Unacademy Students’ Guide Comes Out Overrated

About Unacademy

Unacademy says, “We are India’s largest learning platform” in their official website. We all know how classroom education in India has stifled many brilliant minds recently. With Unacademy, an aspiration of changing it is made. The official website of Unacademy vividly declares that in a span of 6 months, over 300,000 students have benefited from over 2,400 online lessons and specialized courses on cracking various competitive examinations.

This company has artistically managed to hire some of the top-quality educators in India. The list includes names like Kiran Bedi who is India’s first woman IPS officer and right now the governor of Pondicherry. They also claim that over 2 million views every month help the company to touch the lives of people in the remotest corners of the country. There are several success stories which include thousands of narratives about cracking toughest of examinations, improving the ability to speak and write better and increasing the knowledge.

Unacademy envisions partnering with the brightest minds and having courses on every possible topic in multiple languages. They have planned it so that the whole world can benefit from these courses. As everyone is aware, India is home to 19% of the world’s youth and Unacademy tells the journey of empowering them to take on the world in a manner that classrooms will never do.

There are certain terms put forth by the company before a student gets admitted to the venture. The terms are as follows:

The students must agree to receive installs and updates from time to time from Unacademy. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Unacademy Platform and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. The students agree to receive such updates (and permit Unacademy to deliver these to you) as part of their use of the Unacademy Platform.
The associates must not agree to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, “robots,” “spiders,” or “offline readers,” that accesses the Unacademy Platform in a manner that sends more request messages to Unacademy’s servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser.
The students may certainly post reviews, comments and other content; send other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions or other information as long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringement of intellectual property rights.
In their use of the Unacademy Platform, the students will at all times comply with all applicable laws and regulations.
Unacademy reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Unacademy Platform at any time with or without notice at its sole discretion.

Artisans of Unacademy

In 2010, Unacademy started its voyage as a YouTube channel by the closest artisan of the venture – Gaurav Munjal. In 2015, Unacademy got officially registered as an education company in Bangalore. Unacademy Subscription which was previously known as Unacademy Plus is a paid learning service provided by Unacademy. The company currently provides preparation study material for students aspiring for different civil service examinations, competitive exams related to bank jobs and other competitive exams held in all over India.

As a privately-held company, Unacademy has secured funding through a series of significant and rich offerings, including investments from US private equity firm General Atlantic, social networking giant Facebook, Nexus Ventures, Blume Ventures, and Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy. As of July 2020, Unacademy was valued at 1.45 billion US dollars.

Gaurav Munjal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Unacademy, India’s largest learning platform. Gaurav holds a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from NMIMS University, Mumbai. Gaurav started Unacademy as an educational YouTube channel in 2010 when he was in college. In 2013, he set up his first company, Flat. to (now acquired by CommonFloor.com) which was a real estate platform for college students and bachelors across India.

Unacademy was established as a company in 2015 and has achieved exponential growth and success since then. Backed by prominent venture firms and with over 10,000 educators and 3 million learners on the platform, Unacademy is steadily carving a niche for itself in the e-learning space. Gaurav has shaped Unacademy as a leading player of test-prep in India. He was featured in Forbes India 30 under 30, 2018. He is also an active blogger and also a contributor at YourStory.

The other name associated intrinsically with unacademy is Roman Saini. He is an all-rounder. An educator, Entrepreneur, former Civil servant (IAS), a doctor and a motivational speaker- Saini plays all these roles alone in Unacademy. He is graduated from AIIMS, Delhi and also an MBBS from there. He is basically from Rajasthan and then moved to Banglore after completing his education at Delhi. By 2018, his educational venture Unacademy earned him 17.6 million dollars net worth.

In the past months, the world saw a sudden surge in cases of mental illness triggered by home isolation and restless standstill. No wonder, the world is now compelled to explore the paradigm of mental health awareness from a whole new perspective. Unacademy takes special care to this general problem for most of the students ranging a vast spectrum of age.

Mental health has almost shed its taboo image and gained the desired attention in recent years. But it is indeed under the shadow of the current pandemic, the topic is making its way into mainstream conversations more than ever.

Unacademy has considered some serious steps to boost up their team in eradicating mental issues and the hindrances they cause while learning. The steps are-

Discussing the Issue and Deleting the Stigma

Firstly, Unacademy started out by building a transparent culture that doesn’t shy away from discussing mental health. Unacademy claims that their culture puts all employees on the same pedestal, creating a collaborative environment where acceptance is a daily habit. They also try to keep the power distance lowest possible so that everyone is approachable- as the blogs say.

Investing in Mental Health as an Everyday Ritual

2 years into existence, Unacademy has invited a full-time health instructor to promote healthy lifestyle habits like Yoga and Meditation. Since then, it is an everyday ritual at Unacademy, that a lot of employees participate in. Even during the pandemic, they chose to continue over online sessions.

