Startup Story #54: MyNalanda – Analytics To Monitor Quality School Education

 

Nalanda is known as one of the first universities in Asia that saw an illustrious dissemination and discourse of knowledge for 800 years. It reportedly had students from different parts of Asia as well as 2000 teachers. The structure of education has changed a great deal from the ancient period to present day. Education, though a basic right, is highly privatised.

MyNalanda, a city-based educational startup that was founded in 2014, aims to maintain high quality standards by providing schools analytics on teachers, students and overall school performance.

“Throughout our corporate life, we realised that there were certain skills lacking in us as well as candidates we interviewed. We had to understand where the root cause lies. We’ve both worked for over a decade each. We saw that schools would be the right area to tackle this problem rather than at a graduate-level,” explains Manoj Potdar who co-founded the venture along with Dr Manisha Potdar.

This venture provides analytics by testing Quality Learning Outcomes (QLOs) in teachers and students. For student analytics, the key parameters are their skills in creativity, curiosity, problem-solving, conceptual understanding, thought originality and brain flexibility. These parameters help students and parents understand the areas of development in the students’ growth. For teachers on the other hand, the key parameters are their motivation skills, evaluation skills, influencing skills and faith in the institute. “It is crucial to understand the teacher’s attitude towards growth. Today, it is important to know the right attitude towards adopting technology in new teaching methods as well as checking their communication skills,” adds Potdar.

MyNalanda caters to around 50 schools in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad across all education boards. Speaking of the challenges they faced, he further adds, “This is a very niche field so the challenge was to create awareness. A lot of our time went in making people understand what this really means. Education is not an easy market at all. we had to mould ourselves to play different roles professionally. We learnt a lot about sales, finances, research and development. Innovating something in a corporate framework is very different from innovating in a startup. We had to learn how to rightly communicate our idea to the customer.”

For the future, the founders see this venture growing in two directions. “This can either become a boutique consulting firm which caters to premium clients or it can become a very huge global company. It has the potential for both. But now, we’re focusing on doing our job right so it is early to say anything. It all depends upon how the market responds.”

Vijayta Lalwani