e-learning market in India

The Indian e-learning service providers focus on three major sectors: Corporate training, Education, and Government in the domestic and International markets.

Vijay Thadani, the co-founder and CEO of NIIT Ltd., a pioneer in the e-learning industry mentions that in the US, the e-learning market size in 2008 is $4 billion. However, the Indian market, despite a 4% market penetration in 2008 was promising and the reason he states is that even a 4% will be millions of users, which is in fact higher than the population of many developed countries.

According the research report from ValueNotes on e-learning service providers in India, 91% of the service providers focus on the corporate market, 76% of them focus on the education sector and 44% focus on the government segments. This includes the domestic and international markets.

Corporate sector: This is the highly targeted segment by the e-learning service providers and around 91% of the companies find this as the easiest segment to target. Companies today cannot ignore training and they believe training as the important tool to up skill their employees and sustain their workforce. In the past, the major focus of Indian e-learning firms remained on developing IT learning solutions. Now, they have realized the potential in other verticals and diversified in developing technical and soft skill e-learning solutions for almost all verticals, including banking, financing, insurance, automobiles, and so on.

Education sector: This is a vast sector and includes K-12 through higher education academic programs, career guidance programs for individuals, certification courses, and professional development courses. In India, there are only a few online universities and online degree courses that have gained popularity. This is because people still consider regular classroom structure with direct tutor interaction, as the effective mode. However, e-learning courses on career development and IT certification (MSCE, MCSD, Cisco, Microsoft and so on) developed for individuals are a big hit.

Vivek Gupta, Vice President of StudyPlaces.com, an online Indian e-learning portal, mentions that online courses for professional entrance exam coaching is yet another prospective market in the domestic e-learning education sector. With students finding it difficult to manage their regular academic schedule and attend coaching classes for exam preparation, they prefer online courses.

Online Tutoring is a yet another booming industry in the online education sector. The tutoring companies offer online tuition services that include voice-based tutoring for all academic subjects, homework assistance, and assignment help for K-12 students across the globe. Though this trend is yet to catch momentum in the domestic market, it seems to have a flourishing market in the US and the UK, because of the reduced cost of labor for tutoring and good quality of tutoring from Indian teachers.

Government sector: E-learning Service providers focus comparatively less on this segment, since this requires companies to go through lot of procedures and paper-work and it also differs from country to country. Companies also feel the wait time seems longer before getting approval on the projects. Indian government sectors are quite slow in adapting e-learning and the potential of this digital learning technology is yet to gain popularity.