Making Higher Education More Affordable and Convenient

The higher education potential in India has a lot of e learning and digital learning players who are also beginning to impact these sectors. The true potential of the sector oscillates between 60 bn $ usd — 90 bn $ usd depending on the mode of distribution ( Digital / Digital + off line / e learning / Video/ on line tutoring/ Coaching / e certificates etc ).

Here is some understanding that was recently published online on a credible blog.

India is enrolling 70 million students every year there by making it the highest number of students that are enrolling into higher education in the world.

Platforms as Glossaread’s participation in this is to make the course material and reference material books of higher courses like engineering, medicine, law, management etc available to students at a cost cheaper than photocopying.

Students who are unable to afford to buy these copies of books including those who are resorting to photocopying mode of studying will now be able to buy chapters that are made available at a cost cheaper than photocopying and more convenient.

This is an illustration that clearly shows the current potential and the near future potential with the government commitment to grow this sector. The government has strengthened its regulatory bodies like the UGC ( University Grants Commission) to monitor the growth and the investments into this sector.

The founding team did a lot of on ground fact finding and found that students in the higher education segment are not required to refer to all the chapters of their course and reference book and hence are resorting to photocopying to save cost , affordability being one of the issues with more than 80% of the students. Poor Quality photocopied material , old hand-me-downs are a common way of operating across Tier 2 institutions offering professionally skilled based education courses to be able to complete higher education. This has lent itself into piracy.

The piracy market in India has exceeded almost 20,000 crs INR ( over 5 bn $ USD). This has impacted the education book publishers in a big way and to make matters worse for them the apex body for justice, The Supreme Court has passed a ruling favoring photocopying material supporting higher education. This was passed when a bunch of top education publishers in India had filed a case against rampant photocopying of the course/ reference books.

Players like Glossaread are using technology and coaching people to work efficiently tie up with the education book publishers and to split the chapters of their books and make these chapters available online at a cost cheaper than photocopying.

Students across these streams can now look for their author and their books on this platform ( www.glossaread.com/books) and need not buy an entire book but just pick the chapters that are relevant to them from the book either their course prescribes or the ones that they feel they have to refer to.

Top Indian publishing companies like Laxmi Publications( www.glossaread.com/laxmi-publications) / Manupatra Publishing( www.glossaread.com/manupatra-publishing-pvt-ltd) have tied up with Glossaread and are making their books now available to the students pursuing higher education in streams like engineering, management, law etc.

Although the current lot of chapters of books are available for specific streams, Glossaread is also tying up more players to expand the offering to a wider audience base .

The entire buying process has been made easy with a single click mode and the chapter stays with you once bought for ever. The platform has disabled any copy paste/ pdf / edit options in order to prevent privacy.

Its worth trying out the platform and follow its development in the next few months. ( www.glossaread.com/books)

Higher Education Shaping up in developing markets

Higher education in a developing country like India can sometimes become unaffordable by economically weaker sections of the society . Having said that the higher education market in India is set to explode to about 75 bn $ USD by 2020. The entire market of education stands at a staggering 150 bn $ USD.

There are more than 70 million (highest in the world) students who are enrolling into higher education every year . Whether this influx is being physically supported by the govt and some apex bodies like the UGC is another question.

But there is massive deployment of funds that is going in from administrative bodies to manage this demand. As per the latest data in FY’17 the Union Govt has allocated close 150 Mn $ USD to handle this staggering number.

For a significant change to happen in the landscape of higher education one of the most critical factor that has to play a pivotal role is the proliferation of the internet infra. India’ s broadband penetration is still at an abysmal sub 10% and the speeds are at an average of 5.6 Mbps. Some of these data sets are relative to other countries but when we look at Y-o-Y growth over our own country we could be doing a 100% jump in certain cases.

There are a bunch of technology players who are making life simpler and easier for large cross sections of the society. Players like Byju, Udacity, Mooc, Udemy etc are solving significant levels of problems in delivering quality education and at reasonable band widths. They are making courses easy to reach each individuals online and making then comprehensible and in many cases affordable.

Even with solutions that platforms like Glossaread the breaking up of chapters of course and reference books is in line with the objective of making the course more affordable and easy . A cluster of e-learning/ digital learning/ satellite / online tutorials etc are occupying the space and students now refer to them actively to pursue higher education.

The concept of making courseware available in bite sizes is increasing and is being adopted more easily. With specific authors and books of theirs its easy for students to search for the prescribed author and look for the book of their course or for reference and just pick the chapters they would like to refer

There is an increasing awareness and thereby imminent exploration of the ways today delivery and distribution of methods of education. Government emphasis and support towards such effort levels are high and subsidised on order to make this transition from a traditional mode of delivery of physical state into virtual state.

Newer methods of delivery like splitting of chapters from books since all chapters of a course or reference books are never needed are getting more visibility and traction and acceptance and are being supported by the publishers of these books.

The good story with the publishers is the support they get towards helping people not do piracy anymore ( 5n $ USD + in a market like India ). Although digital piracy is no less but with the advent of smart systems like ‘non downloadable formats”, non-pdf ‘able’ formats and with efforts like making chapters of books available at costs cheaper than photocopying, it is rather expected that users will look for faster , more convenient and genuine options and not wonder into the zone of “unauthenticated and fake content “ .

Its time we see the change that is brewing and players who are pushing for a change as this, they will see an imminent change in the behaviour of the consumer and will hopefully get a huge upswing in the revenue graph, which is quintessential.