“40,000 students enrolled, but how many stayed after Day 20?” This question, raised by Nitin Vijay, captures a reality most teachers quietly deal with in online classes. Students begin with intent, sometimes even excitement, but within a few weeks attendance drops, engagement fades, and doubts remain unanswered.
It’s easy to conclude that students lack discipline or seriousness, but this experiment challenges that assumption at its core. The insight is simple but uncomfortable: the problem may not be the student, it may be the environment we have created for them.
Across online classrooms, a familiar pattern repeats itself. Attendance often drops to 30–40% within the first two to three weeks, students struggle to stay consistent, and interaction becomes minimal. Doubts pile up in chat boxes but rarely get resolved in depth.
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Over time, many students begin to disengage silently, often convincing themselves that online learning “is not for them.” For teachers, this translates into frustration and a sense of losing control over the classroom. However, instead of trying to “fix” students, Nitin Vijay and his team at Motion Education Pvt Ltd chose to redesign the system itself.
They called it the “Anushaasan Batch,” and the objective was not to add more content or make lectures more energetic, but to recreate the discipline of an offline ecosystem like Kota within an online setup. What changed was not the syllabus, but the structure around it. One of the first shifts was reducing batch size to enable real interaction.
Large batches often create passive learners, where students can easily disappear without being noticed. By limiting batch size, teachers could engage more directly, ask questions, and ensure that students were not just present but involved.
Another important change was introducing a camera-on culture. While this may seem small, it fundamentally changes student behavior. When students know they are visible, their level of attentiveness increases.
For teachers, even occasional visual check-ins can create a stronger sense of classroom presence. Alongside this, live polls and in-class questions were introduced to break the monotony of one-way teaching. Instead of long stretches of explanation, students were repeatedly pulled into the learning process, making them active participants rather than passive listeners.
Perhaps the most critical shift was dedicating structured time to doubt solving. In many online classes, doubts are either rushed or postponed, leading to gaps in understanding that compound over time. In this model, nearly 30% of the lecture time was reserved specifically for addressing student queries.
This signaled to students that their confusion mattered as much as the content being taught. Over time, this not only improved clarity but also built confidence and trust in the learning process.
Consistency, however, was treated as a system, not a personality trait. Instead of expecting students to stay motivated on their own, the program introduced a structured academic rhythm with hundreds of classes and regular exam-pattern tests. The idea was to replace bursts of motivation with habits built through repetition and routine.
Interestingly, they also experimented with behavioral incentives, offering ₹100 per day as a reward for maintaining attendance streaks. While not every teacher can implement financial incentives, the underlying principle remains relevant: consistency improves when it is tracked and reinforced. Even simple alternatives like recognition, leaderboards, or parent updates can create similar effects.
The results were striking. Where typical online batches saw attendance drop to 30–40% and retention hover around 40%, the Anushaasan Batch reported 90–95% sustained attendance and significantly higher retention. But beyond the numbers, the real outcome was a shift in student behavior. Students who might have otherwise disengaged became consistent simply because the system made consistency easier to follow.
For teachers, the takeaway is not about replicating every element of this model, but about rethinking the role of structure in learning. Online education often fails not because of a lack of effort, but because it is designed primarily for content delivery rather than behavior management. When accountability, interaction, and routine are built into the system, students don’t need constant motivation; they naturally align with the process.
In the end, discipline is not something we can demand from students every day. It is something we design into the way we teach.
