Udacity, an online learning portal that is changing the $3bn Indian market on its head

India’s home-grown institutes may be known world over for the high quality education they provide, however, there’s still a wide gap the current education set-up in the country is not fulfilling, and that is to make every Indian student job ready. Despite students graduating from some of the best universities, Corporates today feel candidates who come to them are lacking what the industry wants.

An Aspiring Minds-Business Insider joint survey earlier this year found out that companies feel there is huge void in what students have been taught in universities and what is expected from them on-the-job. The survey also noted that talent crisis is not particularly a situation that plagues India, but exists worldwide. 61 per cent companies that run businesses in other parts of the world said the problem of finding the right talent for their organizations exists across markets. It's a challenge employers are facing globally today.

However, it’s also true that this gap has also led to the growth of several online education players in India to look into and resolve the problem. It has made e-learning a whopping $3 billion market in India. Among these players is Udacity, an education portal offering MOOCs, which claims India is its second largest market.

A lot has been going on at Udacity, and we chatted with Clarissa Shen, VP International and Managing Director for Udacity, Asia region to know more about the Nanodegree programs offered by Udacity, its partnerships with companies, future plans for the Indian market and lot’s more. Here’s what she told us:

How does Udacity stand apart from the other companies offering online courses in India?
Education is in high demand here. Seeing the growth in technology and technical education market, our mission is to bring most relevant for jobs and the most high quality cutting edge education to everywhere we are present with the ultimate goal of making our students match the demand by employers, whether it’s the next job or for the next promotion, they are able to skill up in high demand areas.
In the US, if you see our partnerships with top tech companies, they see high competition for talent. There’s an ongoing need for more and better developers. Even if you take the US universities for example, not all of them are not teaching technical or development skills. Their courses are not very practically oriented. That has now really taken off in US and we saw a lot of interest from India.

What’s your experience been like here so far and are you happy with the response from students?
India is already our second largest market in terms of students and we are now seeing at least 27,000 students in India enrolling with Udacity every month. We do not expect to be the only players. I expect to there will always be more education players, but I think that’s a good thing. We need a lot of people to change dynamics here in India so as to help young people and working professionals get great education that can increase their skill set.

Can you tell us the courses Indian students are opting for, and what do you think it says about the education system here?
If we consider the top courses across the world and those as per students’ activities in India, we are not surprised that android courses are very popular here. India is our top market for android development courses. Our fastest growing courses have also been in the area of machine learning. It’s really interesting because there are not many places that offer these types of cutting-edge courses, and so as a place to learn something like machine learning from experts working in companies like Google or Facebook, it’s become a pretty hot subject for students on that front. It’s also brought demand for web development skills.

Data suggests that over 50% people enrolling for online courses do not complete them. What seems to be the issue and what are some of the other challenges you are facing?
That is been one of our learning in this journey. When we started out, we felt that if we really wanted our students to be job ready, open courses were not the solution. At Udacity, we have evolved by incorporating other things like there are coaches for students, we have build communities for interaction, and we are providing one-on-one appointments to our students to help them learn because learning these skills is not easy. If you are just on your own watching a video and learning passively, completion rates will not be high, but we are happy to share that in our model completion rates are much higher. It’s because we do not give passive watching online content. We expect our students to learn by viewing and practicing what they have learnt. If they enroll for a program, they actually have to build a mobile app as a part of the curriculum. These projects become a part of their portfolios, and so students understand the commitment any course they pursue needs and they also invest time because they see tangible results.

Few Indian universities have started offering online courses now. How do you look at this?
We are happy to see universities embrace online education, but we are trying to solve a different problem. In US universities, their teaching and their goals around teaching are slightly different. They are more research oriented, more academic, they are teaching students foundational theories, but our partners are industries. We are solving a different problem as there’s a gap between what the industry needs, and what the best of universities are preparing students for, and we are bridging that gap. So even if universities in India start online courses, it’s great for the masses and for transparency and accessibility, but ultimately what we are trying to cater to is the industry demand.

Do you only partner with companies?
Nope, we do partner with universities who want their students who graduate to meet the demands of the industry and employers. We are looking to do the same in India going forward by partnering with universities to allow their students to get trained as per the industry demands by using all our resources and connecting them with our partner companies.

What’s Udacity’s future plan for the Indian market?
We plan to reach out to 3300 engineering colleges to partner and help them with right resources to make millions of students ready for jobs. Students will have access to online interaction with top engineers from leading companies like Google, Flipkart, Twitter on how to make oneself relevant for the top tech jobs.

I think there’s lot of scope for growth and to make more people aware about Udacity. In the next couple of months, we are not only bringing more courses online, but we are rolling out some of programs we have in the US called Connect which brings our online programs in a more blended format like community meet-ups and more offline activities to allow students to be more engaged in this educational journey.