Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Facebook Instagram Linkedin Twitter Youtube
Home Blog Page 730

Smriti Irani Embraces New Responsibility With Full Vigor, Thanks PM

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Former Minister for Human Resource and Development (HRD) Smriti Irani has expressed her best wishes to incoming minister Prakash Javadekar and hoped that he will build upon the two years of good work of the ministry.

In a series of tweet on Wednesday afternoon Smriti expressed her deep gratitude for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi who have shown confidence in her abilities earlier and entrusted her with the charge of HRD Ministry and now the Ministry of Textiles.

Addressing the media as she took charge of the Textile Ministry Ms Irani said that her focus will be on increasing exports of the second largest employment sector of the country and empowering the weavers.

She also expressed that her two years of tenure in the HRD ministry have been towards increasing the learning outcomes and improving quality of education.

Not just mathematics, now we have ‘KIDOBOTIKZ’

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Gone are the days when a child had to wait till his admission in an engineering college to exhibit his skills of putting stuff together and making something meaningful out of it. KIDOBOTIKZ, an initiative of SP Robotic Works Pvt Ltd, the leading robotic technology provider in India has come up with unique courses at various levels of child education so that they can unleash the innovative side of themselves rather than waiting for a long period. Sneha Priya, Co-Founder/CEO shares the details of the journey so far and what lies ahead in an exclusive interview with Elets News Network (ENN)

What was the driving force behind the launch of your initiative?
It is high time that the education sector gets over with traditional methods and integrates practical exposure in the curriculum. Having felt deeply the effect of learning such important concepts at the later stages of education, we felt responsible to ensure that every child should be provided with the practical learning at a young age. That is when “Kidobotikz” began.
Kidobotikz is the name of our brand that provides robotic education to school students

What was the most challenging part of setting up your company?
The biggest challenge was to provide the best services for the best price. We always wanted to give everything for a child, but there were price issues that needed to be addressed. Therefore decreasing the price to such an extent to benefit as many as possible was the challenge that we have successfully achieved.

Who do you see as your prospects? How are you reaching them?
Parents and schools are our primary consumers. The kids of ages 12 to 17 are our consumers. We majorly focus on showcasing the talents of our existing students to inspire and instill the same thoughts to the other students too. This is done by real-time projects, competitions and many more.
What are the major benefits for institution/individuals who would adopt your solutions?
Through our solutions parents and the school management can track the progress of the child on a real-time basis with detailed analysis of where the child’s interests and strengths reside. Robotics is a combination of different fields, such as mechanics, electronics, programming, algorithm and many more. In this way we help every child to discover his/her interest in the varied subjects that we have and master it.

Do you have much competition? What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?
We do not have a direct competitor, though there is other robotic education providers whose model and deliveries are completely different than that of ours. There hasn’t been any big hurdle in the path so far.

Where do you see your company in five years time?
We would be serving the K12 age group globally with Robotic Education which helps them focus, fine-tune and bring their thoughts to reality. Being a startup that predominantly focuses on democratising technology, we would be looking on to serve a wider range of customer groups to benefit more by reducing the cost of the kit.

CRM Simplified

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is an indispensible factor for any organisation across any industry which aims to last long and strong to which it caters to. Unfortunately there are not many organisations in the country that caters to this service in a manner which is local in nature in terms of both cost and application. How SimpleCRM intends to change the entire landscape of CRM across industries is narrated by Indraneel Fuke founder-director of the company in an exclusive interview with Elets News Network(ENN).

Tell us about SimpleCRM beyond the information provided by your website.
SimpleCRM founders have been involved in global CRM project implementations since 2004. Over the years it became increasingly clear that organizations in Asia require an Enterprise grade CRM at a price point that factored in local economic realities. This led us to launch SimpleCRM product specifically targeted towards Asian customers. SimpleCRM is a comprehensive, highly-scalable, flexible and cost effective CRM solution for small, medium and large organizations in Asia.

What was the most challenging part of setting up your company?
Developing a product that matched the features and benefits of top-tier enterprise CRM solutions like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics, but at a far lower price point, was both our main value proposition and a challenge. However, we were able to overcome this challenge by tapping into our 15+ years of experience in developing enterprise software for global organisations and leveraging open source technologies to build SimpleCRM product line that did deliver our value proposition that is an Enterprise grade CRM at a highly attractive price point for Asian organisations.

