As edtech companies lay off almost 2,000 employees and unicorns open offline centres, Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal has said that “opening a few centres should not be linked to edtech failing — correlation is not causation”.
“There are 100+ tests that learners write ranging from JEE and NEET to UPSC to USMLE. When learners are young, they prefer a hybrid approach rather than pure offline. When learners are relatively older then they prefer pure online,” he added in a Twitter thread.
Munjal said that Unacademy’s PrepLadder has over 20 per cent market share in NEET PG and not a single learner wants to go offline. However, things are different in JEE and NEET, where learners want to go out and parents also want them to go out.
“More discipline is needed unlike NEET PG learners where the intent to self-learn is extremely high,” he added. The Unacademy CEO said that edtech is here to stay and he is more bullish on it than ever.
Move by other edtech firms
Major players like Byju’s, Unacademy, and PhysicsWallah have forayed into offline or hybrid learning models. Even upskilling start-ups like Imarticus Learning, Stoa School, and Scaler have incorporated elements of offline in their course structures.
Scaler has partnered with co-living start-ups to offer customised living space (Scalerverse) to its learners but classes continue to happen online. Stoa School has started experimenting with city-wide meetups and three-day residency programmes but its core medium of teaching still remains online.