History tells tales of shishyas sitting under trees under the harsh mid-day sun to imbibe knowledge from their closest gurus. India pioneered the classroom concept and even perfected it to a certain extent before it became commonplace and formalised. Needless to say, we've come a long way since the Gurukul- from palm leaves to slates to books to now laptops. Online learning has revolutionised the education sector, especially in our country, which now boasts the second most students enrolled in e-learning portals, following the United States. 

Anyone looking from the outside can easily gauge why the Edutech scene has boomed over the last 10-15 years. The flexibility and ease of logging into an online account and watching tutorials beat the hassle of travelling to a classroom. E-learning is also cheaper on average while being an effective mode of education. Not every child might have the resources to travel to a classroom, but any classroom can come to a child with just a working internet connection.

The makings of the current Edutech scene were laid about 20 years ago by the pioneer, Sal Khan, who used Yahoo Doodle images to teach his cousin mathematics online. Over time, a lot more people started tuning into his lessons, leading him to upload the videos to Youtube under the channel name ‘Khan Academy’. He officially established the company in 2014. Closer to home, Byju Raveendran started his educational journey by taking coaching classes for Maths to train students for competitive exams, after which, in 2011, he set up his company, ‘Think and Learn', to teach students using online tutorial videos. 

The boom in this sector happened towards the middle of the previous decade, when multiple companies were established and began moving from websites to apps. A lot of emphasis was placed on the K-12 segment of students from kindergarten to class 12, especially with the aim of preparing students for competitive exams like SATs abroad or JEE/NEET in India. Other niche resources were created for other segments like middle school segments or rarely even primary level students but most of the focus remained on Students from class 9 to 12. Over the next few years, so many companies began to pour into this pool till the market got saturated.

One market within edutech that is still unsaturated is material for post-secondary education. The major resources for college students are solutions to numerical problems and coaching for exams like GRE, IELTS and GATE. There are also forums like NPTEL setup by the National Institutes of India to do certification courses in. The lack of saturation comes from the lack of resources on video lectures for ordinary college classes and relatively few materials available for rather non-conventional branches of engineering like Chemical engineering, and this is where MSubbu Academy comes in. Dr. M.Subramanian has been adding materials on chemical engineering to his website, ‘www.msubbu.in‘ since the birth of the millennium. For almost 25 years now, he has been adding lecture notes, solved problems, and question banks as "Chemical Engineering Learning Resources.". Then he streamlined this material and collated it on MSubbu Academy from the year 2021, where he offers tutorials on chemical engineering subjects, coaching for competitive exams, etc. 

by

Smruthi P
Student of MSubbu Academy
03-May-2024

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