Who are your target consumers? How are you reaching them?
SimpleCRM modules are applicable to all sizes of businesses in a variety of industrial sectors. That said, we do have developed verticalized solutions for certain industries, shown as follows:

Helpdesk
Support Centre
CRMLead Mgmt
CRMConfigure
Price
Quote(CPQ)
ModuleMobile
CRM

Insurance & Banking  ✔  ✔  –  ✔
Professional Services  ✔  ✔  ✔  ✔
E-Commerce  ✔  ✔  ✔  ✔
Real Estate  ✔  ✔  –  ✔
Dealers  ✔  ✔  ✔  ✔
Telecom  ✔  ✔  ✔  –
SMBs  ✔  ✔  ✔  ✔
Education  ✔  ✔  –  ✔

What are the major benefits for Institution/individuals adopting your solutions?
At a high level, SimpleCRM solution consists of following key modules:

  1. Comprehensive Lead Management System – This module allows organizations to track and manage leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts, create quotations and invoices and many other sales related aspects; basically the entire lead to cash cycle
  2. Case Management (Help Desk CRM) System – This module enables organisation to capture customer complaints, feedback from a variety of sources such as, calls, emails, website and even social media. It also helps manage case escalations and workflows. Basically this empowers the organisations to better serve their customers resulting in higher customer delight and retention.
  3. Partner and Customer Portal Framework – This module extends the reach of traditional CRM and allows other important stakeholders like reseller partners or customers to share information and collaborate with internal teams of an organization
  4. Marketing Automation System – This module helps organisations capture leads through a wide variety of sources such as, website, social media, calls, chats, emails and others. It also helps run email and SMS campaigns and provide campaign analytics.
  5. Mobile CRM App– Mobile app is a great way to be in touch with your customers on the go, even when you do not have net connectivity. It allows easy access to customer data and also ability to make updates which are later synchronised with the main CRM.

What is the level of competition and what is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?
There is competition for all promising business opportunities. Most Indian organisations still do not have a proper CRM system in place and that presents a big opportunity for solution providers, so there is bound to be competition for us as well. However, we believe no other CRM provider is able to match the combination of our Asia market focus, high expertise in delivering CRM projects and a great product at an attractive price-point.

At this stage of our growth, we do not have any big hurdles as such, but recruitment and retention of good talent continues to be something we need to keep working on.

Where do you see your company in the next five years?
SimpleCRM initially began as a customised solution on open source platform for one of the largest financial services organizations in Asia. After delivering a successful and scalable solution for 1200+ bank users, SimpleCRM founders decided to further build the product and deliver an enterprise grade, highly-scalable, comprehensive and affordable CRM for Asian organisations. Over the last few years SimpleCRM team has successfully delivered several large-scale deployments in Asia. For example, e-commerce companies like askme.com have 4,500+ of users managing sales, support and operations on SimpleCRM. NGOs like Reliance Foundation are using SimpleCRM for running their PAN India Toll Free Helpline for more than two million rural audience. Life Insurance companies like Union Assurance have decided to roll out SimpleCRM Lead Management System for 4,000+ advisors. On Education, SimpleCRM has been selected for providing lead management and help desk solution by premium institutes such as ITM University, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and Orchid International School.  

Over the next few years, we expect to continue to grow at a fast pace and become number one CRM alternative to salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM for the mid-enterprise & large enterprise market segments in the Asia Pacific.

Quick Facts

Headquarter: Singapore and India

  • Management details – https://www.linkedin.com/in/indraneelfuke
  • Clientele:
    • Large Customers with CRM users ranging from 500 to 2,000+
    • SMBs with CRM users ranging from 5-500.
  • Team: Having experience of more than 300 CRM projects over the last decade
  • Awards:
    • Selected as one of the top 40 startups in Web Summit’s ALPHA program
    • Selected as one for the 25 most promising CRMs by APAC CIO-Outlook

CBSE website to host UGC NET admit card soon

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

The admit card for University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test (UGC NET) will soon be available at the official website of Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

The board is scheduled to conduct the UGC NET examination on July 10, 2016.

Aspirants can download the admit cards by logging into the website http://cbsenet.nic.in/ and click on ‘UGC NET July 2016 Admit Card’.

On opening of the page, the candidate needs to enter details such as roll number and date of birth in the space provided and submit. The admit card would appear on the screen.