Supporting Through Qualified Counselors and Self-Help Resources

One of the many ways, through which Unacademy try to ensure that employees stay mentally healthy, is by looking after their emotional well-being, by building awareness on mental health. This drives confidence among employees to deal with such challenges and sensitizes the leadership towards enhancing the team’s emotional balance and productivity.

Unacademy additionally challenged the initial lockdown blues of this year, with a number of self-help sessions for Unacademians. At the onset of COVID-19, a myth-busting session was organized to clear the air regarding panic-inducing fake news. This was followed by regular workshops under the Health Connect Series.

Besides the above, they have got onboard a renowned psychologist and psychotherapist Miss Sailaja Manacha for a talk on springing back to the team of Unacademy resilient self through ‘Prioritising Self-Care to Combat Mental Chaos’ and well-known author Mr. Devdutt Pattanaik for a unique interaction on ‘Thriving in Crisis’.

Unacademy and Its Courses: Are They Access Friendly?

Unacademy apply the principle of – Learning shouldn’t stop, come what may. It is not just about applying this principle to examinations but, everything that learners wish to pursue. Keeping this as the central focus and, to forward the cause of democratizing knowledge, Unacademy has introduced two very exciting categories on their platform. They have successfully launched the Unacademy Chess Subscription and the Unacademy Competitive Programming Subscription with CodeChef.

The company and its team are rapidly expanding to make Unacademy, the one-stop destination for learning.

The best programmers of the country from CodeChef coupled with Unacademy’s technological prowess have come together to help coding enthusiasts become masters in competitive programming. No matter the level of expertise, there is something for every learner who is looking to expand their knowledge in the field of competitive programming.

Here’s what the subscription has to offer, with the aim of helping learners reach their full potential:

Learners can create their own personalised learning schedule, by choosing from a range of Live Classes, as per their convenience.
ICPC world finalists & IOI medalists, top-rated coders, software engineers working in the best product companies — the best of the best are teaching on Unacademy to help learners in their journey.
Learners have a chance to engage in discussions during Live Classes and address their questions, to get the experience of an actual classroom

That’s not all, Unacademy are constantly expanding their reach to more learners by adding better courses, bringing in more experts and creating an enriching learning environment, for competitive programmers of the future. While doing this, the quality is being surely compromised as can be seen from the reviews of students in general.

The Unacademy Chess Subscription has taken the promise of ‘bringing the best’ to the next level with world renowned Chess Grandmasters like 5-time World Champion Viswanathan Anand, Pravin Mahadeo Thipsay and several other experts teaching on the platform. This subscription aims to empower young minds across the country to grasp the highly competitive sport of Chess with ease, and from the comfort of their homes.

While earlier the Grandmasters were only role models that budding Chess enthusiasts looked upto with Unacademy, they are now also going to be their mentors. Unacademy says its aim is to shift the paradigm of learning Chess, by introducing theoretical and practical lessons.

Another interesting part is that lakhs of aspirants take the IBPS exams every year, out of which only a few qualify it. And this handful of successful future bankers includes 100+ Unacademy learners. This is really a proud moment it is for us at Unacademy to see 100+ learners crack an exam where the bar is set really high. Be it IBPS Clerk or PO, our learners have passed with flying colours in one of the most attempted exams of India

Unacademy Educators like Aashish Arora, Ankush Lamba, Nimisha Bansal, Sakshi Pahwa, Kapil Kathpal, Arun Singh Rawat, and Puneet Kumar Sharma are redefining the way India learns. They are the constant source of inspiration for every learner preparing for Bank Exams, guiding them with valuable insights from their own experiences.

At Unacademy, the declared goal is to make education accessible to every learner at every corner of the country and help them achieve their goals. The IBPS 2019–2020 result, with several Unacademy learners cracking it, has reaffirmed this mission and motivated the whole team to keep pushing their limits.

Why Should You Join Unacademy?

Education and technology, in short the virtual teaching-learning process in India was already a rapidly growing space and the pandemic has only expanded the need. Test preparation platform Unacademy has raised over $110 million from the likes of Facebook and PE firm General Atlantic at a valuation of $510 million in 2020 alone. This is a clear indication of how fruitfully the company is taking off its journey.

Excellent business model especially designed during Covid pandemic

The company claims that they actually did not change their business model post covid-19. What the pandemic did is to prove that they already had a great model to begin with. What they did differently, however, was to make sure that people knew about them more and more, especially during the outbreak when there was a need for the products. So, they tried to make sure that Unacademy launches a lot of free classes. That helped this company get more exposure, helped them clock up a lot of free watchtime, which ultimately helped in the growth.

