchising as well? Preschool is typically more difficult because at that age, you want to make sure that students are playing with each other. There is a social element which you want to cultivate and normally during this pandemic, this, that generation is very difficult to manage or you know that. So I personally believe even post pandemic, there is a merit in having this online and face-to-face element mixed together to provide more effective learning for this preschool people and this preschool franchises which are there in the market, the franchisee which will evolve fast enough to make sure that there is a proper well-balanced combination will survive and thrive. Just take the last question. The last question is, what's your view on live webinar learning versus recorded videos learning from a customer's perspective? Sure. So those two are very different marketplaces. So when you are talking about live versus recorded, recorded sessions are considered as a asynchronous method and live is basically synchronous learning methods. When you look at live versus recorded, number one you need to remember is that a recorded sessions are professionally done, right? There is of course a chance to cut it and then you need to make sure that there is a proper step-by-step learning which is provided without thinking about the type of audience you are looking at because for you there is no audience management which you can do at the time of recording. So that is very different than the live interactive session which we call as a synchronous learning method. So when you say webinar based, of course that synchronous can be divided into webinar and the meeting kind of a thing which we are looking at right now. Well, let's say right now this is a webinar but meeting where you can also interact with the faculty is very different. In webinar what you need to do is that you need to make sure that the content is very, very much curated and it is highly driven based on PPT because then you are able to cover certain points which are required to be covered in the webinar but when it is live interactive session what I discussed earlier that you can do because in that scenario you can give them pre-read or post-read and during the session you can always have interactive discussion, right? So I personally believe that webinar is not the right model to teach students. Webinar is a model which can be easily scaled beyond let's say 500 students also, right? Doesn't matter. So there are instances where webinar is better because you can't provide education at a scale to 500 people, otherwise it is very difficult, right? So that is one thing. But at the same point in time when you want to provide effective education, premium education, you need to think about not more than 30 students. You can't handle 30 students in a way of let's say face-to-face education also. So when you are looking at this kind of online education you need to limit your number of students to 30 to 40 maximum. That's it from my side. I think one question quickly I will answer. One question is that whether installing local server with learning material would work better for schools in rural area, right? So when you look at this segment my personal opinion is that the challenge is not only network connectivity challenge is also how to distribute it later, right? Today nobody can come in school. So even if you're a local server how are you going to make sure that the student can come to the school, right? That is the more difficult part and the most difficult part in this entire thing. So what you want to do here is that because you need to maintain social distancing the only way it is possible is that you partner with this telecom provider and make sure that you are able to optimize the content good enough so that at least the text and basic image-based content can be provided to them if not the video-based content. So you need to partner with this telecom provider and make this free, make this part free. And the ones who make it free most of these people can afford it. So let's say Geo for example they can reach to all these millions of people Airtel for example, they can reach out to this millions of people. So when you are able to reach out to these people along with this free medium I'm sure that these people can get advantage of this much easily. Thanks, I think this covers all the questions. Right, absolutely. Thank you so much Mr. Vikram. Thank you for your wonderful insights and advice for everyone present here. I'm sure we were able to add value to everyone's lives through your session. Thank you so much for being so patient. And yeah, I guess we'll just wrap up the session now. Once again, thank you to both our speakers, Mr. Vikram and Dr. Akhil. Thank you for being a part of this webinar. And yeah, that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks Raleigh. Thanks Dr. Akhil. Thank you. Thank you Vikram. Thank you to all our attendees. We'll see you next time with another webinar. So our next webinar is actually on 12th of May and it's about business valuation for startups and young growth companies. So if you need any information regarding that, please get in touch with me through an email and I would be happy to provide you with more information. Until next time, thank you so much. Stay home and stay safe. Thank you.