However, in the education industry, innovative education startups are not only impacting the daily lives of those who use their products, they are completely overhauling the way we learn and the way institutions are run.

Lower cost, online EdTech solutions are poised to completely disrupt the traditional high-cost models as innovative education startups deliver similar services and offer products which are more affordable. According to inc.com, the global education market weighs in at $4.6 trillion dollars, which helps to give you some idea of the opportunity up for grabs for EdTech entrepreneurs. In countries like China where 67% of its citizens are now internet connected, but traditional teaching and learning still prevails disruption is bound to happen. Baidu report on trends in education reveals that by 2017 it will reach RMB 280 billion (USD 40.5 billion), and place itself third in the rank of China’s online industries.

Here’s a rundown of why those start-ups are set to disrupt the education industry with innovative approaches. 

Here are the key vendors as outlined by business wire, with potential to distrupt the market.

1. We can, and should be personalizing learning experiences

Innovative EdTech products give students the freedom to make the decisions on what and how they learn. The opportunity to better understand concepts using the digital aids that suit them, or even the ability to easily communicate with teachers and other classmates from home is a great example of education innovation in practice. Personalised learning experiences have proven benefits for students that include higher levels of student engagement and the opportunity for teachers and educators to better allocate their time.

Innovative EdTech products give students the freedom to make the decisions on what and how they learn

2. We can use data to make better decisions about how we learn

Data is predominantly becoming an invaluable resource for teachers, providing them with the opportunity to access detailed feedback on how learners are processing information. Educators can find answers to questions like – which are the best ways to teach complex ideas online? And which parts of a course are best taught in-person?

The data that more established EdTech platforms have collected over the years enables constant improvements and insights, which allows educators to better connect with students. Understanding what types of content students interact with, when students stopped watching an online video or what percentage of students answered a question correctly the first time around helps educators make crucial decisions around how they deliver the program of education in the most impactful and efficient way.

3. The way we match students to institutions is outdated

We live in a world where advanced retailers are using data to accurately predict top selling ranges, what will be the ‘must have’ item next season, and even what a consumer will purchase in the future. We use data to make many of the decision in our lives from what to eat for dinner to how to spend our downtime.  So the idea that you have to choose out of the ten of thousands of potential places to study by simply searching on the internet and speaking to people highlights the need to refine and innovate the process.

Choosing what course you should study is just one step in finding the right college or university for you, but there are many other factors to consider such as whether you are a cultural fit for the institution, whether their teaching methods are suited to you learning styles or which courses correlate best with the specific topics they want to study.

4. We don’t need to be held back by budget restrictions

Most traditional educational institutions and organizations face budget restrictions, however many of the current tools on the market require significant investment upfront – in part, this is due to the fact that many are designed for the ‘enterprise’ education market and do not cater for smaller specialist academies or institutions.

Budget cuts are often the answer to fund the desired tech, but often at a cost to other areas such as art, music or drama programs, extra curricular activities, and new course material. No education organization should be faced with having to choose between implementing new tech that will significantly improve the lives of students and educators and cut an extra curricular program.

What barriers education do startups face?

Avichal Garg, co-founder of PrepMe highlights that, “most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.”

In addition to this education is a notoriously slow moving, political and bureaucratic industry, and many end users of edtech such as teachers and administrators don’t actually have any say or buying power in the process. Couple this with the pressure for state and government schools to spend taxpayers money prudently and you start to get a small picture of the barriers innovative education startups must overcome.

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But, taking the time out to promote your eLearning course prior to launch may seem like an investment of time and resources you’d rather use elsewhere. If you’re new to promotion here are 6 top reasons why you should invest some time and resources into promoting your eLearning course to help increase enrollment numbers, before the big launch.

Six ways promoting your course, before the big launch, can help increase enrollment rates…

You build brand presence

Whether you’re new to eLearning or have been running eLearning courses for years you should always be looking to grow and develop on the brand presence of your startup or institution.

Marketing your latest eLearning course that’s ready for launch is a great way to spread the word about your content, brand and the other eLearning courses you offer.

Increase your pre-launch enrollment rate

People are more likely to enroll in an eLearning course if they know more about it. Your pre-launch marketing material gives you the opportunity to showcase topics covered, interactive material, outcomes and what makes your eLearning course different from competitors.

Build up enthusiasm by and consider offering early subscribers a bonus to encourage sign ups such as access to exclusive material or additional notes. Another tactic to help boost enrollment rates is to consider implementing a referral where students encourage their friends and colleagues to sign up to the course.

