Author: Saviour Edwards
Victor Ariyibi-Oke – Co-Founder and CEO, Metropolitan School of Business and Management.
In the words of Jeff Bezos “In Today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.”
Global standard in EdTech is on the rise and business owners and investors believe it’s a goldmine. According to research firm Markets&Markets the global EdTech and smart classroom market size is expected to grow from $85.8bn in 202o to $181.3bn by 2025, at a CAGR of 16.1 per cent during the forecast period.
In 2021, an improved statistic from Holon IQ showed Global EdTech Market to reach $404B by 2025 – 16.3% CAGR. ‘Post-COVID’ update to HolonIQ’s Global Market Sizing. Powered by our ‘top-down’ global education economic model and tens of thousands of ‘bottom-up’ machine learning revenue estimates.
Within the context of a downgrade for total global expenditure, HolonIQ’s updated global market size for EdTech is a $63B upgrade to our pre-COVID estimates. We now expect total global EdTech expenditure to reach $404B by 2025 representing a 16.3% CAGR, or 2.5x growth, between 2019-2025.
Meanwhile the Middle East and Africa’s education technology (EdTech) market is expected to reach $7 billion by 2027.
Stakeholders like Coursera, Udemy (who just went public), ByJus, and Udacity recorded massive scale in the middle of the pandemic.
From just 44 million in 2019, Coursera has 92 million registered learners on the platform as of 30 September 2021 – a jump of over 109% in two years. Additionally, a rise of over 145% is witnessed when it comes to the total number of enrollments on the Coursera.
Udemy has more than 35 million users learning new skills from 57,000 expert instructors who’ve produced over 130,000 online courses. Tutorials reach students from more than 180 countries in over 65 languages, and thousands of enterprise customers use Udemy for employee training.
This and more shows that there in room for massive scale in the industry and it looks like Africa is beginning to rise to the occasion globally.
In 2017, getsmarter.com who boasts of a global alumni community is over 50,000 lifelong learners and intend to improve a total of 1,000,000 lives through better education by 2030 are in for real competition. In 18 months, Metropolitan School of Business and Management totaled 450,000 learners maintaining a growth rate of 245% month over month. Should MSBM continue to grow at this rate, it is projected to reach getsmarter’s vision of 1 million by August 2022 or sooner.
Victor Ariyib-Oke, the CEO of the Metropolitan School of Business and Management (MSBM) has said that technology is the secret behind the success of the business.
Technology is best when it brings people together and MSBM has done a great job bring 450,000 people together to experience true flexible and affordable higher learning setting records to become arguably the biggest EdTech platform in Africa with over 450,000 active learners on the platform in a mere 18 months, and Ariyibi-Oke says that technology has played an integral role in the success story.
On the importance of technology, he says, “We’ve been able to build all our technology by ourselves from our CRM platform to our learning management system to our AI-driven LMS which automatically follows up on students and checks up on them to see how they are doing. So, we’ve put in a lot into technology, which is one of the things that makes us unique.”
“We have one of the best education platforms in the world. I can proudly say that because our platform educates students from point of enrolment till when they finally graduate,” Ariyibi-Oke continued.
Corroborating this claim, Tolulope Ariyibi-Oke, an Executive Director at MSBM said, “We have always known that the future of education is going to be virtual learning, the future of education is what we are implementing right now.”
“The first thing we always think about is how we can make the quality better? then how can we make it more affordable?”
Olutayo Olusiyan, the Head of the IT and Engineering team, the team responsible for powering the technology behind the MSBM platform said, “We can only get better from here because what we have done has been really incredible. There’s been a lot of growth; we have added a lot of new features, we’ve added more people on board. The number of people in terms of staff strength is just phenomenal and we started quite small.
“The growth rate is quite impressive. The same thing is applicable to our students. We’ve had such huge growth over a short period of time that we are actually in awe. But you see, it motivates us; it drives us to want to do more,” he added.
Azmat Qayum; the Head of Academics at MSBM also agrees that the technology powering the MSBM platform is integral as he said, “Our USP is the simplicity of our learning materials, and the simplicity of our portal. It is really easy to use, and it makes it very easy to learn.”
Speaking further, Qayum also pointed out the humane angle of the institution as one of the core reasons it has seen monumental growth:
“Two years back, we were a really small company, and we have grown tremendously because of the kind of response we have had towards people. I know we are an EdTech company, but the kind of human element we have been able to inculcate into our processes has drawn so many people towards us. The kind of support we give, the kind of personal advice that we offer and so on.”
“A lot of our students need global exposure and this is what we offer. We are more than an institution that is here to give them the learning materials that they need, we give them a global perspective on how to achieve what they want to achieve,” he concluded.
The Metropolitan School of Business and Management is a British online university helping to bring top-notch British higher education to students from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The online EdTech platform that started operations in 2014 acquired 450,000 learners between 2020 to 2021 to become the biggest EdTech platform for higher education in Africa.
