COVID-19 opened a hybrid channel for studies: Aakash Chaudhry

Entrance coaching institutes like Aakash Educational Services Ltd (AESL) had to revamp its offerings overnight to adapt to the challenging scenarios brought in by the pandemic. After AESL's acquisition by Byju's for nearly $1 billion in April 2021, managing director Aakash Chaudhry is focused on churning out a hybrid model of coaching. Chaudhry is also the brain behind the company's IIT-JEE services, Foundation services as well as its digital programmes and products portfolio. An alumnus of Harvard Business School, he is an engineer by profession equipped with a Computer Sciences degree. He has also done an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, and has worked with major IT firms such as Infosys and Cognizant, before joining AESL. In an exclusive interview with THE WEEK, Chaudhry talks about the possible synergy with Byju's, the future of offline coaching segment and the current challenges the second wave of the pandemic has posed for offline centres in the country.

The past one year and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has caused immense challenges for the offline education segment in the country, especially for players like Aakash who were primarily focused on offline coaching centres. How have you dealt with the situation and what do you foresee in the future, especially with the second wave of the pandemic?

It was a challenging time for us when the pandemic hit us in March 2020. Though our strength lies in our offline centres, we were able to transit to the online medium though our digital division. When the government announced the lockdown last year, we were able to transfer all our classroom students to the online medium in a week. This continued until we got permissions in different states and cities to open our offline centres. Now with the second wave, we are facing challenging times again with lockdown and curfews being announced across states and cities. This year, too, we have again transited to the online medium and have tied-up with Microsoft to get the Microsoft Teams platform for the online medium.

Despite this, our experience says that entrance exams such as JEE and pre-medical require a lot more face-to-face involvement of students with their teachers. There needs to be regular discussions and doubt clearing sessions. Hence, there is definitely a want and need for students to come back to physical classes right now. Given the current situation, we will continue online teaching and live tutoring. Additionally, we will extend our recorded lecture sessions for the students so that they will be able to study anywhere, anytime. So all of these facilities have been made available to all our existing students and the new students who are taking admission. Face-to-face interactions are always better not only with the teachers, but also with peer student groups also and with those students who are doing better. Giving test papers in a very disciplined and organised environment is also important and helps students perform better in the entrance exams.

Why did you decide to join hands with Byju's that is predominantly into the online edtech segment? How will this synergy work after the largest deal in the Indian education segment?

The deal with Byju's is thoughtful and complementary in nature. They are masters in online so they have a good technology and product team. In addition, they have a strong sales and marketing arm. On the other hand, we have a strong academic pedagogy and physical presence. A combination of this has the potential to create the country's largest omni-channel wherein a student has the freedom to study at a physical centre, and at home. The cross transition is easy. Besides this, Byju's has been a key player in the school segment and our strength has been the test-preparatory segment (medical and engineering coaching); so, all this is complementary in nature. Hence, if a student in Byju's ecosystem wants to upgrade and study for medical and IIT entrance tests, we will be able to service them. Similarly, students who approach us for entrance test preparation can also leverage Byju's content while they prepare for the entrance exams with us.

In terms of synergy, will Aakash remain an independent entity? Were you also in talks with other companies for a possible acquisition and merger before this partnership with Bjyu's?

We are awaiting government approval and once that is in place, we will start full-scale integration of the company and its capabilities. We will continue to run as a separate entity and subsidiary. Our strength and capabilities are complementary in nature so it does not require regular interaction or engagement with the larger ecosystem of Byju's. We will continue to run and expand our offline centres. Byju's will continue to provide their content support and marketing and we will continue to execute daily operations from our centres. We have got 215 centres, of which 140 are company owned and the rest 70 odd are franchise owned. We plan to add more centres as we go forward.

We wanted to leverage on our technology, our sales and marketing extension and for that in January 2020, we acquired a company called Meritnation.com. So all of that was part of our bigger plan to take our technology capability and product capability higher.

With regard to our deal with Byju's, talks were between us since June last year when Byju’s team reached out and wanted to understand the kind of work we were doing. They wanted to explore if there were possibilities to work together. So as the discussions advanced, both of our teams realised that we could work together and provide far more benefits to a large number of students then what we were doing independently.

Will the future of coaching centres adopt a hybrid model wherein it would be essential to have both the offline and the online mode of imparting education?

Yes, I think both will be important and it is just an elementary pause for the offline. But I feel that once the situation in the market is safe for students to go out, the efficacy, the outcome and the discipline that students can enjoy in the classroom will be higher. The Covid-19 pandemic has opened a hybrid channel for studies where students may not want to attend classes everyday. They may want to study online for most of the week, but come for a day or two to clarify their doubts. I think what it will do is increase the access to good and quality education to a much larger number of students. Earlier, people did not believe that high quality online education was possible, but now there is a sense of confidence with online education and going forward, we will have physical classrooms, hybrid classrooms and online classrooms based on the needs of students. We feel that in the future, parents will keep coming and calling and will ask us for hybrid programmes.

Aakash has one of the largest presence in the offline coaching segment in India? What have been your expansion plans and after this partnership with Byju's how do you plan to go ahead?

We are uniformly present all across the country. In fact, we have a large presence in south India. Going forward, our plan is to add more centres in large metro cities and in some of the remotest tier III and tier IV towns. We are also trying to experiment with new type of physical centres that are part physical and part online hybrid centres, where students can come to the centres and we can teach through the means of VSAT and the internet from the nearest centres. Let's say there is a main centre at Lucknow and there is this neighboring district of Lucknow. We cannot open physical centres there, but we can open the extension centres where Lucknow-based teachers can teach online and students can learn and then these teachers can travel to these extension centres to meet the students over the weekend to clear their doubts. These are some of the new interesting models that we are trying to work on.

With the dates of many engineering and medical entrance tests being changed constantly due to the pandemic, how are your coaching institutes coping?

The changes in the dates of many entrance exams put different kinds of pressure or stress on students, especially when they have been preparing for more than a year or two and want to appear with full preparation and get over with them. Due to such delays, the students get anxious and think what will happen now as they keep repeating the same topics. In order to cope up with this, we have introduced new programmes and different revision modules so that the students do not get bored or stressed and in turn, helps them stay focused. Our academic team is currently doing its best to keep the students engaged, busy and ensure that they do not lose focus, especially during the last few months before the entrance exams as the last couple of months are important. We don’t want our students to get distracted. At the same time, we continuously keep motivating them and also keep talking to their parents. During such meetings, we keep telling them that deciding the date for the entrance exams is not in our hands and that they should not get disturbed by such events. We are giving them a lot of motivation and teachers are talking to them over the phone and keep motivating them. We are ensuring that they remain focussed. I think for any exam, especially an entrance exam, it is not only a test of knowledge, but also the test of one's nerves.

The offline coaching centres' business is otherwise a fiercely competitive field with so many organised and unorganised players. How do you see its future in India?

Offline education is definitely here to stay and because it's not about how you are using and how you are educating, it's also about keeping the students focused. At the same time technology within the classroom will also play an important role. Hybrid systems are equally important and we are confident that with digital and hybrid education, we would be able to help the students in a better way. If the quality of offline centres is not up to the mark, then there will be no significance although there are many multiple cheaper options available.