Are Indian EdTech Giants a bubble?
There are so many edtech companies coming into existence during COVID 19 like WhiteHat Jr in India and they take charge you a lot of money for teaching coding to your kids. And they give a lot of promises that your kid will earn a lot of money and become an App developer and so on. I think their mentality of operation is to induce a fear in Indian parents that is if you don’t enroll your child with us your child will be left behind in academics.
I think companies like WhiteHat Jr understand this concept and are exploiting people on the same premise. Plus the government announcing that coding for children is compulsory gives them more reasons to exploit. Do not get me wrong I am not against people teaching code or a parent wanting their kids to learn coding it’s just that I do not want edtech companies like BYJU’s exploiting them for all the wrong reasons or give them false hopes.
I mean literally, Bjyus sell a worthless tablet.
Honestly, no one knew about WhiteHat Jr 6 months ago and now they have made around 300 million in valuation seems too much for a company coming into existence just 2 years ago. I mean their concept of teaching one on one is great and maybe it works too. But it seems they do not seem to make the kids learn instead their main focus is to make more money. I mean they seem more like a networking marketing company. Plus their teachers are no good and do not have IT or CS background and they do not undergo any kind of training. I mean it not necessary to have an IT or CS background but at least you should some prior knowledge of what you are teaching. Mugging up scripts is no way of teaching.
I mean you can check it yourself if you wanna teach at WhiteHat Jr it says no prior coding experience required. And the biggest joke is that they advertise they have teachers of the highest qualifications and are highly certified. I recently worked with a similar edtech company as an application developer and they are just making scripts in which saying simple things such as Hello or Hi is also scripted. The person at the company clearly said to me that teacher doesn’t have time to learn to program and just gets paid to read the scripts so that the teacher can get paid on an hourly basis.
They make scripts in such a way that teacher has to just read it out to the kid without knowing what is inside. They do not have to know what they are teaching or go into specifics into that programming language. Even the timings in the script are written. I think if you wanna teach something you like you do not need a script you can have references but scripts that’s too much.
I think since the lockdown is going on more and more people are signing up due to peer pressure to keep their kids active. But as soon as the schools and colleges start I think their subscriptions will decline greatly.
Also companies like WhiteHat Jr use open source tools like codepen and code.org and make money out of it. I think they the moral responsibility to give back to the open-source community.
So take my thoughts with a pinch of salt I may be wrong but these are my thoughts. The way these companies advertise is like if you do not learn how to code it’s the end of the world for your kids. It’s not true at all every kid has their unique talents and should have the freedom to choose their path. So what’s the alternative if you do not want to get engulfed by this edtech giant’s its simple use the free resources provided by Google like grasshopper for example or use code.org which is completely free they even provide video tutorials to understand the platform better and it is all block based so it is simple for beginners. The bottom line is don’t learn to code because everyone is learning it you might have more talent in other areas.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Thanks for reading
