Eduwizards: The Change in India’s Online Tutoring Pursuit

Eduwizards is an education technology company that provides online and offline tutoring to students in India and US. The company claims to have registered over 100,000 students and endeavors to increase the registrations. In an interaction with DataQuest, Ashish Sirohi, Co-Founder and Director, Eduwizards, talks about the importance of online education in India and the recently launched mobile applications.

Q. How does Eduwizards work? Can you please throw some light on the entire mechanism?

Eduwizards provides a marketplace platform that connects students with tutors. Tutors submit detailed information and after review they are approved to go live and be searchable. Tutors are allowed to charge a tuition fee depending on subjects, and levels.

Students can choose their tutors themselves, after reviewing their details, or our staff can find the right tutor for them. We collect payments from students for tuition sessions, keep our commission, and pass the rest to the tutor.

Q. What were the challenges faced by the company?

Eduwizards.com India tuition website provides an advantage of learning from best tutors through online video sessions. For online tuition a major challenge in India is that both the student and tutor could have low bandwidth or fluctuation in internet speed. When we launched for Indian students in August 2015, we had solved this problem by building our own proprietary voice-based whiteboard; it has crystal clear voice even at low bandwidth of 100 kbps. Launching a tutoring website in India meant rapidly building multiple technologies and applications aimed at the needs of Indian students, because we want to provide Indian students a full ecosystem.

Q. What is the purpose of deploying technology solutions, and what is the company’s ROI?

Our multiple Apps serve as a discovery tool among students to knowabout Eduwizards. A lot of our students are now being acquired through our NCERT Solutions App which witnessed over 100,000 installations.

We are also positioning ourselves for leadership looking forward to the future business prospects. On our India website presently, 98% of students are choosing face-to-face home tuition and 2% are choosing online tuition. Growth of online tuition in India will be through a real-time App-based Instant Online Tutoring system. We are on track to become the leader in such App-based tutoring, in both India and USA. Our App has whiteboard with voice activation which is a key feature that interests students of all age and levels.

Q. Please tell us about the recent app launched by the company?

We launched our Live Tutors App for both USA and Indian students. Our App has whiteboard with voice which is a key feature that students want. The app is available for iOS and Android. Our App allows students to connect 24x7 to a tutor within seconds for Live Tutoring or Submit Question 24x7 and get an answer within minutes. A student who downloads the App will get free credits to try Live Tutoring or Question Submission. After that we offer low cost pay by-the minute scheme for Live Tutoring and pay-per-question scheme for Question Submission. The App covers maths, science, biology, chemistry and physics for students in K-12 and college. Also, students who take regular tutoring with Eduwizards are provided with 24 hour access to Live Tutors App.

Q. Advanced Adaptive Testing and next generation Gamification technology are your recently added facilities, how are these beneficial for students?

There are many companies in India providing online assessment and practice tests. But internationally, genuine Adaptive Assessment is based on advanced technology called Item Response Theory (IRT). Being Edtech pioneers, we have brought this international technology standard to India by developing it in-house. IRT is used in world's high stake tests such as GMAT and GRE. We will now expand to increase our reach among students preparing for USA K-12 Exams. Such Adaptive Testing is genuine personalized testing; each student sees a different set of questions depending on student-level.

The world's technologically advanced education companies have begun offering IRT Adaptive to students as a Practice Tool for all exams, and Eduwizards is now offering Indian students this same advantage in test practice. The Test Practice using IRT Adaptive is estimated to save time of every student aiming for a top rank in examinations and do not require to repeatedly waste time in practicing easy or average questions.

The other technology we have developed in-house is next generation Gamification technology which involves interactive and fun activities for child learning. We have this technology market-ready with a demonstration also.

Q. What kind of growth is the company witnessing?

Since the commencement of Eduwizards, we endeavor to build a sustainable business with revenues from commissions, rather than growing on the basis of free connection distribution. Our India Tutoring revenues have been growing 30% at regular intervals since the launch in August 2015. The 90% of the tutoring sessions were gained from payments by repeat students only.

Q. How do you see the future of the company in the upcoming years?

The Edtech sector has huge potential indeed. We are on track to be the leading Tutoring Platform in India for both home tuitions and online tuitions, as well as, the App-based Online Tutoring leader in both India and USA.

For home tuitions, we cover 50 cities with an objective to provide tutors for all subjects and across all pin codes in these cities. With sustainable business, continuous revenues and increasing connections, we aspire to grow fast and steadily to secure permanent India leadership.