Friday, May 27, 2011

Finally E-learning Begins in India – with a Bang!

May, 2011 seems to be the beginning of a new era for Indian e-learning. With several companies and organizations announcing e-learning initiatives India is poised to address the gaps that have long existed in this part of the world.

The e-learning era appears to have finally dawned in India. From being a largely outward looking industry, where Indian companies primarily served as a service provider for clients in US and Europe, Indian companies are becoming inward looking – a clear reversal of trend. Leading this transformation are several Indian companies that have lined up with some very innovative offerings.

This month Educomp announced that it has joined hands with Great Lakes Institute of Management to provide e-learning education. The two partners are poised to invest around Rs 150 crores (15 million USD) in the next five years and the duo are planning to roll out e-learning management courses which will cost about 10 percent of the cost that a student spends in the regular courses. Sify meanwhile is planning to introduce a learning management system in India and they already have a couple of customers who are interested in its products.

At a corporate level Harvard Business Publishings (HBP) is planning to begin e-learning for Indian managers this year. The courseware will be delivered through the mobile platform. Close on it’s heal are other institutes like the Wharton's Executive Education Division that have also shown a keen interest in beginning such initiatives for the Indian manager.

Even iProf, which claims to be India’s first and largest e-learning superstore for IIT, CAT, PMT and other high-stakes tests on tablet computers, has announced an investment by Kaplan Ventures to enable the iProf platform to offer test preparation in GMAT and GRE, two exams required for admissions to most competitive U.S. business or graduate schools.

The Indian NGO sector too is not far behind and many have already begun using e-learning for furthering the cause of education for the marginalized and the disadvantaged sections of the society. Smile foundation of Ahmedabad has begun a innovative program called the Twin e-learning Programme (STeP) which is designed to offer job-oriented skills to youth from the less privileged sections of society living in urban slums and peripheral rural areas.

In Kolkata, a Jesuit-run media center is promoting e-learning in schools using audio-visual material in a bid to make lessons more interesting. Called Chitrabani, the center, named began its Bichitra Pathsala (innovative school) a year ago.

With so many different e-earning initiatives in the country, the service-driven mindset is rapidly getting replaced with an innovation-driven mindset. This however, brings forth a new challenge of gathering next level e-learning professionals who possess strong grounding in innovation. What it also requires is the need for the industry to enrich itself by drawing in the academic fraternity which has for long been kept out of the commercially-driven service industry.

At the government level, IGNOU, India’s largest Open University, has announced the details of the virtual university for Africa after the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised such an institution in May, 2011, at a summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Pan-African E-learning Network of IGNOU will be devised as a robust e-learning network that will go a long way in alleviating the needs of African nations.