Beas Dev Ralhan
CEO, Next Education
A fast growing, technology driven company, Next Education is planning to raise 150 crore funds through private equity. Beas Dev Ralhan, CEO, Next Education, shares his insights with Pragya Gupta on the company’s plans for becoming one of the top three education solution providers in India
Tell us about the new initiatives taken by Next Education to enhance learning delivery.
Technology based solutions are key to revitalising India’s education system and making its future generations competitive at global level. Education delivery, consumption and monitoring must move onto a digital platform, which might lead to seminal improvements of the teaching-learning processes and ensure better learning outcomes. The challenge that we now face is to ensure an effective and quick integration of digital technologies into our education system. Next Education is the only digital education company that provides end to end solutions in the industry. With in-house content and quality products like TeachNext, LearnNext, NextErp, NextLabs and a host of new services such as the Next Learning Centre, Next Education aims to bring the future of education to the schools in our country.
Next Education is planning to raise `150 crores through private equity this year. Tell us about your growth plans?
We plan to invest the money so raised in developing new products and to expand the company’s operations across the country. This will augment our long-term growth plans and profit margins.
Tell us about the new innovative solutions that you are planning to launch?
After great focus on self-learning and teacher assistance products, Next Education envisions huge potential in the interactive learning products thanks to cheaper tablets available in the country. Over the two years, NextEducation will launch a series of products on tablets, which are based on interactive nature of that medium. In the long term, we aim to be one of the top three education solutions providers in this country.
What kind of role can tablets play in delivering interactive and personalised education?
Most of the learnable moments for students during study time in home, school and tuitions were getting missed due to lack of an interactive learning system. We visualize tablets as the solution to that problem. As said earlier we are extremely bullish on tablet as a platform. We have big plans for using tablets over the next 2 years to deliver high quality personalised education to the children of this country.
ERP involves heavy investment. In your opinion what kind of return on investment does ERP offer to schools?
On the contrary, NextERP, being SaaS based ERP solution hosted on the Cloud, does not need heavy capital investment at all. NextERP is a simple, easy to use School Administration System that helps schools to automate various critical operations like admissions, fee management, parent-teacher-student communication, managing student records, examination and results management without any upfront investment. It helps schools to integrate and automates all their processes, like connecting with parents and other stakeholders, tracking key metrics and ensuring fast decision-making. The system is designed to increase efficiency with better resource utilisation. The NextErp is economically priced at Rs 15 per student per month to ensure that schools find it easy to implement.
What roadmap will you suggest for encouraging better industry- academia partnership for better outcomes?
Industry needs to work closely with academia to create solutions that are accessible to consumers in the Indian education system. Digital content developers need to work closely and identify the issues, understand them and before developing a solution which will answer the current and future requirements. Next Education has been doing such research with the help of the academia to ensure effective designing of educational products. //
