Top-6 Features to Increase EdTech Revenue

The total amount of investment in EdTech solutions is projected to double from $152 billion in 2018 to $342 billion in 2025. This is a clear indication that EdTech is a highly profitable market with ample opportunities worth investing time and effort into. Indeed, as 2019 e-Learning research from Tomorrow.org shows, 72% of schools already use cloud collaboration platforms in their curriculum, nearly 60% provide their students with mobile devices for studies and almost 50% provide online education.

These numbers undoubtedly went up due to pandemic-induced lockdowns. Add the ever-continuing adoption of Industry 4.0 across various niches. Consider also that blended learning now accounts for 69% of corporate education and training— and you will see why 2020 is a great year to hop on the EdTech wagon and cut yourself a piece of that multi-billion e-learning pie.

However, to be successful in this highly competitive market and drive good revenue, you must pay attention to 6 important EdTech features and trends listed below.

Selling your product once gives you revenue, making sure your customers keep using it ensures long-term success. e-Learning is all about continuity of training so that customers leverage your solutions time and again — and for that, they should be satisfied with their customer experience. This can be boosted through providing an intuitive end-user journey, regularly adding extra features, running various loyalty programs, etc.

ExxonMobil uses an LMS to train new shifts of employees to work their oil rigs while they are still on solid soil. Before the emergence of Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technology, such training mostly consisted of videos showing various aspects of oil rig workflows, and the learners had to memorize all the operations.

However, once reliable VR sets became available, the LMS developer released their support as a new feature. Thus, learners can operate oil rig systems in simulated environments and practice their skills in fast-paced emulations. This helped reduce the average time spent training by nearly 23%, greatly increasing the cost-efficiency of personnel onboarding. Currently, other oil & gas companies follow suit, implementing AR/VR-based training programs.

Another example is replacing actual biology and chemistry laboratories with virtual labs. This helps avoid spending budgets on consumables, remove the risk of accidents and provide training to thousands of students at once, instead of a single biology or chemistry class at a time.

Thus said, retaining your customers is one of the most crucial tasks for any business. According to the results of our research of the challenges of building an EdTech company, every fourth founder named working on customer retention their primary objective to ensure increased revenue.

It does not matter how useful your EdTech solution is, if the end-users find it hard to use. Thus, user experience is the key aspect of the long-term satisfaction of your customers and engagement of end-users. Even small UI/UX details can be very empowering (or detrimental) and affect the chances of market success for your product.

• Use minimalistic and clean design. The course's enrollment page must be straightforward and lead the user to that Buy or Enroll buttons without distractions and chasing squirrels.
  
  
• Use convenient page formatting and navigation. Any action on your course should be done with 3-5 clicks, no more. Forget about multi-layered drop-down menus.
  
  
• Use mobile-friendly and adaptive design, as 80% of users will assess your products on the move, from their mobile devices
  
  
• Use microlearning — small chunks of learning concentrated around 1 idea. The users must be able to watch the video, do the exercises, read additional materials, complete some quizzes and pass the exams within the span of 2-4 hours
  
  
• Use customer feedback to continuously improve your product, as explained in the previous paragraph

This way your customers will work with an intuitive and effective training solution that evolves along with their needs, and will not want to change the platform.

Personalization is one of the key aspects of a successful e-Learning process. Integrating Artificial Intelligence to enable real-time analytics helps personalize learner journeys and keep them motivated and entertained. This is why AI's popularity in education is skyrocketing, and the value of AI in EdTech is expected to reach $3.6 billion by 2023.

Use the following tips to personalize the e-Learning journey for your users:

• Use pre-course questionnaires at enrollment, to assess the existing level of knowledge on the course topic and filter learners
  
  
• Use the data from these tests to identify each user's learning preferences, knowledge gaps and confidence levels — and adjust your course content to fit their particular needs
  
  
• Build your course modular (complete with theory, exercises, polls, expert guidance, etc) and create rules on the sequence of showing each module. This way the experienced in the course topic learners can skip the basics and move on to the next tasks, etc.
  
  
• Alternatively, highly confident but inexperienced learners might need some challenging tests with expert guidance. This will help them adjust their expectations without losing confidence and route them to appropriate modules to close their skill gaps and provide the required knowledge.
  
  

Through providing personalized e-Learning, you can ensure the learners remain motivated, engaged and entertained, which leads to positive training outcomes and lets them come back for more, increasing your revenue.

E-Learning gamification went a long way from badges and dashboards it started with. Nowadays, VR/AR solutions are used in various niches, from K-12 education to professional training to provide immersive and engaging education. Chemistry students can perform safe experiments, while biology and surgery students can train in virtual environments, without endangering patient's lives. ABI Research states the global market share of VR-based immersive education will grow to $6.3 billion by 2020.

Private and institutional investors amply support e-Learning startups and EdTech initiatives:

• More than $32 billion were invested in EdTech over the past decade and Global EdTech Funding predicts the total volume of investments to reach $87 billion by 2030
  
• AI/ML and AR/VR solutions are more and more commonplace in EdTech, providing a new level of learner engagement and performance, and the demand for them is growing
  
• US EdTech market is the biggest globally, getting multi-million investments YoY, while EU authorities have invested more than $1 billion in various EdTech initiatives.
  
• EdSurge database of public funding deals has reviewed 105 EdTech deals in the US in 2019 and claim them to amount to $1.66 billion in total, with the deal value average growing by 15%, as compared to 2018.

We can surely say EdTech is on the rise and does not show any signs of slowing. Global lockdowns induced by the pandemic have highlighted the importance of e-Learning once more, and the market is actively growing.