1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s the conversation I had with Andrew in the context of Course Hero. He was trying to figure out a strategy for leveraging that trend of the celebrity teacher or the superstar teacher as you called – leveraging expertise, creating, and giving people a platform to teach on the Course Hero platform by riding on that trend. I think that is a major trend as well.

Deborah Quazzo: Everyone’s a teacher. 

Sramana Mitra: When you look at COVID-induced changes what do you see?

Deborah Quazzo: What we’ve seen is an acceleration. We expected the digital learning market to grow from $160 million towards the half a billion mark in 2026. But we’ve taken a step change – there’s a two-year compression in that growth cycle. We’re now projecting the digital learning market will be a trillion dollars in 2026.

The adoption of e-commerce in the commerce area and the penetration levels of how that moved is an analog. Certainly, some companies are suffering and are badly impaired by what’s happened, particularly companies that depend on any kind of physical setting and have not been able to pivot into online delivery.

We just had a phone call this morning with an entrepreneur in India who’s seeing incredible changes in the dynamics in the Indian ed tech market. Funny enough in India, you still go to people’s homes to sell a consumer product like education – a tutoring service even if it’s online.

You’re not able to do that under COVID and it’s transformed the go-to market and the sales strategy in India because the habits are going to have changed because it will be probably a long time before anyone is going to be going to anyone’s house to sell something.

Similarly here, going online whether you look at K-12 or you look at higher education is not perfect. You can read a whole lot about its imperfections, dissatisfaction on the part of students, issues like cost and why would someone pay the same amount for being online that you do to be there physically.

I think those are all questions to be asked with or without COVID. It’s also elevated the fundamental issue of the digital divide in that low-income students that don’t have access to WiFi and devices. That was something that existed before COVID. It just re-elevated it.

Low-income students should be able to learn at home. It’s not remote learning. It’s learning at home and so hopefully out of this, we see some real moves by the government and collaboration to make sure we get equity of access to low-income families around this so that they can participate equally in digital education which I think is encouraging and important.

I think there are going to be all kinds of fascinating ramifications from what’s happened. We all know that it’s not exactly over, so people are going to be held to a high level of accountability to improve the online delivery of education. You can’t just stick some people on Zoom and hope that it works.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures
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