Krishna Kumar is the founder & CEO of Simplilearn.com, a leading player in online education and training for professional certification courses. He shares his views on e-Learning a reality for learners in India
Tell us about the growing market of online learning platforms; it is a business reality or hype?
The Online learning market is growing at a rapid pace, and is bringing a sea change to the educational landscape. It is a business reality and not simply hype. The advantages of online learning, like learning comfortably at your own pace, avoiding schedule conflicts, focused learning and most importantly the cut down on the expenses in comparison to institutional learning on the part of the learner makes it user friendly and popular.
How do you ensure the security of data and contents on the website?
There are various measures that we have adopted to ensure the security of data and content. Mainly it is done through engaging a pool of dedicated servers for enhanced security. The servers are continually monitored to keep a track of the attacks if any and at the same time, the server patch is frequently updated along with the upgradation of the software. Apart from these, SSL layers for user data protection, user bank/credit card data not getting stored in the server, restricted back end access to prevent data theft, rigorous testing processes used for website build releases, are also some of the measures adopted. We have the state of the art data center security that keeps our data and content secured.
In terms of investments in technology, what have been the major technologies that you have decided for Simplilearn website to benefit the students?
Our product, Simplilearn.com is based on Web2.0 user-friendly interface, integrated with social network such as facebook, twitter and youtube. Its structure is built on an e-commerce platform with easy and secured log-out process. The back end of our product is based on LAMP and JAVA based server stack and we have an integrated learning management system (LMS). All our course content is SCORM complaint, which makes it easy to extend the content to other platforms like mobile, tablet etc. An integrated 24/7 chat and customer call back mechanism that ensures that customers would be able to reach out our support team at any point in time.
What is your feedback on the use of online platform for communication and ideas exchange?
Webinars and blogs as a platform of communication and ideas exchange, works in a great way. We have a strong blog that has write-ups by experts from the respective fields, giving information about test preparations and course benefits. These write-ups give the students a glimpse about our online course material that in turn helps them to take up our courses. It is a popular feature on our portal and we continue to make it more active and engaging for our learners community.
