Is it the end of the era for Edtech startups or the beginning of some major changes in Edtech? Will education move back to offline learning or we are going to witness a new shift in the direction of education?
In these difficult circumstances for the Indian Edtech industry, we are looking at an out-of-the-box approach to the age-old education system. One of them is taken by a young entrepreneur from IIT Kanpur, Prakhar Agrawal.
Prakhar Agrawal, a small-town boy from Madhya Pradesh believes the future of education will be very different. As Prakhar is from a small town, his father didn’t want to send him to big cities like Kota, Delhi, etc. So he had no other choice but to study on his own without any tuition/coaching. He started preparing but faced a lot of issues keeping up pace with his courses which most of his friends who went to Kota were also facing. His marks in mock tests used to be very low which led to stress and demotivation. Once he was so demotivated that he left his studies for a month.
Seeing Prakhar like this, his father got involved with him in his preparation and prepared a dynamic schedule for him. It was not a normal timetable, but a daily study plan which keeps on changing according to his learning pace and his performance. With this new dynamic schedule curated to suit his style of learning, he was able to clear JEE with a very good rank just by changing his way of studying from a fixed curriculum approach to a dynamic curriculum approach.
Even after getting into IIT he was very intrigued by this new learning methodology and wanted to help others implement this as well, so during his summer breaks he helped students around his neighbourhood to adapt to this new learning method and with it, most of the students were able to clear JEE.
This was making him more and more curious about how this can be done at scale. During his 3rd year while working on a project he was introduced to Machine Learning by his friend. This new-age technology and the limitless possibility of this technology ignited a small fire in his head. He can finally make his dynamic curriculum available for everyone, but it was just a small step in this direction. To further enhance his skills in Machine Learning, he did multiple projects and courses. He went on to join a leading investment bank Goldman Sachs to work on ML risk models. Later he also worked for Linkedin as an AI engineer where he was introduced to Reinforcement learning. It was then it clicked on Prakhar’s mind how he could leverage reinforcement learning in the education system and make adaptive dynamic learning possible.
During Covid Phase, while everyone was worried about job security, Prakhar quit his high-paying job at LinkedIn and returned to his hometown to pursue his ambitious dream to help students learn from this approach.
To understand the problem better he started talking to students around his hometown and also went to Kota and Delhi to get the real picture of this stressful and never changing ruthless coaching education. One of his key findings and the one which took him by surprise is that 95% of students are not able to follow their syllabus/curriculum. This led to the inception of Exam Lounge to address the problem of 95% of students who are often left out and given step-motherly treatment by coaching.
Since the beginning of Exam Lounge, it has helped more than 10 thousand students to move one more step closer to their dream using the Adaptive Dynamic Curriculum approach. With his “Never stop until you are done” life motto, Prakhar believes that all the future learning happens through the Dynamic Curriculum route, where every student gets to learn in a more personalized, unique way and making learning a stress-free process.
For its innovative way of learning, Exam Lounge has been recognized at multiple events all over India including Unicorn Ventures, Idealab’s, Huddle, Inc42, etc. Exam Lounge has been selected for the Government’s Samridh Seed fund program. Exam Lounge is also part of the Wadhwani Foundations IGNITE program and IIT startup cohort.
Let’s change the Way of Learning!
Exam Lounge: https://in.linkedin.com/company/examlounge
Exam Lounge App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.examlounge.examloungeapp&hl=en_IN&gl=US
Exam Lounge website: https://examlounge.com/
