What Makes Saas-based Education Technology in India Effective

Published on Oct 1, 2019

Updated on Mar 3, 2020

Worldwide, the education and training industries spend over $4 trillion annually. Out of this, 85% of the expenditure accounts for delivery costs – i.e. the cost of building and infrastructure, teaching staff, etc. In India, the Union Budget 2018 allocated Rs 85,010 crore ($1.2 billion) for education. Despite this expenditure, the current education system is unable to deliver adequate skills to make students job-ready for the industry 4.0 era. Education technology (EdTech) bridges the gap between delivering education and making learning effective. Let’s look at how Education Technology in India can reform learning?

Education Technology: Skills that will be required in Future

Why EdTech?

The 2016 Trading Economics data reveal – 44.85 million people are unemployed in India; despite there being more than 1.6 million schools and 38 thousand colleges. This illustrates a gap in the existing education system and learning resources.

Although the expenditure on education is rising, educational performance is still weak. Cost-effectively improving the quality of education is the need of the hour. And ed-tech is an opportunity for upscaling ‘education’ at the global level.

EdTech is not just redesigning the textbooks in a digital format. The role of education technology also lies in developing applications in incorporating new learning architectures. Apart from revamping the learning architecture, cloud-based EdTech platforms can make learning material accessible to students anytime.

What Makes SaaS-based EdTech Effective?

Education technology encompasses several domains like reading materials, computer-based training, e-learning, and m-learning (learning through computer or mobile), teacher training, curriculum management, and back-office management. People also consider EdTech as Education Management Information System (EMIS). The following are the salient features of the Education Technology platform.

Scalability

In India, the classroom standards in the government-funded schools define the pupil to teacher ratio (PTR) in upper primary classes as 35:1. That is, a typical classroom should not accommodate more than 35 students. It is one of the reasons that many students do not get admission in good schools.

The SaaS-based Education Technology can make courses and learning material available to the students irrespective of their geographical location. EdTech platforms are easy-to-use and don’t require any preliminary training to use the software.

Engaging Learning Platform

To motivate students to learn without fear of grades and punishment is a daunting task. Unless the learning material is engaging, chances for its success is less. EdTech solves this challenge by deploying technology like virtual reality, gamification, and discussions on its platform. To bring the best of education, some education technology platforms also incorporate open learning models or open license content standards.

For example, EkStep – a non-profit initiative has created a collaborative platform to bring equal learning opportunities to every child, especially in rural India. It is an open platform where facilitators can join and create interactive courses for learners.

Education Management

An academic institute requires faculties, infrastructure, and efficient management for its smooth functioning. Technology in education is also making school management easy.

For example, Kreedo – an EdTech startup provides SaaS-based school and learning management system. It helps preschools with curriculum, teachers training, teaching material, child assessment, and other school administration tasks.

Faculty Training

Normally, teaching experience and educational qualifications are the only criteria for faculty recruitment in India. That’s why often faculties lack the skill to convey their knowledge to pupils effectively.

EdTech startups like flipClass track teachers’ performance and advise them on their technology platform. This application provides two types of feedback to faculties at the child’s level and concept level. It also assesses teaching against benchmarks.

Accessibility in Regional Languages

KPMG reports- video content will cover 80% of the global internet consumption. In India, consumers spend 50-60% of their average time on Hindi videos, 35-43% on regional videos, and only about 7% on English videos. Moreover, India homes 22 major languages and 13 different scripts.

To enhance conceptual understanding, materials available in learners’ comfortable language is a bonus. Language translations and curriculum in regional language are the additional benefits of education technology.

What’s the Future of Education Technology in India?

With over 3,500 startups, Education Technology in India is expected to reach $1.96 Bn by 2021.

While tier-1 cities boast of quality classroom education, tier-2 and tier-3 cities suffer a setback due to lack of resources. Ed-Tech can make quality learning accessible to rural regions. It can also help with teachers’ skill development, classroom infrastructure, and school management.

EdTech will make more use of technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Blockchain and STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) Labs to design interactive learning interfaces.

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

An Overview of Education Technology in India

Why EdTech?