Candidates would not be allowed to take the examination without hard copy of the admit card.

Foreign university name on degree certificates for those under pact from now

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Students of Indian educational institutes will now have to study two semesters of undergraduate and one semester of post graduate degrees abroad, says United Grant Commission (UGC) in its decision to amend the existing guidelines.

The amendment requires that domestic educational institutes that enter into tie-ups with foreign institutes will have to ensure the above.    

The decision to amend the existing guidelines was taken on Wednesday.

As per the decisions, Indian institutes which get top accreditations will now be able to approach the UGC to seek its nod for entering into academic tie-ups with highly-rated education institutions abroad.

This is reversal to the previous norm which mentioned that only foreign institutes could seek permission for academic collaborations.  

The name of the foreign institute will be mentioned on the degree certificate for such courses.

The minimum degrees of collaboration have also been specified in the norm as per which at least one semester for post-graduate degrees and two semesters for under-graduate degrees have been specified.

A window of one year has been provided for institutes, which already have a global partnership, to get their pacts approved by UGC.

As per officials the MoUs will provide sufficient autonomy to the institutions as students from foreign institutions will also be allowed to come to Indian campuses under these norms.

Guidelines for collaborations had been previously brought out in 2012 during the previous regime but they had not attracted any proposals

New Education Policy draft calls for changes in Right to Education

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-


Several recommendations of the National Education Policy (NEP), 2016 calls for amendments to the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009.

The draft proposes merging of small, non viable schools which clashes with RTE’s neighbourhood schools located within one kilometre for children attending classes 1-5.

NEP has a mention of school mapping which is opposite of RTE’s child mapping but stresses that transportation must be arranged for children attending non-viable schools.

On account of increase in schools claiming religious or linguistic minority the committee notes that the proposal to extend 25 percent economically weaker section quota in private schools to minority institutions will also need an amendment.

It does not just stop there. The RTE bans grade repetition till class VIII which the draft wants to limit till Class V.

Fuelling a longstanding demand of private schools the committee calls for amending the RTE to provide, in addition to infrastructure, learning outcome norms that affect quality of education.

The report also says that infrastructure norms for recognition of private schools must also be applied to government schools and demands punitive action if not adhered to.

The policy proposes making education for children aged four and five a right, and roping in the NCERT and State Councils for Educational Research and Training to develop pre-school curriculum.

Online portal to facilitate education loan for aspirants in Delhi

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

The days of standing in long queues in banks to avail loans for education may just be over as the Delhi Government launches online application portal for Higher Education and Skill Development Guarantee scheme.   

The portal inaugurated by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal will help students avail loans who wish to pursue higher education in Delhi.

The scheme which is regarded as the brainchild of the Directorate of Higher Education will serve as an encouragement to undergraduate and students of higher education to pursue their career goals which they might otherwise fail to avail in the absence of adequate funds.  

Under this scheme, bank loans taken by the students will provide a guarantee through a Higher Education and Skill Development Credit Guarantee Fund created by the government. Students will not be required to furnish any collateral or margin money and it will be an equal opportunity scheme.

For the sake of convenience and transparency the facility was made online and the participating banks will be oblidged to provide loans applied by the students, said Deputy chief minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia.

With the launch of the portal Arvind Kejriwal said that he was committed to the promise made by his government that no student in Delhi should be denied the opportunity for quality education due to lack of resources.

From B’lore to Bengal, 8 Indian universities among top 100 in Asia

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

For the first time in the history of Independent India eight Indian institute of higher education has been successful in grabbing ranks below the top 100, where Bengaluru based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has ranked 27th.

In the first 100 institutions, eight have featured from India and 16 in a total of 200.

It is the first time the list has been expanded to 200. In all, 22 countries are represented, an increase from 14 in 2015.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay (43rd), Kharagpur (51st), Delhi (60th), Madras (62nd), Roorkee (65th), and Guwahati (joint 80th) and Jadavpur University in joint 84th place are the other names that occupy various positions in the first 100.  

National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University also from Singapore occupied the first and second position respectively for the first time.

However, the ranking authorities observed that the South Asian Institutions of higher education lag behind their East Asian Counterparts like Singapore, China and South Korea to attain an international standard primarily on the grounds of funding and the lack of government initiatives to treat the universities as a fulcrum to stimulate economic growth and frame policies.

