K-12 edtech is the software and online teaching that children use for school learning, from kindergarten to Class 12. The name K-12 comes from "kindergarten to class 12". It covers lessons that a teacher plays on a classroom screen, practice apps for homework, digital books, and classes and tutors over video or chat.
K-12 edtech has two very different buyers. The first is the school. In India, private schools buy for themselves, and government schools usually receive their programmes through the state education department. Schools buy slowly, and once they choose a programme, they use it for years. The second buyer is the parent, who usually pays for live classes, such as coding or maths. A company that sells to parents must find each family itself, which costs a lot in advertising. Parents keep paying only while they see their child improve.
Here is a typical day for a Class 7 student in Nagpur. In the morning, her science teacher plays a lesson on the smart class screen, a large screen at the front of the classroom. The lesson comes from digital courseware, the year's curriculum in software form. In the afternoon, her class goes to the school lab and builds a small robot from a robotics kit.
In the evening, she does her maths homework on an adaptive learning platform. Each new question depends on her last answers: easier when she gets one wrong, harder when she gets several right. This method is called adaptive learning. Then she reads a story on a digital library for children, which suggests books at her reading level.
When she is stuck on a question, help comes in two forms. Her elder brother in Class 11 searches a homework help website for a worked answer. Her cousin at a government school in a nearby village asks a question through WhatsApp-based learning, where an AI tutor replies inside the chat app on the family's phone. Using a chat app to serve people in this way is called conversational commerce when businesses do it.
On Saturday, she takes a coding class with a teacher over video, through online classes for kids that her parents pay for. A live online class is a class in which the teacher teaches over video in real time. Some children attend no school building at all. An online school runs the whole school over video, and its children take board exams at an exam centre. A certificate counts only if a recognised board awards it, which is explained in accreditation.
Many of these products are freemium: a basic version is free, and families pay a subscription for more.