Boost your eLearning ROI

Promoting the benefits of undertaking your eLearning course, prior to launch, helps online learners understand exactly what they will be able to achieve upon completion of the course. Knowing what they can achieve means that students are more likely to be encouraged and excited by what they are about to embark upon – resulting in better attendance, participation and higher levels of engagement. In corporate eLearning environments, early marketing can even help prevent costly compliance violations

The direct benefit to your institution is an increase in eLearning ROI.

Make sure you’re pitch perfect

Promoting your eLearning course forces you to take the time to really refine what it is you’re offering, the benefits and standout features. The benefit of this is that you learn to pitch that allows you to sum up your eLearning course in a matter of minutes, with maximum impact.

Get valuable feedback

The earlier you start marketing your eLearning course, the earlier you start to get your online learning involved and excited. Another benefit is that you start to get invaluable feedback from learners about what attracted them to the course in the first place.

This knowledge gives you the opportunity to get feedback on things that might need to change before the course begins. Start by asking subscribers what attracted them to the course and basic questions that help to gauge their current level of knowledge and understanding – with this information you can tailor the course accordingly.

Build an email list

Undertaking some marketing activity for your upcoming eLearning course is also a handy way to build your email lists. These are invaluable when it comes to promoting future courses and re-engaging students. Promotion via email has a much higher conversion rate than marketing done through email – so by collecting emails now, you’re setting yourself up for a higher success rate in the future.

The list is targeted (user has already shown interest), personal (lands straight in the inbox) and most importantly you own it – not subject to changes in policies by the big social media channels.

Increasing your enrollment rate and getting students engaged early on is key to any successful eLearning course – so don’t skimp on the marketing and make sure you invest the time it deserves.

InfoDBase offers seamless pre-admission and enrollment module which allows educational institutions to increase their enrollments efficiently and effectively.

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Whenever you hear about futuristic technologies, implication and implementation of these technologies in education has always been thought last. You can give credit to the conservative nature of our education industry.  So our primary focus was to commission an extensive R&D on use cases and how the trends can change the education landscape. What InfoDBase team has done with respect to the application of these technologies in the education space is overwhelming.

We are investing in many cutting edge technologies and two of the main ones are Bots and Virtual Reality (VR). Global design and strategy firm frogdesign, in its 2017 forecasts predicts technologies that will define the upcoming year and mentions the use of Bots and VR. Lets have a look into this closely

VR finally will be a reality in 2017

Imagine the experience of going to the university sitting right in your living room. Virtual reality will finally make its mark in Classrooms in big ways.

Classrooms will be able to livestream entire lectures for people who want to watch without leaving their living room. Companies like NextVR are already partnering with Live Nation to make the setup a (non-virtual) reality. InfoDBase Learning Management System will be heading towards supporting VR platforms and content. We believe partnerships, integration and collaboration are the key to make this vision a reality. We aim to make InfoDBase VR enabled for our educators to easily deliver the VR enabled technology to their students.

Bots will make educators administrator effectively and students learn efficiently.  

In the way the communication app Slack has merged bots into its chat service, we are extensively exploring how educators will use artificial intelligence to handle the logistics of administrating students and learning activities.

We are working with many educators in the preliminary research to commission an assortment of administration and learning bots to bring our vision to reality.

Lets give you a sneak peak on some use cases. An enrolment administration bot might automatically solicit and collaborate with students and parents, while a student aid bot polishes his/her skills and helps student prepare for exams with organised content based on the student’s learning weaknesses — all to help the educators administrator work faster and students learn more effectively.

In today’s context of the primacy of smartphone and tablet devices, robust cross-organization cloud services and the changing nature of productivity — all combined with the acute needs of enterprise security — we are heading to dramatically change the definition of the education and learning management as a service.

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Different Learning Styles

Through the formal approach to learning, students gain knowledge through systematic lessons, curriculum and courses. We may say that this approach is passive since students have to go through the same processes altogether. While this is true, there are various learning styles that students feel more comfortable with. These learning styles are listed below.

Different Teaching Approach

There’s a Chinese proverb: “A thousand teachers, a thousand approach.” This proverb resonates the truth, as every teacher is unique, their methods and approach to teaching will vary even a little bit. The most common approach to teaching includes teacher-centered and learner-centered. The learner centered approach see the teacher as the only reliable and sole source of information, in a sense this approach is dominated by the teacher. The learner-centered approach is a little more lax in terms of where the information comes from. In this approach, the learners have also seen a reliable source of information. There are other approaches to teaching and the disciplines of these approaches vary. We have outlined these different approaches to learning in the graph below.

What’s the Difference between Learning and Teaching?

Differentiating learning and teaching is very easy. In direct definition, teaching is giving lessons about a particular subject to a group of learners. While learning is gaining knowledge by studying, being taught and experiencing. Many will assume that teaching is more important than learning, the truth is, learning is more important because it’s the end goal of teaching. Students can learn without teachers, but teachers can’t teach without learners.

