Divya Lal is a visionary and charismatic leader and Ted X Speaker with over two decades of experience. Divya has created a special niche for herself in the Indian education industry. Passionate about providing access of quality education to all, she strives towards creating innovative solutions which drastically improve the teaching and learning outcomes. At Fliplearn, her role as Managing Director provides her the unique opportunity to bring all her skills on board to create a platform which can address the need for quality education in India. In a conversation with Higher Education Digest, Divya talks about unique learning programs Fliplearn offering to the students, the reason to launch Fliplearn Edge in 2020, her long-term plans and many more.
The closure of education institutions due to COVID-19 has given a momentum that the Indian eLearning sector was looking for. As an award-winning e-learning app, how is Fliplearn helping learners during this pandemic?
In March, when the central government announced the closure of all educational institutions indefinitely, all schooling systems in India were disrupted overnight. Since then, Ed-tech space has seen frenetic activity with many digital learning platforms stepping forward with innovative solutions to ensure that the impact of school closure was considerably minimised on children’s academics and their future.
Fliplearn is a platform that offers everything needed for a virtual learning experience and continued uninterrupted learning, which is a need of the hour. It allows schools to conduct Live classes, create their own content, assign homework, create tests, and check the performance of class across tests. Parent connect includes parents as essential stakeholders in the students’ learning process and keeping them aware of their child’s learning. It is offered to bridge communication between teachers and parents.
Designed by top educationists of the country, Fliplearn is a device-agnostic platform and can be accessed from any android mobile phone or IOS. The content provided is completely mapped to the school curriculum and is available for all subjects, classes, and boards. Over one hundred thousand animation videos and hundreds of practice questions of each chapter, all available at a click of a button. The courses are strategically crafted to ensure an understanding of fundamental concepts. It provides mind maps for improving a child’s IQ and comprehensive topic synopsis for quick revision at a moment’s notice.
What are the unique learning programs Fliplearn offering to the students? How does the company intend to stand out from the crowd?
Due to COVID-19, there is no doubt that e-learning space has got great momentum. The key to making yourself visible and stand out from the crowd demands meeting user demands in the most intuitive way. This marketplace is overcrowded with multiple brands/services on offer for school students, and at Fliplearn we have focused on offering unique and customisable features to our customers that meet their teaching-learning need in the most efficacious ways.
Fliplearn is a customisable, engaging and offers simplified content which it delivers with great ease of access to a plethora of features. Fliplearn is the only platform that offers free content for two grades at the cost of one. When a student subscribes for any class, they get access to a class below and a class above along with it. Our unprecedented teacher platform lets the educator control as well as upload their material, create tests, automate corrections, prepare report card read, and re-grade it accordingly. The in-built tools help teachers and can be personalised easily.
What inspired you to launch Fliplearn Edge in 2020? How has been the response from students and teachers during the lockdown period?
Fliplearn Edge was developed by our research team with the vision to provide a complete academic solution, a high-quality virtual learning experience ensuring better learning environment for students with the primary focus being learning concepts and collaborative learning environments.
It was fortuitous that we were ahead of the curve with regard to Fliplearn Edge since it was ready for launch when the pandemic struck and all institutions/businesses including schools, had to shut down overnight.
It is quite overwhelming to see the response received from schools, teachers, and students across India with over 2 lakh students, 10 thousand teachers, and 200 schools on- board using our application. It is particularly heartening to see that Fliplearn Edge platform is being used so effectively by a large number of teachers, many of who did not much experience with virtual learning platforms before lockdown. It is a testament to the architecture of our platform that teachers have been able to adapt and leverage it successfully in a short time period.
In words of one of our users, Preeti Gugnani, Principal, Scholars Rosary School, Rohtak said, “While the pandemic is steadily spreading, our internal discussions, assessments, and concerns that required years of time to consider before we shift to a fully interactive and internet model were all addressed in a matter of hours. We were forced to re-estimate our delivery methods across all aspects of teaching and extracurricular activities, and so much more. We simply had no time to delay or experiment. In our assessment of different EdTech solutions, we zeroed in on Fliplearn Edge during lockdown as no online platform seemed to be offering such tailor-made features that could exactly suit the requirement of our teachers as well as students. Fliplearn Edge’s modular architecture is positively impacting all the stakeholders in the entire school ecosystem, including the school management, teachers, students, and parents.”
Fliplearn Edge has over 2 lakh students, 10 thousand teachers, and 200 schools on- board now. How did you manage to become a successful online learning provider in India?
As mentioned earlier, we were fortunately ready with our product just ahead of the lockdown. We always foresaw the need for blended learning, and since inception, have been focused on developing the most effective digital tools to help teachers and students and supplement classroom teaching-learning. What the Covid pandemic did was that all the discussions, assessments, and concerns that required years to consider before schools transitioned to so-called ‘smart schools’ were addressed in a matter of hours!
Fliplearn Edge platform offers tailor-made features that can be made to exactly suit the requirement of teachers as well as students – this is what tilted the scales in favour of Fliplearn and its modular architecture in lockdown times.
What are the marketing strategies Fliplearn using now and would recommend to other online learning startups?
Due to COVID-19, there is no doubt that e-learning space has got great momentum. This marketplace is overcrowded with multiple brands/services on offer for school students and making yourself visible and stand out from the crowd demands meeting user demands in the most efficacious ways – unique and customisable features etc. Every startup in the e-learning space must study and understand the need of customers. The effort should be to provide personalised and unique services at an affordable price.
What are some of the most innovative technologies in EdTech right now? What are the key trends of e-learning to follow in 2021?
Few of the trending technologies in the EdTech today include the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, chatbots among others. Recently, Fliplearn has incorporated automated checker in the platform to reduce the manual workload of the teachers along with customised dashboards to give a bird’s eyes view to every stakeholder. Fliplearn bringing more focus on personalised learning for every child.
Edtech companies should aim to use technologies towards making teaching-learning more interactive and fun.
Key trends of e-learning to follow in 2021 are:
- The market for online education in India is expected to witness a magnificent growth.
- Video-based learning will remain a hot trend in the upcoming year.
- In the coming years, immersive technologies (augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality) will change the e-learning landscape completely.
What are your long-term plans?
Fliplearn has become one of the largest used learning platform in education in India and currently have over 2 lakh students, 10 thousand teachers, and 200 schools on- board using our application. We aim to expand our user base to 10 Lakh students, and 1000 schools by March 2021. We are committed to providing affordable and personalised online learning solutions to schools and students across the country
We would like to reach out to every student across the country regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds and would like to make e-learning more affordable. We would like to work closely with policymakers.
We are working hard towards strengthening our technology even further and adding more features which can help students and teachers even more in future.