Students keen on joining foreign universities for higher studies, sometimes, are bedazzled at the wide range of choices in subjects, courses and universities, and locales and often get confused in making the right choice. Why even to get hold of information relating to all the domestic institutes of higher learning of repute at times become a challenge in itself, even in these google everything days.
It is in times like this, that the student community years for that one single platform that helps them with all the relevant information at the press of the button and one that gives them real-time concrete help in matching their marks, choices, and availability of admission from among the hundreds and thousands of combinations on offer, in universities in India and abroad.
With helping out students in their high education quest, two young men from Kerala, developed an app, they call Edumpus, a social media education platform. It is a startup that promises to ease the admission process, starting from shortlisting of locale, college, courses, and subjects so that the student can achieve the maximum amount of academic satisfaction and chances of post-university placement in professional life later on.
With decades of experience in academics, including his own days as a student, Ajesh Raj, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer, Edumpus, told Infodea that “we wanted to simplify access to higher education. Our social communication platform uses artificial intelligence to connect all the stakeholders in higher education – the students, the institutes, and the offline educational consultants.” It is designed as a dependable platform offering all the relevant information to the students and connecting them with academia and the institutions.
What the Edumpus has done is to expand the choices available to students by aggregating a large repository of universities across countries. Students are also given personalized suggestions regarding courses and streams to choose based on their aptitude and yearning. “Our system can suggest the best fit courses for the students based on their scores and capabilities,” Ajesh Raj said adding “our aim was to harness AI and machine learning to transform the student recruitment industry.”
The platform has created a vast database with up-to-date information on listed universities and institutions maintained by a dedicated team. Students can also use helpline numbers for advice from specialists.
Ajesh Raj described their startup as “the Amazon of student recruitment” and a student can “order” what he wants from a list of our ‘offerings’ (list of courses, subjects, universities), which will then be processed and “delivered by the platform and specialist advisers.”
When asked how he hit upon the idea for this social communication platform for education, he said that inefficiencies in the student recruitment sector needed a tech-enabled SaaS platform. “We have tried to combine an AI-driven approach using predictive models with effective relationship management. For example, a student considers a limited number of variables when deciding on higher education – affordability, geography, etc. And in the post-pandemic world, the need for identifying the best fit for students becomes more important given the emergence of new educational dimensions.”
Besides, there are other variables, such as budgets, academic requirements, scholarship availability, intakes, universities, etc. to be taken into account. “We factor in these variables and use AI to suggest the best fit for each student and that they get a full idea of what they can aim for.
Basically, Edumpus carries out all the research on behalf of the students and thinks of all aspects before advising them. “We also hand-hold the students through other aspects of the recruitment process like counselling, visa applications, guidance on offer conditions, accommodation facilities, etc,” he said.
India sends about 2 lakh to 3 lakh students abroad every year and out of this, undergraduate students make up about 10 percent. Students from India take admissions in over 5,000 schools and universities abroad each year to study hundreds of different courses.
At present, the start up has managed to build a portfolio of over 500 institutions in more than 15 countries and has a strong 1000-strong network of educational consultants associated with the social communication network.
“Yes, the future belongs to a networked individual, and we at Edumpus will encourage all the students to stay networked, with each other and with the academic world, even after they walked out of the educational institutions into professional life,” the CEO of the startup said.