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Application Form Fields Module

The application form fields enable school administrators to customize the forms on their online application page. Once the customization is complete the users can easily deploy the form on their websites by copying and pasting the embed code.

Pre-Admission Module

School admins will have access to different modules (features) including the pre-admission module where they can manage new applications. This module allows the user to sort applications by type and date. By clicking on the name of the applicant the admin can view the full details of application including the following: contact information, age, parent’s information and the series of messages sent to the applicant (if any).

If your school requires new students to take an examination before you admit them, the admission officer can send an SMS and/or email to the contact information provided in the application to invite the applicant to come to the school. All of these can be done without leaving the InfoDBase interface. Once the student passes the examination, the admission officer can then change the status of the application to accepted or admission offered. From there, the student can opt to accept the offer and pay the required fees.

Easy, Affordable and Innovative

InfoDBase  is very confident that you’ll love the features of our Student Administration Software program. The features mentioned above is but a fraction of things our software can do for your school. We have helped many schools (big or small) to streamline their schools application process. You can find all the features of our program here, or you can always ask for a demo here.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s ranking and visibility in search engines for certain keywords that are related to your industry or niche. While SEO seems very simple, the process behind it is more complex and you will not get the same results every time.  SEO is very important for schools because many applicants and their parents do their research about prospect schools online. Majority of these searches are made on search engines and social media sites.

If your school is not visible on search engine results page, then you are missing out big time. With over 1 trillion searches on Google per alone, we can say that a fraction of these searches are related to schools, colleges and universities admissions and applications. To be on top of search results mean higher application and enrolment rates.

On Page SEO Strategies

Your Website’s On Page SEO plays a big role in telling search engines what your website is about. On page SEO includes meta titles, description and alt texts. To ensure that search engines understand what your content is about, include keywords and make your titles and description short and precise. Another technique is using alt texts and descriptions on images that you use on your content.

Note that .edu websites have big advantage when it comes to SEO, these websites are preferred by search engines because its content are scholarly and often goes through strict editorial processes. While this is true, you have to note that your school’s website is competing with other websites with .edu domain extensions.

Off Page SEO

When websites link to your website and content, search engines like Google take it as a vote of confidence. While this is true search engines also look at the nature of these links. Are the links coming from link farms or from a reputable websites? All of these are counted by search engines and the better your link profile is, the better your website will rank on search results.

Directories and Other Listings

Directories allow you to list your schools or educational institutions. Majority of directories and listing sites have great impact on how your website is ranked for local searches. Searches like “private high school near me” rely greatly on listings such as Google Places, Yelp among others. It is a good practice to list your websites on reputable directories and listing sites. A word of caution, there are some listing sites and directories that search engines have penalized because of quality listings. Be wary and list your website with caution.

Is SEO Worth it?

Implementing new SEO strategies to improve your website rankings is a good idea only if you have solid strategies in place. If you’re unable to come up with one, it’s best to have someone do it for you (preferably an agency with vast experience in this area). If you are in doubt, this good resource for beginners will help you out tremendously.

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This is why more and more educational institutions employ social media strategists and managers to help improve their online presence. If your school do not currently have any social media pages yet, TODAY is the best time to start one. We suggest that you follow the social media strategies we have outlined below.

Be Professional

Set up your school’s page in a professional way. Since social media sites rely mostly on visual cues, make sure that your page’s profile picture and cover photos are in the right dimension. Fill in all the necessary information and make sure that your page description embodies the true values of your institution. Communicate in a professional manner all the time.

Be Fun

While your social media page is an avenue to communicate with students, potential students and their parents it doesn’t have to be boring. Remember if you are going to establish a good following on social media, you must post updates that would grab the attention of your followers. A good interaction between you and the students is measurable through comments, likes, retweets etc.

Some good updates to posts include: photos of recent school activities and gatherings (featuring students and their parents), pictures with quotes about success and education, big news about improvements of school facilities. Bad examples of posts include: calling out and tagging unruly students, tuition fee increase (this is best communicated personally).

Content is king

Your school’s social media pages are great tools to connect with students, parents and applicants. Use these platforms to your advantage. If your school already has a website share your content on your social media accounts frequently. This way, new applicants, parents and students are well aware of the things that are going on in your school like: your school’s achievements and how student life is like in your school. Keep your followers in the loop and encourage them to share your content, this way your referral traffic increases as well.

Social Media Management Takes a lot of Time

If you are the school owner, you probably want to delegate the social media management task to someone else so you can focus on more important things. While you’d probably want to pass this task to a random team member, note that social media management can be daunting. You want to give this task to someone who is already familiar with different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube etc.

