Online education portal, Meritnation has recently rolled Meritnation Junior, a new product exclusively for students of class I to V which focuses on concept based learning, with practice as the bedrock of all learning. Alongwith this, the company has also launched 4 offline centres in Jaipur.
Meritnation Junior
Meritnation Junior has been developed as an education platform for students that is engaging and guarantees true mastery of every topic. With an Study companion called ‘POTU’ as its mascot , and a gamified approach, with various other additional features such as the animated short videos, are also being introduced to make study more addictive. It has unlimited questions across 500+ topics with over 1000+ videos and downloadable worksheets.
It also has a specially designed parent’s zone which allows parents to create tests and assign them to their children. They can even monitor their child’s performance through comprehensive reports that allow parents to readily identify the ‘weak spots’ in their child’s learning.
There is also a Scorometer on the website, which helps indicate the proficiency level a child has reached on a given topic. Ranging from ‘beginner’, ‘advance’ to ‘proficient’, it helps a child keep track of progress on the topic.
On Meritnation, Classes 1-5 account for almost 25% of the total sign ups, since launch of Meritnation Junior, over 3 lakh seventy thousand questions have already been attempted and a total of almost 8000 topics have been mastered by young learners till date on Meritnation Junior.
Offline Study Centres
The company has launched 4 new advanced study centres in Jaipur. Explaining the USP of the centres VP of Product Vivek Narayanan said, “Our centres harness the power of technology to customise studies & also bring in friendly mentors to inspire the learning effort of students. We started off to deliver on a promise of assured learning & with the Centre for Excellence we believe we have cracked it”.
The study material at these centres consists of active concept maps, animated videos, unlimited questions & comprehensive tests across all popular boards & subjects.
We Caught up with Pavan Chauhan, MD and CEO – Meritnation.com to know how Meritnation is doing, idea behind launching offline centres and his views over tie ups with schools.
Inc42: With increase in mobile users, and the increase in students using the platform via mobile or accessing mobile app by Meritnation, do you think mobile will overtake web traffic for Meritnation?
Pavan: The number of mobile Internet users according to a recent IAMAI report is expected to touch 185 Mn by June 2014, accounting for about 76% of the Internet user base in the country. Approximately 35% of our total userbase access the website on mobile. We have doubled our mobile users in the last one year. We believe that our mobile user base too will increase significantly over the next few years and we do see a definite trend of mobile overtaking desktop traffic.
Inc42: In regard to the offline learning centres by Meritnation, how has been the response so far? Recently, you launched another centre in Jaipur, how many more cities are you planning to launch offline stores?
Pavan: We launched our first offline centre in Gurgaon 2 years back. It has been a massive success with hundreds of Gurgaon students learning at the centres & high renewal rates showing confidence in the program. We have utilized these 2 years to fine tune the model. The launch of 4 company owned centres in Jaipur is the first step in an aggressive roll out all over the country over the next few months. We also plan to introduce a highly lucrative franchise model to aid this expansion program.
Inc42: Meritnation is also offering preparation material for competitive exams, as there are number of players who are offering the same, what are the key things that differentiate you from them?
Pavan: In India, Meritnation is the only online learning website that offers a comprehensive and rigorous test prep module. Our online courses are designed in a such a way that they not only help an aspirant prepare rigorously for the entrance exam, but also ensure that he is thoroughly prepared for his school level exams.
The online courses include concept building videos, strategy sessions with experts, revision notes, subject-wise practice questions, previous years’ solved papers, sample papers, Live Tests Series and customised reports. In addition tools such as the Rank Predictor are some of the other value adding features that help a student in Meritnation lend that extra edge to his preparations.
Since entrance exams like IIT JEE have gone online, Meritnation’s preparatory courses aim at not only familiarizing the student with the online mode of these exams as well as training them to successfully finish the paper in time.
Inc42: From where is the maximum chunk of traffic coming up on the platform?
Pavan: A huge chunk of our user base comes from students in classes VII- XII from cities like Delhi, Pune Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai. Kolkata and tier 2 cities like Lucknow, Jaipur, Trivandrum, Cochin, Nagpur etc.
Inc42: Any plans to tie up with schools? Why or Why not?
Pavan: We have not actively focussed on the institutional model till now, however we recognize that schools present a huge opportunity; a solution tailored for schools will necessarily have to take into account aspects related to training and servicing which will have to be built into the model. We have built a product for teachers in schools which helps them devise assessments and are considering rolling out the same soon. We may also consider focusing our energies on developing a school based solution for students in the future.
Founded in 2009, Meritnation currently has over 6.4 Mn registered students; it caters to CBSE, ICSE and State Boards such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The platform can be accessed on iOS and Android platforms, recently it has also launched study related apps like Tables App, IIT JEEnius Mobile Apps.
