The education system in our country has not seen many changes; however, the edtech department of the country is witnessing some significant changes. Currently, several startups are working in this field, but most of them provide courses on their platform, and a lot of research work has to be done by a student before they decide to choose a course that they want to pursue.
This is a time-consuming task, and people always wish for a place that would help them in saving time instead of scrolling through endless pages on the internet. However, this call was heard by Milan Roy and Vaibhav Srivastava as they faced the same problem when they were planning to opt for online courses. Understanding the problem they had to go through, they learned from the model of Trivago and MakeMyTrip and decided to launch an online course aggregator platform called Edvicer. Check out the platform here.
The beginning of the journey and what is Edvicer
Destiny has one or the other plans for everyone, and the perfect example of this is when Vaibhav from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh meets Milan from Faridabad, Haryana, in IIT Delhi. From batchmates to friends, to business partners, Vaibhav and Milan have had a long journey till now. After completing their B.Tech and M.Tech in Chemical Engineering, they both have had a fair share of courses that they specialized in during their college time.
The insane amount of courses offered online, and lack of ratings and recommendations make it extremely tedious and challenging for users to find a suitable course. Edvicer has worked in this direction to help the user to make a well-informed decision quickly and without any hustle. The platform compares more than 1 lakh online courses offered by major platforms, and with the help of the machine learning algorithm, an overall rating is given to the course based on the assignments, content, difficulty, forum, satisfaction, and teaching.
With the help of artificial intelligence, Edvicer makes personalized pathways for students and working professionals who are planning to get skilled in a particular area. This is carried by considering the current skill level, desired skill level, and the time in which they wish to reach that level. Depending on this information, a series of courses is recommended to the users, and then they can select the desired course from there.
Hurdles in their journey
Every startup faces one or the other problem, and for someone entering the edtech universe, they have to be careful with the choices they make. The platform they planned to open up was forming a chicken and egg problem as their platform would rate courses based on the reviews, and they were dependent on those reviews. On the other hand, the users will have to review the courses first to help them.
This was a massive challenge for them, and they finally came up with an AI-based algorithm for rating the courses. With time, the ratings given by the algorithm would be merged with ratings provided by users on their platform. The next challenge was to start building the service, and since both of them gave up college placements to start their startup, funding was a major problem and hiring a team for technical developments of the service.
They again had to go through courses and improve their knowledge by gathering skills through various online courses while working on what they could with their level of skills. The beginning was tough, but soon, things got more comfortable, and they were able to develop a complex website with a lot of data.
Collaborations by the platform
In conversation with TimesNext, Milan and Vaibhav talk about the partnerships that they have with the platform that includes working with Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, Edureka, and many more. These platforms are already a big deal when it comes to online education. The platform also plans to collaborate with all major and minor course providers that provide useful content to the users. Since the services are based in India, they would look forward to helping out the fellow Indian students who are preparing for several entrance examinations.
The first milestone for the company and current growth
The first milestone for the platform was when they collaborated with all the primary course providing websites. Every single thing about their vision was dependent on teaming up with the course providers. They reached out to them, and they had to wait for a few days before they heard from them again, and this was a stressful moment for them.
The platform launched on 5th December and the growth have been good and steady. With users from more than 120 countries in the world, the website is receiving a positive response from everyone. They are focused on the service they are providing, and they are also taking care of the platform from the feedbacks from users and improving their services.
The vision for the company
The duo is working hard to help other people while making their brand successful, and they wish to be the search engine and recommendation platform for the users when it comes to online courses, skill development, and career options. They want to make Edvicer the brand name for the online education world.
