We at Turnip wish you the best of health, success and happiness in 2023!
Here are some of our learnings from serving over 20,000 scholars in the domains of intellectual property, innovation, big data and entrepreneurship.
Students want “offline”, but …
2022 was a year when the academic system bounced back from its covid woes. The speed at which education moved from zoom to classroom surprised even the biggest edtech companies.
Edtech startups suffered a funding crunch and consequent layoffs. Academic institutes, however, thrived as students were happy to be back in the classroom. Proving that fellowship and community will always be a core part of education.
Some say that the education system averted a major permanent overhaul due to covid. Other’s say we have lost an opportunity to learn and that we are back to “Kota”.
In the midst of it all, I think we forget to take the viewpoint of the biggest stakeholder in the education system: “Students”. What do students want? They want “offline”, but with “convenience” and “flexibility”.
Increase in screentime
One permanent post-covid change is the increase in screentime for students and adults alike. As a result, long form webinars and lectures via zoom/youtube fell out of favour even in late 2021. Method of teaching via webinars, zoom meetings is also significantly different from powerpoint slides presented in a classroom. Instructors have to reckon with many distractions of the online world to hold onto the attention of scholars.
Advent of ChatGPT
We saw the proliferation of so-called “content” during covid years. Instructors and influencers rushed to create short form and long form videos sharing their skills freely on YouTube and other platforms. So much so that people started comparing YouTube to be a free university for everyone.
The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 has exacerbated the “content” problem even more. Now, artificial intelligence based language models are good enough to write in conversational style. Basic to medium intelligence content in the form of essays, reports, articles, etc. can be created in seconds.
This will pose a significant problem for instructors to identify plagiarism in academia. On the other hand, the best of artificial intelligence models are useless, if we don’t ask good questions. Rather than assessing students on how good their “answers” are; we might be on the path to creating an education system that rewards asking “good questions”.
Turnip’s 2022 Learning and Highlights
In 2022, Turnip became fully focussed on online education. IPGRAM acquisition was successfully completed in March 2022, paving the way for us to consolidate our offerings within innovation, intellectual property and entrepreneurship domains.
Unlike typical edtech startups, we survived and thrived in 2022.
We launched a highly successful “Entrepreneurship Course” taken by over 12000 scholars at the time of writing. This response gave us an indication that entrepreneurship as a core part of curriculum has truly arrived in UG/PG levels. We intend to extend our offerings in this area in 2023.
Our course promotion and distribution infrastructure is a key component that allows us to keep our prices low and create a wider impact. It underwent a major overhaul owing to a sophisticated hack we suffered last month. There was no loss of data or possible long term impact. However, we do feel our responsibility as a “startup” is growing to keep our systems and customer data secure.
The “hybrid” model of learning is here to stay despite everything moving back offline. Turnip courses offer a convenient, flexible, slow and consistent learning style that students absolutely love. Our course format and styles view learning as a journey.
Turnip Innovation Festival 2023
I invite you to attend Turnip Innovation Festival 2023. It will be conducted on 21st January, 2023 as a day-long online event with the theme “Intellectual Property Commercialisation”. Please visit the Turnip website: https://turnip.co.in to register.
Best wishes,
Dr. Rahul Kapoor | Founder
Turnip Innovations