Content Curator
Naresh Dubbudu is the Founder CEO at Abhyaas Edu Technologies, Hyderabad. Honored with ‘Distinguished Alumnus Award’ from NIT Warangal in the year 2018. Gold Medalist from NIT Warangal, alumnus of IIM Bangalore and exchange alumnus of Stanford Business School. Ex employee of prestigious companies like McKinsey and Tata Motors.
What key factors motivated you to join the education sector?
“Impacting younger generation for the benefit of nation”
The seeds for joining the education sector were planted in my mind since childhood. My mother is a teacher and when I was a child, I liked the kind of impact she made on young minds, the kind of relations she had with other teachers and the life she led. This was an early motivator. Afterwards, when I myself started interacting with young minds, my interest towards education elevated and allowed my mind to think progressively, finding the loopholes and do for the betterment of this sector.
How would you describe your leadership style?
“Lending hands to support and grow productively”
I believe leadership is about giving people their space and ownership. I understand delegation as empowering people to make their own decisions. At Abhyaas, the managers are nurtured as decision makers by giving them responsibilities and power to take their decisions. My leadership style is giving space to grow, lending support, trusting them and putting confidence in their abilities, rather than just putting pressure from the top. I believe in bottom-up growth at Abhyaas.
How do you strategize the key plans for the administration of your platform?
“Ideating solutions and deeper plannings on a weekly, quarterly basis”
We have periodic brainstorming sessions within the team and cross-functional departments. As the CEO, I review all teams on a weekly basis, be it product, sales, delivery, etc. We take the learnings from one of the review meetings and also discuss in another. These weekly meetings help us identify the pain points that need to be resolved, they are discussed in our brainstorming sessions in the subsequent weeks. Also, we hold quarterly review meetings on a larger scale, including cross-functional teams. What we believe is that whatever solutions we create need to vibe with the students and their parents. We tend to put more value on the eyes and ears on the ground. Faculties, sales team, customer team are all consulted to understand the real time problems of the students. Ours is a customer centric approach.
How does the coaching style at Abhyaas ensure the best development of the students?
“Rightful information and guidance for better education approaches”
We believe that success in any exam, 60% depends on the student, 30% depends on the teachers and 10% is based on the family, friends and the overall environment that the student lives in. A coaching institute is an enabler, and can make a huge difference in the results. At Abhyaas, in addition to giving the right amount of coaching, study materials, mock tests and resources, we were among the early users of technology for an institute, barring the ed-tech companies. Even though we were a brick-and-mortar institute, we had inculcated the use of analytics to aid in learning of the students in our institute. We nudge our students to analyse their performance and time management based on the insight from technology. Also, we always empower the students to make the right choices, not only pre-entrance exams, but also post-entrance exams. Abhyaas ensure that students get placed in the best possible colleges, and do not waste their time and resources.
What do you think your roles and responsibilities to the platform are?
“Solving problems for an advanced educational platform”
Towards the platform, as an education leader, it is my responsibility to bring the insights from the industry to help make the platform more robust. Our focus has always been on becoming an education player rather than an ed-tech player. Addressing the pains and actual needs of the students through technology is my prime concern. Improving our platform, content and pedagogy, are all my responsibilities to look after.
What do you think should be the platform’s top priority over the next 10 years?
“Making the learning process engaging and autonomous”
At Abhyaas, we are working on expanding our reach by developing more courses to cater to a larger audience. We are working on developing a constantly learning management system, for the future, for engaging students online, as we engage them in the physical classroom. This also depends on the students, students learn from each other, while some prefer to study in groups, others like learning on their own. We are trying to include all of this in our LMS. This generation is extremely social media savvy, we aim to utilise their behaviour in the education sector as well. We are also developing an AI powered platform, based on gamification techniques, to simulate cohort learning.
What do you see as your platform’s greatest strengths?
“More comprehensive evaluation and high engagement processes”
What we bring on our platform is not just analytics but Predictive SWOT tool. Not only will our platform generate insights on scores and modules covered, it will also use those insights to do a predictive SWOT test for individuals to suggest what to study and where to focus. We also have an highly engaging, open discussion forum, where students post their queries and everyone from the ecosystem can answer. We are working on making the process so robust that apart from just the course materials and mock tests, students learn on a wholesome level.
What are some of the biggest challenges you see for higher education?
“Making pace with the digitalization of the education sector”
Higher education is getting disrupted on a massive scale. Students are now learning a lot online and through certifications. Ironically the higher education institutes hold value for their degrees only, not education. The autonomous players have started providing online degrees and the big companies value skill sets more than the degree certificates. The challenge for institutions lies here, how to keep themselves relevant in the digital world. Technology is one common challenge for both industries. Many good higher education institutions are going online, trying to be friends with technology.
Any suggestions you would like to give to the aspiring students?
“Have a clear approach to learning”
Don’t fall for shortcuts. There is a lot of content available, please select wisely. While they say that scarcity is a problem, here the problem is plenty. Students are bombarded with content. When students don’t have a clear direction, they start something then leave it midway. The problem here is, Access to Excess. Students need to focus and learn one part at a time.
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