Providing a creative edge to education

Vivek Agarwal, who has been in the e-learning space for over a decade, says he has never been bitten by the proverbial entrepreneurial bug. He believes entrepreneurship cannot be force-fed. The decision to do something on his own was due to a “gradual awakening,” to fuse the realities of doing a business with his passion for teaching.

“I come from a small town, and the way you spoke English, kind of, defined you. For me, teaching has always been a passion,” he says.

Agarwal hails from a suburb of Nainital, Uttarakhand. He believes there are class, economic and cultural compulsions to speak good English in India and he has always felt the need to do something about it.

A Commerce graduate from Shriram College of Commerce and an alumnus of IIM-Calcutta, he worked in GE Capital, where he assessed balance sheets to decide whom to extend loans to and whom to reject. The two-year stint at GE was rewarding for he got to see the reality of the business world and, of course, saw his bank account swell. But the urge to be an educator was still there, and he wanted to be at the helm of affairs.

He thus began e-Gurukool, an online platform to deliver lessons and help educational institutions manage their curricula. The business went well, and he sold it to training services provider NIIT for ₹25-30 crore in 2003. His experience with e-Gurukool highlighted the holes in e-learning sector, and also provided capital for his next venture. His current venture, LIQVID eLearning Services, started in 2002, focuses exclusively on spoken and written English.

He realised that his bet on Internet penetration was too high and the role of the teacher had to be modified to make online lessons a success. In EnglishEdge, the flagship product of LIQVID, the videos are shorter, teachers are acquainted with broadcast techniques involved in talking to students over the web, and self-training modules such as Talk-To-Yourself-In-The-Mirror are part of the curriculum. A new module in the making is an interview preparation exercise meant for smartphone users. A staffing expert asks the usual questions such as “What is your USP”, “Why should we recruit you”, and students can record their answers and send them across to EnglishEdge as a mock interview.

“For visual learning, we are creating a video of a candidate appearing for an interview and getting grilled. This can give a peek into what they may expect during the real thing,” says Agarwal.

These new modules are meant for direct purchase by anybody with Internet access. From a business-to-business company selling its products to Educomp, the IITs, Jawaharlal Nehru University and several other training institutes working in rural areas to working on a new website for its interview preparation videos, EnglishEdge has become a delivery channel too.

EnglishEdge gets its revenue from two sources. One, from enterprise licensing where it builds content and websites for its business customers. The other is charging an amount based on the duration of training and number of learners benefited. This can range from ₹300 to ₹6,000. Investments in the business have touched ₹20 crore, which includes stakes by private equity firms Bedrock Capital and SBI Holdings, Japan, cumulating to $4 million. The target now is to raise $10 million to fuel its direct-to-customer venture.

Even now, Agarwal does not believe that 3G Internet is absolutely reliable. “It will take at least five years for good quality 3G to pervade the country. I think the wave of broadband Internet is still years away.” But he is firm he is in this business for the long haul.

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