Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

The ed-headlines (ed-lines?) this week made me think of an old song called Look What You’ve Done by Australian rock band Jet. It isn’t the title but the chorus that, to me, perfectly encapsulates what just happened with online-to-offline edtech:

Oh, look what you’ve done

You’ve made a fool of everyone

Oh, well, it seems like such fun

Until you lose what you had won

Changes in Indian edtech now come in a matter of weeks. One minute, the sky is falling through the roof. The next minute, they’re using it to pave the walls of their new offline centres. 

A number of bold-faced edtechs are now… well… just education companies with a technology arm. Unacademy, Imarticus Learning, the newly-minted unicorn PW, Byju’s—all these companies, which have raised a total of US$7 billion between them on the promise that online education works, have launched offline operations. 

Unacademy has 15 centres dedicated to preparing students for the UPSC and JEE-NEET exams, PW has 20 test-prep centres, and Byju’s will hit 500 tuition centres for K-12 (Kindergarten to Class 12) by the end of this year.

I know what you’re going to say. Edtechs are facing dire times, schools have reopened, revenue streams have shrunk. So edtech is taking the offline bull by its horns. 

But here’s my argument—edtech wasn’t born during the pandemic. And it certainly wasn’t born because of the pandemic. It was an alternative to the bloated, expensive, and concentrated offline model of tuition and test prep.

In the effort to survive the funding winter though, edtech has become what it thought it never would.

Or they were just fooling us.

Part 1: Oh look what you’ve done

You’ve made a fool of everyone

The week started with a standoff in India’s IIT-JEE coaching hub Kota. 

Rajesh Maheshwari, co-founder and director of the Allen institute, issued a stern video warning to his faculty. In a threatening monotone, Maheshwari told them that they shouldn’t get “greedy” over offers from other edtechs and that they’d never be welcome back if they left for another company.

Allen had one specific villain in mind.