As Vedantu scales its junior students-focused programs, the edtech unicorn is expected to double its teacher strength in a year’s time.

Currently, the company has an overall strength of over 3,000 teachers. “In the span of five to six months, we will add 600 to 700 teachers just for Vedantu’s super maths course, which has about 22 teachers currently. In the junior domain, Vedantu’s courses have 1:1 or one to few (one teacher teaches four to five students) classroom structures. We plan to teach lakhs of students in this domain and so accordingly, the scale of our teachers is also expected to increase rapidly,” Hari Sharan Luthra, General Manager, Teacher Excellence at Vedatnu, told BusinessLine.

TTE programme

The scaling of the teacher strength at Vedantu is supported by the company’s in-house Teacher Training Excellence (TTE) programme, under which, the company provides rigorous trainings to offline teachers and academicians, and prepare them for online teaching. The TTE team trains teachers under four cohorts — master teacher, personal teacher, class teacher and student academic mentor. The entire training process is conducted on Vedantu’s proprietary tech platform, W.A.V.E. (Whiteboard Audio Video Environment).

The two-week long training programme includes first week of instructor-led training, where the focus is on the skills required for online teaching. “We don't tell them that you should have a good body language, we tell them how to have a good body language. We get into the practical tools to tell them that what they can do in a live session, even if everything's going out of your control,” said Rajesh Rajan, Deputy General Manager - Teacher Training and Development at Vedantu.

Mapping performance

Followed by the first week of instructor-led training, the teachers are then observed in the online sessions. Each session taken by the teachers is scored on 40 indicators that a teacher should demonstrate inside a class. The company has come up with a V-meter, which helps in mapping teachers’ performance. For example, one definition is chat management. In a situation, where a student is disturbing the session, the teacher is measured on how they handle that situation.

“Our programme focuses on teacher’s EQ (emotional quotient) instead of IQ (intelligence quotient). Because, for one to be teaching online, they need emotional intelligence to handle stressful situations and engage the students. The first two weeks is specifically about skills and preparing teachers for the challenges that they may face in an online classroom,” Ranjan added.

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The company has so far, trained 1,000 teachers in the virtual mode and plans to open its training programme for teachers outside Vedantu ecosystem as well. “We are right now in the initial phaseof launching an offering, where different aspirants who want to become teachers can be trained and given foundational skill training to teach in a quality manner. Right now, we are focusing only on online teaching, but probably later, we'll also consider training for hybrid teaching mode, if the requirement arises,” said Luthra.

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