Hiring the right instructors is the biggest difficulty, says Abhishek Singh, Founder, Coursebirdie. The venture is looking out for people who are top of their fields at the same time passionate about teaching skills to others, so that students get the best.

Give us the brief of the various reasons behind starting the Coursebirdie?

In 2012, I was working on my first startup that helped students and parents with course and college selection. Because of limited programming skills, I struggled over the growth of the business. I enrolled for few classes, but after spending both money and good, ended up with nothing. During the same time, I was doing research on the Indian higher education market as part of my Master’s thesis at the University of Edinburgh. I found out about the huge gap between student learning outcomes and market demand. Other co-founder too was in UK and was doing research on UK education market. At that time we decided to quit our jobs and move back to India to start this venture and solve this problem that both of us faced by offering education that is relevant, interactive and inexpensive. We followed the approach of learning by doing and tailored each class and workshops around a project.

What are the various difficulties and hurdles encountered in doing business on ground level?

Hiring the right instructors is the biggest difficulty. There’s a massive shortage. We’re looking for people who are top of their fields at the same time passionate about teaching skills to others.

What is the market size of the services offered by you in India at present?

It’s a very huge market. Education market in India is worth around US$ 92.98 billion and higher education contributes 59.7 per cent of the market size. It will be growing 18per cent per year.

Over 50 per cent of India’s population is under 25 years old and a lot of people want to learn new skills or upgrade their skills.

What are the major benefits for organisations and individuals adopting your solutions?

Well there are many benefits for students. Students can learn programming and business skills for free or at a fraction of cost charged by institutes. They are taught by expert teachers who not only have knowledge of that topic but are expert practitioners. Students learn through a hands-on project by doing. Through online discussions they can ask questions from fellow learners and instructors, share links and get feedback from other students.

What is the vision of your company for next two years?

In next two year, we’re planning to add 50-60 online classes to our library and offers in-person (or onsite) workshops in Bangalore, Singapore and London. Apart from that, we are working on a number of exciting initiatives, such as career services, job board and 1-on-1 mentorship programme. We are particularly fired up by the opportunity to teach 1000 students this year from economically backward sections of society for free.

What are the various methods you are using to increase the visibility of your organisation?

We spent zero on marketing and advertising. Through word of mouth we had a waitlist of 5000 students. Since we launched Coursebirdie Online Classes, we have taught a little over 8000 students. To increase the visibility we’re now investing in different forms of digital marketing. We also have plans in place in terms of more traditional advertising.

How you can differentiate your services from competitors?

Our education favours practice over theory. We’re offering practical, hands on education that is delivered by expert practitioners. These expert practitioners are young people and not college professors and are updated with new, cutting edge skills. These young people frequently interact with students and together we strive to make video lessons that feel personal so students have stronger connections to the teacher and subject.

As I mentioned before, each class or workshops is designed around a project so that by the end, student has built something that they can show to current or future employers.

What are the ways of engaging customers with you? Any special case study?

To engage students we’re making sure that each class include short bite-sized video lessons and project. Shorter videos are easy to digest and allow students to easily self-navigate through the content. We’re also engaging students through discussion forums and 1-on-1 mentorship programme.

To aid and enhance the learning experience of our students we’re working towards offering career services, career fairs and networking meet-ups. These features will be introduced in coming months.

What are the various initiatives taken by your organisation to emerge as a market leader?

In addition to teaching young professionals and university graduates, we are also working towards teaching 21st century skills to small and medium-sized businesses. We are organising in-person workshops and teaching them skills such as networking, website design, blogging and social media marketing that would help them grow their business.

We’re partnering with few major employers so that we can design short learning programmes according to their requirements.

 In one of its kind business, Anirudh Motwani, Founder and CEO, Indiacollegesearch.com has found the bottlenecks with college admissions in India. While  talking to Elets News Network (ENN)he informs that today over 5000 colleges accept admission applications via their portal.

Give us the brief of the various reasons behind starting Indiacollegesearch?

As college aspirants, we had experienced the various problems involved with college admissions in India. Lack of access to information about colleges, no clear differentiation or understanding of what makes one college better than another, logistical difficulties in sending across physical application forms and documents to each college are some of the issues.

When we saw the other side of the challenge and the difficulties faced by institutes in managing admissions, we felt there was a need to connect colleges and students in a way that classified portals had failed to do.

What are the various difficulties and hurdles encountered in doing business on ground level?

Since selecting and applying to college is a life decision for students and parents, trust plays a major role. As a startup, we didn’t have a track record but we tried to stick to a simple rule – ‘Giving no information is better than giving wrong information.’ We also thought that in the long term, it makes sense to incentivise colleges to directly upload authentic information which is again verified by us.

Changing the mindset of decision makers at the institute level is always a challenge and a lot of people within academia are skeptical of technology. So the problems are similar to what any other industry (from travel to banking) faced while adopting technology and building dependency on software solutions, but change is inevitable.

What is the market size of the services offered by you in India at present?

Indian colleges and universities currently spend around US$ 600 million per annum in application generation but less than 3 per cent  is currently spend online. By 2020, we see US$ 200 million per annum in online application generation spend and US$ 400 million per annum in online admission management spend.

Career counselling is also a large market but at present we are focused on monetising from colleges and the platform is free for students to search and apply.

What are the major benefits for organisations and individuals adopting your solutions?

For institutes, the two main benefits are increasing the quality of students they accept by having a higher number of more qualified applicants and reducing time and cost involved in managing the admission process (forms, documents, payments) by more than 60 per cent.

What is the vision of your company for the next two years?

To have over 10,000 colleges accepting and managing applications exclusively via IndiaCollegeSearch. In monetary terms, we are targeting US$ 1 billion in admissions processed by 2017.

What are the various methods you are using to increase the visibility of your organisation?

Currently, there is very little marketing we do to increase the visibility. We have increased our userbase over 30X in the last two years and we have 3 million users.

Free organic traffic has been our backbone – today if you search colleges in india on Google, we’re on the top even before Wikipedia.

How you can differentiate your services from competitors?

I think the focus is different – we have taken a longer term view. So, the idea is not to have a classified ads business because college is an important decision for a student. We are doing things to improve the selection and admission process including alumni reviews, incorporating NAAC ratings, increasing transparency of the placement information and getting colleges to reduce application response time.

We are the only website to provide verified information about colleges.

What are the major stakeholders and sectors you are focusing on?

In our industry, the major stakeholders are students, parents and the colleges. Our vision is to help students find the right college and allow colleges to connect with the right students.

What are the various initiatives taken by Indiacollegesearch to emerge as a market leader?

We have taken a platform approach. In a network effects business like ours, the more colleges which accept applications via us, the higher the volume of students applying online. So right from the start, we made it free for students to apply and colleges to view and respond to applications.

Today, over 5000 colleges accept admission applications via our portal. Online or offline, no other platform can connect a student to even 10 per cent of that. So this has made us market leaders in terms of college admissions: every five minutes, a student is admitted to college via IndiaCollegeSearch.