If your team members or faculty are all too busy or are not very familiar with these platforms, delegate it to a social media specialist. A word of caution, if you decide to outsource this task make sure that you review their work from time to time to ensure that the quality and content of their posts are what you expect it to be.

Social Media is Evolving

Like many communication tools, social media is also evolving. Today, it’s the most popular means of communication and we’ll never know if it’s still going to be in the next few years. Expect new feature, platforms and trends to come out and be ready to assess if it’s going to benefit your school or not.

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Teachers are said to be the second parents of their students. They help hone their students and turn them into successful contributing members of the society. Without these commendable people, learning would be much harder or even impossible for many. Through them, we learned to dream and turn our dreams into a reality; through them, we learned to hope for a brighter future. Let’s ponder on the importance of teachers in our lives with these inspirational quotes about teaching.

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Global Citizen Festival

This year, the fest saw performances from Pearl Jam, Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and Coldplay. Behind the masquerading showbiz is the organizers’ lofty goal of eradicating poverty and one of the means to do so according to them is the availability of quality education especially to children. Educated children would ultimately drive them to better lives and solutions for their parents and their communities.

Clinton Global Initiative

The Clinton Global Initiative features top speakers to help translate ideas on education into actionable ground results. Clinton Growth Initiative members discuss points to develop effective education systems across the world which includes child education plans and skill enhancing education programs. The initiative has seen phenomenal results in Uganda where its leadership and entrepreneurship programs reached 200+ school with more than 20,000 enrollments.

Global Education First Initiative (GEFI)

The Global Education First Initiative or GEFI is the UN Secretary General’s education first initiative to push education as a catalyst for meeting all goals including UN agencies, NGOs and business initiatives. GEFI held an event titled #EducationFirst for sustainable development which featured the joint winners of Nobel Peace Prize 2014 Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai. The objective this event was to promote education as a means to achieve special development goals of the United Nations.

Worldidac India

WORLDDIDAC INDIA is the only event in the Asia Pacific region for Educational Material, Training & Technology based solutions for all levels and sectors of the Education & Training Industry.The event is partnered by the Worlddidac Association and supported by British Education Suppliers Association (BESA), DIDACTA (Germany) & India Didactics Association and the event is supported by all prominent ministries of the Government of India and various educational bodies.

Tech4ed Education Platform

Adam Braun, Director of Global Education Platform convened the event #Tec4ed to explore the possibilities of utilizing technology to deliver education to the marginalized youth.The commission is supported by the government of Norway. The platform also looks into the problems encountered by the less fortunate students when it comes to education financing- a major barrier to schooling and further studies for those who are challenged for adequate funds.

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Enrollment should ease the entry of students and pave the way for more interested parties to sign up

When it comes to enrolling students, institutes go hammer and tongs at their endeavors to attract students. Things can go sour if they bite off more they can chew. Managing student enrollment is a critical process and requires precise execution of plans. Otherwise, there might be an overspend on increasing the number of seats without any results. Given below are a few methods to maintain a seamless enrollment process.

Having essential data in place

Keep all information about processes in the appropriate areas of the website. The idea is to make students and their wards aware of all checks and documents prior to the process so that no hassles are encountered. It will make sense to have an IVR system for telephonic inquiries and a live chat support for questions that may arise with respect to enrollments. A comprehensive set of FAQs may also be added on the website to assuage any doubts prior to enrollment.

Accurate forecasts needed

The admissions team needs to be realistic about the intake for the current academic year. The whole process of goal-setting must involve realistic targets based on concrete facts and not wild projections. Some of the points to consider are demographics, competition, and the rate of increasing enrollments in the past years.

Develop a holistic marketing plan

Once an enrollment target is set, it is necessary to have a marketing plan in place to attract students. It should ideally be a mix of print ads, flyers, radio ads, forums for introducing the school to parents and students and possibly TV commercials for an ideal impression and recall. Have a look at our article on Effective Strategies to increase student enrolment & Top 5 key strategies to attract international students. Given below is a list of tools we recommend for your marketing plan.

1. Email Marketing – MailChimp
2. CRM software – Salesforce and InfoDBase or a combination of Salesforce and InfoDBase
3. Form building tools – Typeform and InfoDBase or a combination of both.
4. Use social media tools like HootSuite, Meet Edgar to publish and post important enrolment dates and results.

Finally, have a student enrollment system in place

One cannot overstate the need to automate processes to speed up admissions and enrollment. Automated systems will eliminate unnecessary paperwork and set processes without losing data and efficiency. Having an online school management system software such as InfoDBase that takes care of activities right from admissions and enrollment to administrative functions and progress tracking will make things look more seamless at the institute. Contact us for making your institute process-smart and efficient.

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