Unschool, founded in 2019 in Hyderabad, Telangana, is an ed-tech company that creates an online learning ecosystem for students and professionals. The company allows students, graduates, young professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone with the curiosity to learn to create an online learning ecosystem that fits their needs and industry demands. It caters to a marketplace where industry experts host online courses for students and earn royalties from the Unschool team in return.
The vision of the startup is to provide alternative learning and teaching methods to enable the youth towards employability. The mission is to have teachers, working professionals, and students, create a powerful online learning ecosystem.
The Story
The Unschool story began at a phase that comes in the lives of Indian youth oftentimes when the person realizes he is not made for something that he is already working for. The same happened with Rahul Varma, when he realized his passion doesn’t lie in coding but in fact, he’s more inclined towards sales & marketing.
After handling the AIESEC’s India operations, he joined a startup in Bengaluru as Chief Operations Officer. It’s there he realized that India’s education system is not responding to the demand of the industry as the curriculum is quite outdated. He was also skeptical about the readiness of the entry-level workforce in the coming years.
All of this lead to the beginning of Unschool in 2019.
How does Unschool Works?
According to YourStory Media, it is a marketplace where industry experts host online courses for students and earn a royalty per sale that is given by the Unschool team. Unschool provides with One-to-One Mentorship, Practical assessments, Certified Projects, and Guaranteed Internship opportunities – all of this designed and validated by industry experts.
There are a host of courses at the platform in three major domains – Technology, Management, and Arts.
In the technology section, the platform hosts courses on upcoming technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, AWS – Cloud Computing, Big Data engineering, Cybersecurity, etc. Whereas, in the management section, the courses range from Business Management, Art of Selling, Digital Marketing, Six Sigma to Copywriting, etc while in the arts section, the courses are Graphic Designing, Human Rights, and Duties, Interior Designing, Psychology, Public Speaking, etc.
On the Unschool platform, students can sign up and immediately start their lessons. Once they complete 20 percent of the course, they are intervened with a project that tests their knowledge. Upon finishing 70 percent of the course, another major project intervention takes place. Once they do well and finish 80 percent of the course, they are presented with handpicked internship opportunities from reputable MNCs, startups, NGOs, etc.
Role of the coaches
The coaches are the backbone of the system developed by the startup. They receive a royalty for the courses that they’re able to sell on the platform. Currently, there is a community of 200+ coaches that is aiming to play a vital role in defining how Unschool educate individuals to embrace their fullest potential
The team let the coaches decide and plan the courses because they understand that every coach has a unique teaching style, and hence the team lets them explore their style. They are also free to create their own curriculum which is only possible because of the platform’s attitude of having no ‘set syllabus’ which is the kind of unschool that Unschool is trying to deliver (feel the pun, eh?).
The Unschool team also provides junior coach support to the senior coach, which is responsible to execute and take care of everything!
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Challenges
Being an early-stage venture, it is completely bootstrapped and started from the founder’s family residence. Since then, he has moved to the office.
Also, survival being an early-stage startup in a heavily invested, highly competitive ed-tech industry is no mean feat but comes with its own challenges.
“The biggest challenge was to convince the faculty and students on why Unschool is better and provides with an outcome-based learning and personal mentorship, which is extremely important. On the other hand, with the stigma around education in India, everyone studies to get a degree/certificate but not with the spirit of upskilling/learning. After receiving positive responses from our first 100 customers, we started gaining traction through word of mouth and grew from there.”, Rahul told YourStory Media in an interview.
Future Plans
The startup boasts of 21,000+ active monthly users and 5.2 million minutes of learning currently. It also has more than 25,000 paid users which the team intends to notch up to 500,000 users in the next three years.
They are also coming up with their web application and mobile application to further penetrate and capture the ed-tech market. The team has plans to add up to 500 courses by the next three years to become the one-stop solution for learning a skill, assessing your knowledge through projects, mentorship, and placement opportunities.
They also have plans to partner with colleges to provide students with upskilling courses at an affordable cost.