In my previous article, I discussed what edtech companies are, the downfall of edtech companies and the reasons behind it. You can read it here.
Today we are doing something on similar lines but in more detail. Between 2019 to 2021 - the golden era of edtech companies; one of the more famous edtech startups in India was WhitehatJr. Reasons for this range from its obscene advertisements to its $300 million acquisition. Another thing that interests me about discussing this company is that I started my professional coding journey with WhitehatJr. However, that will not make me biased towards it.
Due to all the attention and limelight, many people started researching more and more about how the enterprise works, causing many consumers to dislike the company's concept. There are many reasons why it happened, which have been explained in the following paragraphs. While there are many other articles on this debacle, this one will include my experience and the inside view.
Let's start with the company's origin - Whitehat jr was an edtech institute founded by Karan Bajaj in early 2018. The startup mainly provided coding classes for children of age 6 to 18. They offered live courses and a curriculum consisting of Game Development, App Development and Data Science. They started by teaching code.org, scratch, and P5.js before moving on to Javascript, HTML, CSS, React Native Library, and Python using Visual Studio Code. The Backend and APIs covered in the course were from Google Firestore and Google API. They even briefly covered the Software development lifecycle for aspiring programmers.
In spite of the fact that all of these courses sound pretty hardcore for a child of six or ten, they didn't go through the entirety of each language, just the basics, and taught us how to make simple applications. I would say in a spectrum from 1 to 10, where 1 represents knowing nothing about coding and 10 being Dennis Ritchie (The person who invented the C programming language) we would at the time be at a 3 or 4. All of this course information and languages mentioned here date back to 2019 to 2020, right before Byjus acquired them.
I joined Whitehat jr in late 2018 when I was 12 years old. At the time I had previous experience with coding as I was enrolled in private tuition for learning python basics which also included scratch and code.org as this was back when I was 10 or 11. I believe at the time when I joined Whitehat Jr was one of the most perfect classes for me as my primary purpose was to gain more knowledge regarding coding and different programming languages. They were also the only online live classes that took children as students.
Additionally, their platform was extremely user-friendly and any technical difficulties faced would be solved almost immediately. You even had an option to directly contact Karan Bajaj in case there was an issue that was disturbing you. At this time Whitehat jr was still in its initial stage and had not blown up.
However, all of this changed after the Byjus acquisition. The Byjus takeover completely changed the platform to the extent it had lost its original integrity. You could no longer connect to the helpline easily, it would take weeks for them to sort out your issues and the entire website acted like a Phishing website. For example, every time I would open the website to join a class or to do a project I would get flushed with 100 pop-ups promoting different Byjus classes and free trials which was annoying. The platform had transformed into one of the clustered pirated websites with ads all over. One thing that miffed me the most was the fact that while I had my grade 10 prelims and was preparing for my IGCSE board exams, I was receiving 3 or 4 calls weekly promoting a free math class or music lesson despite informing them several times that I am uninterested.
Then there are these fraudulent ads and promises on television and website such as kids engaged with them earning 20 million dollars which according to their convenience keeps changing. Furthermore, they guarantee that children enrolled will get job offers from Amazon, and Facebook and will get a chance to visit and work with Silicon Valley companies. I’m there wondering where my job offer is despite being enrolled with them for years XD! Jokes apart, my main purpose was to learn and gain more knowledge and was not mesmerized by these fake adverts. Until even my learning got hampered!
I was almost at the end of the course with 7 classes left to earn the Whitehat which is the last milestone within their grading system when my teacher resigns. This was the teacher I was with when I had started with Whitehat and she had a background in programming as she was working on her startup side by side. However, Byjus had put a lot of work hours about 14 - 16 hours per day on these teachers with a minimal raise which was inhumane. According to Scroll.in and livemint.com 800 teachers left whitehat acquired by Byjus within 2 months because of the work hours and payment issues.
So after my teacher was changed it was just a spree of different teachers in every class and the teachers kept getting worse and worse. I speculate this was because they had no proper teachers since everyone had resigned and they were just hiring random people. Moreover, according to Scroll.in all of these new classes were scripted and these new “teachers” or readers were just reading out of scripts. It is also mentioned in the article that these teachers were told to recite random achievements and degrees when they first met children to increase their credibility such as “Head of child operations” and “having degrees from multiple universities”. These claims are also mentioned in other articles featured in Livemint.in and even the economic times.
Furthermore, they just couldn't schedule classes and let me finish the course. I would have been very happy if I was learning something with this extended number of classes but we were not doing anything. They had recently added quizzes while I was in the 137th or 138th class and most of these classes included doing those quizzes the whole time. Additionally, the curriculum changed entirely, the majority of the course now included just scratch or code.org which was just not worth the money for people who were newly enrolled in the course. Moreover, since the classes were scripted it was equivalent to reading instructions out of a react native website or stack overflow.
Whitehat jr has declined a lot since it was acquired by Byjus. I considered myself lucky that I could finish the majority of my course while it was at its prime. I guess they can still come back from such a fall by admitting their mistakes and reverting to what they originally were.
Anyways, this was my experience with whitehat jr and the positives and negatives that I faced. If you have any questions regarding the article or if you disagree with it, please feel free to connect with me.
Thank you for reading and I will soon be releasing more of my thoughts on my different fields of interest with the next one! Have a good day!
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