AI Can Level The Education Field For Low-Income Students: GeniusMentor

Edtech platforms in India are growing at a fast pace. Post Covid boom, the segment has seen a slowdown. But, things are again coming back to normal as more students and learners use edtech platforms. GeniusMentor is one such edtech platform, which is leveraging AI (artificial intelligence) to impart education to students and learners. In a conversation with the Bizz Buzz, Mridu Andotra, Founder and CEO of Genius Mentor provided an overview of the company’s AI-driven educational platform.

Genius Mentor aims to deliver affordable and personalized learning experiences, particularly targeting students in tier two and tier three cities, with subscription costs ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000. According to her, the company’s AI powered algorithm enables it to design a personalised learning path for every student. She is of the opinion that given the rising cost of education, GeniusMentor can solve the learning challenges of economically weak students. The platform, which has evolved from her previous social initiatives in education, is planning to launch its courses in competitive examination space soon

Can you provide a brief overview about GeniusMentor? What are the key differentiating factors of GeniusMentor as compared to other edtechs?

GeniusMentor is an AI-powered education platform. We are making education affordable and personalized for students and learners, leveraging AI. That is our core. So, what we are doing, we are leveraging AI avatars. We have made AI avatars using AI. And through AI, we are creating content in the platform. So, AI is doing quizzes; it is taking assessments; it is teaching to the students and it is available 24*7 for the students. In that way, GeniusMentor is a completely AI-powered edtech platform. In the future, we are planning to collaborate with human teachers and make it more like a hybrid model where human plus AI impart various courses.

As we are leveraging AI for teaching, our courses are affordable. That is because we are not paying hefty salaries to the teachers. We are making sure that this becomes a mass product, which can be used by students and learners in tier-II and tier-III cities as well. Our aim is that quality education should be affordable by each student in India. Students from rural areas and small cities should be compelled to pay lakhs of rupees for online coaching.

What is your pricing model?

We have made it affordable starting from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 if a student opts for a personalized learning platform. The main differentiating factor of our platform is that we are bringing in personalised learning, using AI and other emerging technologies. Because, we know that if there are 40 students in a class, they have different learning paths as well as different learning speed. Our algorithm, which is our proprietary AI algorithm developed inhouse, figures out that what a particular student is weak in and what are his/her strengths are. After taking into account these parameters, a specific learning path is designed for each student. Such personalised learning path is very unique to our edtech firm and is our key differentiating factor. Because, our AI-powered platform customizes the content, curates the learning path, and creates a customized individual learning lessons for the students, which is not the case for other edtech firms.

What is the motivation behind starting GeniusMentor? Can you throw some light on the team?

The ideation stage for starting this edtech firm started 10 to 11 months back. I was into teaching as a social endeavour. I was teaching students from socially backward classes from Covid time. And then I created another AI platform, and got funded from European investors, and I continued with that. But meanwhile, I was always interested in edtech as it has a big social impact. GeniusMentor started 11 months back with a mission to make teaching affordable for millions of students across India. Because when I was involved in teaching, I have encountered students who cannot afford highly expensive classes. I have understood the pain points by speaking to teachers from West Bengal, J&K, from many very backward regions of the country. I have seen that there are very less practical lessons imparted to students. Students even do not know how to calculate profit and loss in real time. So, we want to solve these pain points through our courses, which are practical-oriented, personalised and technology-enabled.

Can you provide a brief overview about how these courses are designed? How are you leveraging AI for designing these courses?

We started with 2nd to 12th standard of CBSE classes. We used NCRT syllabus curriculum, not particularly the books, but the chapters. We gauge the contents of those books and designed the curriculum accordingly. However, we have made sure that they are not the same as it will face copyright issues. So, the content is ours. In our edtech platform, we are in the process of designing content for various competitive examinations. We have aligned ourselves with a few coaching institutes, like for UPSC and designed the courses. AI has created the content, and the AI has done the personalized learning algorithm. But we still want to refine it to a level where any student does not feel the need to go to human coaching institutes. Importantly, we are designing courses in multiple languages. Currently, our courses are available in Hindi, English and Hinglish. But we are in the process of designing it in various regional languages. We are integrating it with Bhashani to include multi-linguistic languages also. It will take us two months.

Can you give us a sense about your business model? How is the initial response to your various courses?

We are relying more on the technology, because technology is one that is the USP of our platform, unlike other edtech platforms. Secondly, our revenue model is B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) both. So, we are not just relying on marketing and Facebook marketing etc, but we will be selling our technology and services to schools, to coaching institutes as part of our B2B model.

We are trying to make personalized learning as a core of the education system. Humanly, it is not possible that any teacher to understand the weakness of all his/her students in the class. Only technology can understand that. And we want to spread this technology in the education sector, to the coaching institutes, to the schools, and to the universities.

The response to our courses is very good. We have done a bit of marketing. And there are students who are using the platform. We have done the beta testing. Now, there are students who are using the platform. And we are improving the platform. That's an ongoing process that we are doing.