Edtech firms build brick-and-mortar centres across India to woo students

Several are adopting a hybrid model of offline and online education to stay afloat, as students head back at school and colleges post pandemic

Located in Kota, the education hub in the southeast of Rajasthan, is PW Vidyapeeth, the edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah’s first pure offline centre. The centre is designed to assist engineering and medical aspirants, providing them with a competitive and friendly learning environment with a 24/7 doubt-clearing facility. The student-teacher ratio of each class will be 125:1. This would ensure each aspirant gets adequate teacher attention.

It was on students’ demand that PW took this leap to open its first offline centre in Kota. 

“It shows our agile nature and how we can quickly adapt to new learning pedagogies to raise the quality of education,” says Alakh Pandey, founder and CEO of PW (PhysicsWallah). “PW looks to bridge the accessibility gap by opening 20 offline coaching classrooms, aka Pathshalas, across India.”

PW is among several edtech unicorns which are setting up bricks-and-mortar tuition centres and adopting a hybrid model of offline and online education, as students are back at school and colleges. The reopening of schools and colleges has sparked a crisis in the edtech sector with falling valuations, slowing funding rounds and faltering investor sentiment. Experts said that now that students and parents understand the benefits and constraints of edtech, they are altering their purchases for the next year, assuming they will have access to offline also.

Though online classes have been very effective for learners during the pandemic, PW said physical classrooms create a better learning atmosphere. The presence of in-person learning is all that students seek in the new normal. The firm said the opening of this PW centre is in sync with this vision. It is designed to cater to the ever-evolving needs of today’s new-age students, enabling them to leverage the best of both worlds (offline and online). 

PW recently become India’s 101st unicorn by raising $100 million in Series A funding from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures. The company was valued at $1.1 billion after closing the transaction.PW is using these funds for business expansion, branding and opening more PW learning centres.

“For the next three years, we have multiple high-end growth plans,” says Pandey.  “The platform has already made provisions for launching courses in nine vernacular languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Odia, Malayalam, and Kannada. This step will help PW reach every corner of the country and connect with over 250 million students by 2025.”

Like PW, SoftBank-backed Unacademy recently announced its foray into offline learning via its new Unacademy Centres. These will facilitate offline classes for learners and will extend access to top educators in the NEET UG, IT JEE and Foundation (9-12) course categories.

The firm aims to meet the growing demand for inter-personal mentoring with this new approach. It recently launched the first two offline learning Unacademy Centres in Kota of Rajasthan. The company aims to enrol up to 15,000 learners in the first batch across all the upcoming Unacademy Centres in nine cities: Kota, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Patna, Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi and Lucknow.

Unacademy chief operating officer Vivek Sinha said during the pandemic there was huge shift towards online education. However, this shift is prominent in the post-graduate category. The undergrad segment is different. 

"Here the learner is not just looking for the best content, teachers and courses, but also needs structure and discipline,” said Sinha. “What we have observed is that while the demand for online learning is growing, there is a significant segment of learners who want to have offline interaction as well. So, we came up with Unacademy Centres.”

To elevate the learning experience, all Unacademy Centres have been conceptualised with modern and simple aesthetics. A multi-functional café, a massive library, doubt solving zones along with several classrooms and functional zones are housed in the flagship Centre located in the Talwandi Circle and is an 18,000 sq ft facility spread across four floors.

“It is a hybrid product, which is a mixture of both the worlds,” said Sinha. “Besides providing the best components of offline which is structure, discipline and face-to-face teaching for critical concepts, it also factors in the best of the online world. So, when you are giving a test, you're not just competing against the students of your centre but also against the students at a pan India level.”

During the peak of the pandemic, brick-and-motor institute Aakash also focused on the online model. After getting acquired by edtech giant Byju’s for $1 billion early last year, Aakash is transforming into a hybrid edtech firm and is expanding rapidly across the country. It is now again scaling up its physical centres.

“We currently have about 290 operational centres – we added 80 of them this year in the last 6-9 months,” said Abhishek Maheshwari, CEO, Aakash+Byju’s. “We are expanding into tier 2-3 cities as well as deepening our presence in existing metros as these cities grow and demand grows. We will likely add another 40-50 centres next year while continuing to expand our existing centres.”

Aakash+Byju’s now operates in a fully hybrid model, where all the classrooms are equipped with technology to enable seamless integration of students joining offline as well as online.  It is aiming to deliver the strengths of the offline model – brand and credibility, teacher connect, discipline and a peer group with the flexibility and personalization that online provides. 

“Apart from access to technology in certain cases, students faced two major challenges in online –fatigue caused by focusing on a screen for long periods and distractions in the online world,” said Maheshwari. “Akash+Byju’s have made concerted efforts to avoid this and to help the students stay focused on the course.”

Edtech giant Byju’s will also invest upwards of $200 million to open brick and mortar tuition centres in the next 12-18 months. With positive feedback from the first 80 centres launched as part of the pilot programme since December last year, the company has decided to launch 500 centres in 200 cities this year.

The tuition centres will combine digital with physical as the classes will have two teachers – one present in the class and the other who will instruct through a screen in the classroom. The tuition classes will be available for students from classes IV to X and carry an average price tag of Rs 3,000-3,500 per month. The company expects to enroll over 1 million students in its tuition centres over the next two years, with a batch size of 25 students in each class.