Make Yoga an integral part of life, Smriti Irani advises students

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-
national-yoga-olympiad

national_yoga_olympiad

On the occasion of prize distribution to the winners of the first National Yoga Olympiad Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani appealed to students to make Yoga an integral part of life.

Emphasising on the benefits of Yoga, Irani said that it is the single most effective way that ensures physical and mental fitness and prevent stress of any kind to take over the human mind. She also said that on regular practice of Yoga it improves the hand eye coordination which in turn betters our motor skills.

The Minister appealed to parents as well as teachers to spare time for Yoga themselves so that children can replicate the example set by them.

The HRD minister announced the restructure of Yoga departments in Six central universities and expressed hope that it will evolve with the passage of time.

Irani appealed to all parents to thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi for spreading the message of Yoga throughout the world and convincing the United Nations (UN) to fix an International Yoga Day.

Yoga Olympiad is organised by National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for all government and government-aided schools. The participating children were assessed based on the practical performance of various yogic activities.  At the upper primary level, students are judged on a total score of 100 marks (60 for Asanas, 20 for Pranayama and 20 for Kriya) for performance in six Asanas.

GenextStudents.com – India’s 1st hybrid tutoring platform

By
digitalLEARNING Network
-

Despite technology-aided education replacing the traditional methods fast, the issue of after-school tuitions still lingers and poses a challenge. Under this situation, the solution to how to coordinate between the various stakeholders in a child’s education has been provided by Genext Students Limited, says its Co-founder Ali Asgar Kagzi in an interaction with Elets News Network (ENN)

Why did you decide to launch your initiative?
Both me and my partner Asad Daud are graduates from the London School of Economics (LSE). It was during the course of our study at LSE that we were exposed to the phenomenal use of technology in education. When we looked at the Indian education space, we realised that the opportunity is massive. However, there are two major fundamental issues facing our education system – lack of physical infrastructure and lack of skilled resources(teachers). These issues can only be solved with smart use of technology. This is what led to the idea of GenextStudents.com being formulated. The company was launched in 2013 as a basic platform providing study notes. Over the period, we’ve had a tremendous journey with some exceptional learning and the business has now evolved to its current state which is a one of its kind hybrid tutoring platform combining best of physical tutoring with technology aided learning.

Genextstudents.com is a one of its kind hybrid tutoring platform that combines the best of physical tutoring and technology aided learning. Our aim is to help parents (and students) search and connect with the best tutor as per their requirements in their vicinity. And, this student-tutor connect is further enhanced by our technology aided tools.

For students, along with the provision to connect with tutors, we also provide comprehensive digital content, assessment tools and comprehensive analytics tools for adaptive learning, which track and analyse the student’s study progress and their performance.

This content and analytics tools are also used by tutors for delivering high quality output to the students.

On the tutors’ front, we have created a platform where we aggregate and verify individual tutors and help them get discovered easily. In addition, we empower these tutors with a suite of admin tools which help them discharge their duties efficiently.

Moreover, students can also subscribe only to our digital content either on our web or mobile app. At present we cater to school students of classes 1-12 for CBSE, ICSE, SSC (Maharashtra) in English medium and Rajasthan and UP Boards (in Hindi medium). The home tutor connect service has been recently launched and is available only for Mumbai and we are planning to expand this to other cities and states for which we already have content available.

What was the most challenging part of setting up your company?
When we decided to foray into education space, the biggest challenge was where do we start from? The larger the opportunity and the sector, the easier it is to get overwhelmed and lose direction. We wanted to ensure that we address the existing problems at the grass root level and create a suitable solution rather than creating a solution and then fitting it into the existing system. Hence, we conducted a thorough market research.

We found out that an exceptional percentage of students opted for after school learning or tuitions. This number is as high as 92 percent in metro cities and is applicable at all income levels irrespective of the category of schools (public or private). The reasons for opting for tuitions vary with students, like lack of proper teachers in public schools or peer pressure in private schools. Therefore, we decided to focus on school level students and created a technology platform for helping these students with their studies and learning. Initially, we offered only digital content on our platform.

However, we realised that no matter how good the content is, it cannot substitute a tutor who could provide a physical intervention and who can guide the student. Keeping this in mind we evolved our business model to create hybrid tutoring platform combining best of physical tutoring with technology aided learning.