High growth of scaling up both geographically and academically

Unacademy plans to grow beyond the test prep space in India to cater to the educational needs of other countries. In the last 4-5 months, they have achieved what they had planned for the next 6-8 months. The team’s internal goal for the next three years is to grow ten times from where they are currently. Online education is a highly scalable model and taking the students’ product to foreign shores is a matter of time. In fact they currently have live classes in Indonesia and Brazil and will grow to provide the best education to more learners across the globe.

A future venture with the vision of shifting pedagogy

Unacademy aspires to build great products that people actually need and then keep scaling from there. One advice from the co-founders for the team remains that always give to entrepreneurs is to build great products that solve a real need and make them 10 times better than anything else out there because there are a lot of problems to be solved.

Scaling up partnership with institutions

Unacademy has made it free for institutions to use our platform to teach their students. At the start of the pandemic, the company has realized that most schools did not have the necessary digital infrastructure to conduct classes online. So, they quickly opened our platform for access to any school which needed it. Educational institutions seeking to go online are indications of positive development for the sector, and many of them may choose to partner with education-technology companies for that. Top of Form

Things to Shock You About Unacademy

A huge rumour regarding a personal matter of Roman Saini, the co-founder of Unacademy caused serious issues for the business. In October 2017, Roman Saini filed an F.I.R to at the Indranagar Police Station in Bengaluru in which he stated that a woman named Chitra Geetha had been harassing him since 2016. He went on to state that she was forcing him to marry her and also pay her 1.6 lakh rupees per month. It is interesting to note that the woman was an employee of Unacademy since 2016. ( https://starsunfolded.com/roman-saini/ ). This raised a serious issue around the workplace environment within Unacademy and of course the relationship between the management and the employees of the same.

1. Struggles to adapt with diversity of learners

Problem: The prospect of having an entire university experience compacted into a personal electronic device is unusual, to say the least. It can be unnerving for students who have only ever known traditional classroom settings. Traditionally, a degree of passivity is expected during lectures, particularly when note-taking and listening, while discussion with tutors is allotted a limited time. Unacademy fails to spring into action, accepting course material in a variety of multimedia formats, and taking part in online discussions which can continue indefinitely.

2. Credibility as a successful platform, let alone “the best”

Problem: Often, the worth of Unacademy’s guidance is not fully trusted, nor given the respect it deserves. Though qualifications are accredited by esteemed university institutions, validity and credibility is met with scepticism because the format is relatively new, and the progress of students is not overseen in the flesh. The perceived value in attending a campus institution, the social education, is also viewed as something not to miss, which can lead to cynicism when considering enrolling in online degree programmes.

3. Outdated hardware and software used by the company

Problem: Unacademy makes standardised education accessible to students all around the globe. This is a spectacular advantage for the company’s education providers, students in remote locations, and those without the funds to commence traditional campus study programmes where fees and student debt frequently eclipse the joy of learning. However, becoming a learner at Unacademy does require the necessary computer equipment to run online learning platforms. This can potentially pose problems for students and schools with old, outdated hardware and software.

4. Managing time well is a serious challenge for the teachers

Problem: While learning through Unacademy as a platform offers the ultimate freedom to organise your studies around your private and professional commitments, it can lead to complacency and a false sense of security if the appropriate dedication and time is not set aside for serious study. Online courses are every bit as detailed and demanding as their offline counterparts, though this realisation may not be fully formed yet in the Zeitgeist of our time. The intangible, digital nature of e-learning means that bad time-management could lead to failure.

5. Discipline and motivation should be more escalated

Problem: Working towards any goal requires dedication and motivation and, on the face of it, studying with Unacademy can seem fraught with opportunities to lose these qualities. For one, there is the unlimited distraction of already being on the internet; social media, YouTube and news websites are as present as your next assignment. A lot of valuable study time can pass if you don’t monitor your internet usage closely. Given the abstract nature of online learning, motivation, in particular, can take a hit, especially if you have already spent the day at work in front of a computer screen.

PR Reviews

It is true that a huge amount of money is invested by the young chaps of Unacademy to advertise about the company’s goals and launch of the newest products. Yes, they call educational guidance as products and also deal with students as crude and mechanical consumers. They have grabbed the strongest platform like FaceBook to uphold their reputation. Yet, they could not help but somehow failed to hide the array of loopholes they behold within their learning and teaching set up. Below are some reviews from the students, guardians and in fact the teachers who are employed. Unacademy has taken the biggest risk of guiding for UPSC but they severely lack enough potent and skilled faculty for this. It is wrong to think for the company that mere conferences with panellists like Pranab Mukherjee, Virat Kohli, Kiran Bedi et.al would amend it all.

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