Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world —Nelson Mandela
Education is the key to eliminating many problems that plague today’s society, such as gender inequality, poverty and so on. And in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which countries maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity. Over the years, the face of education has experienced a sea change. It has moved beyond the classroom level. The most recent one is e-learning.
India’s potential as a huge market for e-learning is enormous. With the rapid increase in Internet connectivity, there is a growth of e-learning in schools and colleges.
Recently e-learning firm Educomp Solutions launched its new product ‘SmartclassOnline’, which will allow students and parents to
access course material, sharing and performance evaluation through desktops and smartphones. Over the next one year, the company targets to add one million students to its SmartclassOnline platform.
E-learning brings unique advantages, the prominent being the ability to provide personalised attention to all students. Another advantage is people living in smaller towns and cities can get access to the best possible learning resources from across the world, at a very affordable price. This helps create a level-playing field.
“SmartclassOnline enables peer-to-peer collaboration, parent-teacher interaction, and group-to-group communication and includes features for managing the student’s performance,” Educomp Solutions chairman and managing director Shantanu Prakash said. Students can access content, teachers can upload assignments for students to download, and parents can access important information about their wards on demand, he added.
Though the company will partner the schools, the solution will be available to parents to monitor their wards’ progress. Educomp will provide access to the solution for R35 per month for a student, Prakash said. “SmartclassOnline allows safe and secure online collaboration through messages, SMS, email, photo galleries, shared events, groups and announcements,” he said. The curriculum extends from kindergarten to grade 12, covering subjects like mathematics, science, English, EVS, social studies, economics and accountancy among others.
SmartclassOnline will be available in two categories for school—a starter pack with collaboration and sharing features (free for a limited period), and a full pack with collaboration, sharing, learning, performance and administrative features. To develop the platform for SmartclassOnline, Educomp has partnered with KV Intelliprop. “We will target the seven million students we already engage with our existing solution. Our target is to bring one million students to the SmartclassOnline platform in the next one year,” Prakash said.
Thus we can say that e-learning is, indeed, well-poised to take significant strides into its seemingly bright future.