So, one can say, it is very important for a young venture to be extremely nimble, learn from ground experiences, and quickly evolve the model as per the customer or target audience requirements.

Who do you see as your target audience? How are you reaching out to them?
Our primary target audience are parents and students. It is interesting to note that parents are the decision makers when it comes to purchasing; but students are the end consumers. In addition we also reach out to tutors as they are the ultimate service providers for the home tutoring services. One of the USPs of our platform is that we cater to all the stake holders in the education system – students, parents and tutors and this is what sets us apart.

We undertake a combination of online and offline activities to reach out to all these categories. Along with this, we have undertaken several strategic alliances to ensure that we have a tremendous reach and are able to positively impact as many number of individuals as possible

What are the major benefits for stakeholders of education adopting your solutions?
For students, along with the provision to connect with tutors, we also provide comprehensive digital content for adaptive learning. This content consists of study notes, solutions to text book question, sample question papers, past year board exam papers, video lessons and question & answer forum along with very comprehensive and chapter wise assessment modules. All this is complemented by in-depth analytics (performance analysis tools) which track and analyse student’s progress and performance. The analytics tools offer some very helpful and meaningful information about the students – such as their strong and weak areas in a particular subject, subject-wise and chapter-wise scores and performance status, historical performances, top performers for that particular class( or subject or chapter), etc. These performance analytics are automatically shared with the parents. Hence, parents are constantly abreast of the study progress and performance of their child.

This content and analytics tools are also used by tutors to deliver high quality output to the students.

On the tutors’ front, we have created a platform where we aggregate and verify individual tutors and help them get discovered easily. In addition, we empower these tutors with a suite of admin tools which help them discharge their duties efficiently. There is a separate app for tutors as well. These tools take care of tutors’ admin work and help them focus completely on their core responsibility of teaching. These tools include – student and batch management system, attendance tracking system, tutor language proficiency testing module, test generators, student progress tracker, parent messaging and communication system and student doubt clearing forum.

Do you have much competition? What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?
Through our extensive ground work, research and interaction with parents, students and teachers we have figured that technology-only solutions would not be the best solution for Indian ecosystem – especially for kids at school level. That’s because no matter how good the digital content is, a student still needs a tutor/facilitator/guide for physical interaction and motivation. In addition, content is highly commoditised and alone can’t be a differentiating factor.

Hence, after a thorough research, we have created our hybrid model which is a one-of-its kind tutoring model combining best of physical tutoring and technology aided learning. We not only facilitate the connection of students (and parents) with tutors but have also created extensive technology tools for offering maximum value to all these stakeholders – students, parents and tutors – through our platform. This is our biggest USP. There are several players which are either focusing on very good content or listing of tutors. However, no one is providing the end-to-end combination of services that we offer.

The first and foremost challenge is creating a suitable platform which offers substantial value to all the stakeholders involved – students, parents and tutors. Having a right platform is very essential; only having content alone and a listing platform for tutors is not sufficient. Our hybrid model aptly addresses these issues providing a mix of physical tutoring and technology aided learning.

The second challenge is ensuring stickiness on our platform. Along with digital study content, assessment and performance analytics tools for students and parents, we have created extensive tech tools for tutors as well. This helps overcome the issue of stickiness and ensures that there is an on-going positive interaction with our platform at all levels.

Third challenge is monetisation, especially of digital content. Consumers are still very wary of paying for online subscription to digital content. Paying online for something which doesn’t exist in physical format is still a huge impediment for our Cash-On-Delivery obsessed population. To overcome this issue, we have partnered with all the leading telecom operators in India – Idea, Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel – to offer mobile balance payment solutions. Customers who want to subscribe only to our digital content either on web or app can pay directly using their mobile balance. No need of net banking, credit cards or even any wallet!

Where do you see your company in the next five years?
In the next five years, our aim is to establish ourselves as the market leader in the tutoring space with state-of-art technology being at the core of our business. We will focus on scaling rapidly, adding more tutors and students across the major cities across the country for tutor connect and partnership with tutorials. Plans are also on cards to up the ante for content in vernacular languages for state board students especially those from Hindi speaking states in Northern parts of India.

1...729730731...1,748Page 730 of 1,748

LATEST NEWS

EDITOR PICKS

POPULAR POSTS

POPULAR CATEGORY

© Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.