How The eLearning Landscape Is Currently Evolving
India will experience a digital revolution as soon, 500 million new users will be added to the 370 million internet users in India. Also, the outreach of the internet is not limited to the urban landscape alone nowadays, but it has reached rural areas, too. These factors create a huge market for the eLearning sector in India.
Preference And Growth Of Higher Education Systems Through The Online Medium
Interestingly, eLearning opens a wide variety of options for working professionals. The options offer a range of learning facilities that they enjoy regardless of their status and location—something they did not have access to a few years ago. As per a statistical report submitted by KPMG, private universities offering different undergraduate and postgraduate eLearning courses are on a rise. This piece of the report clearly signifies that higher education through the online medium in India, though being at an early development stage, is witnessing wide acceptance and steady growth. Post-graduation courses like the Master of Computer Application (MCA) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) lead the race when it comes to the demand for online higher education.
The Government’s Role In The Growth Of eLearning Industry Across India
The Indian government is strongly keen to bring certain digital reforms that may be a big push for the growth of the eLearning industry. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) website points out that eLearning has been identified as one of the key tools for imparting education. In fact, in regard to the same, the government has been aiding R&D projects financially for different educational institutes in the area of eLearning. The financial support to the programs by the government covers the areas of content development, human resource development projects, R&D/technology development projects, and faculty training.
Is India In Sync With Global Trends When It Comes To eLearning Or Online Education?
With high internet penetration in rural areas slowly and steadily rising, there will be a massive spurt in the number of online courses and online students. Technavio’s market research analyst predicts that the Indian online education market will grow at a CAGR of about 20% by 2020, worth about 18 billion U.S. dollars. According to the KPMG report, by 2021, the online education industry in India will witness a growth of about X6 times. It is astonishingly true that the number of users enrolling in online education may touch 9.6 million users by 2021, from 1.6 million users in 2016. The revenue associated with it may be worth $1.96 billion. Estimates point out that the eLearning market worldwide will grow massively to the tune of more than 243 billion U.S. dollars by 2022. These forecasts clearly point that eLearning is all set to become a global trend, and sooner or later, more and more people may opt for it over traditional classrooms.
A report named "Online Education in India: 2021" gives details about the growing dependability of the Indian education industry on the internet, related to the development of the eLearning market. This report gives out some thought-provoking details; in the last two years, the growth of online searches was increased x2 times for education purposes and a surge of searches through mobile devices grew by X3 times. These reports are extremely important for the eLearning industry, as professionals in corporate organizations prefer to reskill themselves and opt for online certification. Both reskilling and online certification stand as the biggest segments, valued close to $93 million in 2016 and anticipated to reach $463 million by 2021.
Summing up, eLearning has been viewed as a potential game-changer in the coming years due to the growth of the online education market and its quantitative outcome to raise employment opportunities, plugging the demand-supply gap in the Indian industries.
Sources:
- KPMG Report: Online Education in India: 2021
