Bengaluru Mohan Lakhamraju, founder and CEO of Byju’s-owned Great Learning said Indian Edtech Consortium has dismissed the consumer complaint alleging Great Learning of mis-selling a course and going forward the company aims to be more deliberate in correctly aligning student expectations from the beginning. 

“I think we could have done a better job of educating people on the course details. That is our takeaway from this. We will be more careful and deliberate about those kinds of things, but there’s just no question of mis-selling, we just don’t do that. Ultimately it is about perception and so people have to be clear about what they are getting into,” Lakhamraju told BusinessLine.

Bullying

He added that there is a tendency in some students to think that they can bully a company into getting what they want by applying pressure. “I think social media is encouraging people to try and do that. We knew that we did nothing wrong in this case and so we took a hard stance. We have certain principles that we are gonna stick by, and  hopefully people will also stick to their principles,” he said.

Last month, a group of students have reached out to IEC with a complaint against Great Learning for allegedly selling a ‘Continuing Education and Quality Improvement Programmes’ (CE&QIP) course of IIT-Bombay as PGP course. In a judgement earlier this week, IEC has ruled that the complaint is devoid of any merit and thus, dismissed. Further, Great Learning is said to be doubling its revenue year on year.

Registered learner base

Lakhamraju said the company’s registered learner base has crossed the 5.5 million mark. This includes learners registering for taking free courses along with other low priced courses. This number has been growing substantially as compared to the beginning of the pandemic, when the platform had 500K registered learners. This is led by the growth in several courses on the Great Learning platform, and the company currently offers 1,200 courses and learners come from 180 countries.

The company has 100,000 learners coming from 90 countries to take its premium courses. These courses include in-depth longer duration programs which Great Learning offer itself or in partnership with its academic partners. Overall, Great Learning gets 55  per cent of its revenue from India and 45 per cent from international business. Interestingly, Great Learning has about two-third of its user base coming from India and the rest is from the international market. 

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