online-schools

Virtual tutors help India in vanishing educational gaps

Gayathri | Friday, February 17, 2017 10:21 AM IST

Virtual tutors help India in vanishing educational gaps

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Ripan Dutta, 23, spent a year working as a software developer after graduating from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2015. But he soon wearied of writing code, and decided to aspire to a more senior role in product management, co-ordinating the teams that were developing, designing and marketing software products.

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Normally such jobs only come with an MBA or after long years of software industry experience. But Mr Dutta wanted to jump-start his career and signed up for a five-month course in software product management with UpGrad, a start-up that offers online professional education programmes. The course, which costs Rs150,000 ($2,230), teaches aspiring product managers to assess consumers’ underlying needs, shepherd development of user-centred technology products and assess a product’s effectiveness. The programme is not simply offering digital lessons: Mr Dutta, who has a full-time job at a Delhi-based travel tech start-up, is also personally mentored by a senior IT professional from a large Indian online travel booking site. “It is helping me a lot in terms of what are the concepts, and what are the things I need to build a good product,” Mr Dutta says. “You can also ask the mentor whether you have experienced something like this, or at what stage you have used this.” UpGrad is one of a growing number of educational technology ventures trying to plug the gaps in India’s education system. There is an increasing demand for knowledge from a young population, but at every level of its education system — from primary schools to universities — India suffers from an acute shortage of qualified, effective teachers and relevant course material. These deficiencies have left tens of millions of schoolchildren unable to read or do maths to their grade level, while many college graduates lack skills relevant to India’s job market, or their own professional aspirations.

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Entrepreneurs, investors and educators are looking to technology to bring more effective education to students — especially those in remote locations — with a limited pool of teachers. UpGrad, which launched in 2015, has had about 2,000 students enrol on its entrepreneurship, digital marketing, data analytics and product management courses. It expects to widen its offerings and increase its student numbers in the coming year. Bangalore-based Edutel uses two-way satellite technology to beam live lessons by specialist teachers in science, maths and English to about 2,000 primary and secondary schools in the southern state of Karnataka, and is now hoping to expand its reach. “When we are trying to solve the kind of challenges we face today, we need some level of standardisation in our delivery, which is only possible through technology,” says Prachi Jain Windlass, director of Indian education at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, which is an investor in Edutel.