Alone at home: how to open an online school for children (Less than 5000$)

Alone at home: how to open an online school for children (Less than 5000$)

The rush of demand for online education during the pandemic and predictions of a threefold market growth by 2023 suggest that online schools will be one of the most popular business niches in the coming year.

The passing year of 2020 was marked by a real boom in online education in general, and in children’s education in particular. First of all, the surge of interest in online courses was of course influenced by the pandemic – more and more parents are trying to reduce children’s attendance at classes “off-line”, and even those representatives of children’s educational schools who have not previously bet on this format of training are switching to training via Skype and Zoom.

Nevertheless, the trend of educational startups moving to the Internet was outlined long before the global spread of COVID-19. Inexorable statistics say that by the end of 2019 as many online schools were opened in Russia as appeared in the country over the last 10(!) years.

That is, everything was going to move children’s courses and training programs online anyway, and the pandemic has only accelerated this process.

The prospects of the EdTech segment (as they have begun to call education in the network by analogy with fintech) are confirmed by the fact that the largest Russian corporations are also interested in online courses. For example, Mail.ru has been developing the “Netology” project for several years, and recently it has become known that Yandex and Rostelecom are actively developing Russian “Zoom for schoolchildren”.

Nevertheless, entrepreneurs with less investment opportunities have room to spread – many representatives of small and medium-sized businesses at the turn of 2021 have an excellent opportunity to launch their project and successfully promote it on the wave of growing demand. So, what do you need in order to open your own children’s online school and how can you build your business processes step by step?
What niche to move into

To begin with, you will need to choose the direction in which you plan to develop online learning. Among the most in-demand niches in EdTech are foreign language courses and teaching schoolchildren programming. Recently, high school students’ preparation for exams and entrance into universities has also been gaining popularity.

It is interesting that even in such a rather conservative initial segment as education, some entrepreneurs come up with non-standard tools to attract the attention of children and their parents to the project. Among very effective examples is gamification of the learning process, such as the use of games like Minecraft, which are popular with schoolchildren.

And many analysts predict that the biggest success in the coming years will be those representatives of online schools that are able to develop a clear system of grades (levels), designed for many years (or even decades) of training. The ideal is to form an ecosystem that will allow a young school-age child to enroll in a digital school and train them up to a top-notch specialist in a certain field in the future. That is, more and more online schools will essentially compete not only with commercial projects, but also “play in the field” of state educational institutions.