A plethora of Japanese universities opened their stalls in education fair, in Taj Coromandel, Chennai to woo Indian students. Representatives of several schools and universities attended the anxious lot of students who formed a beeline at the booths.
Yoshino Hiroshi, Director of University of Tokyo India Office, unraveled the prospects of education in Japan, he asserted on the facts that Japan is a beautiful and safe city with rich culture and heritage. He also highlighted the issue of generation of smart manpower is the need of the hour. Japan is in urgent need of good manpower in the field of engineering. He also raised his concern over the decrease in the number of Indian students in Japanese universities.
The Tokyo University ranked amongst the 20 best universities of the world, but it failed to woo maximum number of Indian students even after fetching a good rank. Only 727 students enrolled in different Japanese Universities last year. Currently Japanese Universities offer a gamut of courses to students which include Engineering, Sustainable Development of Language, Economics, Commerce and Humanities.
Dr. Daljit Singh Cheema, Education Minister, Punjab
The Punjab Education Department has decided to educate the students regarding Environment and Wild Life protection to inspire them to conserve natural habitat and environment.
The department would execute this plan in collaboration with the renowned NGO ‘Nature Conservation Society’ which has been working for the wild life protection. This was decided in a meeting by Dr. Daljit Singh Cheema, Education Minister, Punjab with officials of the Nature Conservation Society.
Dr. Cheema emphasised the need for environment awareness, besides formal education, that the students must be made aware about the surrounding they live in and also for the protection of wild life. He said that healthy environment is imperative for overall development of the society so in order to conserve the natural flora and fauna and wild life, a sense of responsibility toward nature must be inculcated among the students.
Special lecture and quiz competition would be organised in schools on the theme of Environment and Wild Life protection. During these lectures, apart from the teachers of the education department, resource persons of Nature Conservation Society would interact with the students and educate them about the role of healthy environment for the human development. These activities would also be replicated during Block and District level Science fairs.
The Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, announced slew of plans, targeting the minorities of the state. He announced plethora of new projects which will completely rehash the entire minority education infrastructure.
The Maharashtra Government is mulling on the idea of starting a polytechnic college and a senior college in Urdu medium and putting Urdu as an optional language in schools. The State government will transform these plans into reality with an objective of corking the soaring dropout rates of the students in the state.
In a milieu of several eminent personalities, Fadnavis asked for new ideas which will develop the minority education scenario of the state and assured of financial backup to turn the idea into a reality. He also stressed on the fact of building good human resource, as India will be the major factory of human resource in the 21st century. English, Science will soon be a part of the madrasas curriculum, Fadnavis assured.
Other speakers also tabled the idea of skill development for minority students and have also asked for apt career counselling, to help the students to navigate their career in a proper way.
To help schools simplify their processes, Nidhi Mahule Kandpal, Co-founder, HOP!app developed a cross platform app that puts school, teachers and parents on a single platform. This new app helps to make interactions among the stakeholders simple and smart.
Give us the brief of the various reasons behind starting HOP!app.
We identified that young working parents, want to be involved in their child’s education. But the irony of modern times is that though parents want to know and participate more, they have limited time at their disposal. We also saw that schools need a simple and effective way to communicate with the parents and to keep them up to date with the latest developments in the class.
Something which is currently managed though multiple mediums such as SMS, social networks and PTMs. These needs led to the conception of HOP, a cross platform app that puts school, teachers and parents on a single platform. With HOP, we intend to make interaction, collaboration and school management simple and smart. Building a support system that works for students at school and back at home. What are the various difficulties encountered in doing business on ground level?
In any industry the people you work with make a lot of difference, especially if you are trying to do something new. Edtech has been making a huge buzz in the western teacher and student communities, but not much in India. Finding industry experts and getting their perspective on how technology can be integrated with the current teaching methods in India was tough.
Secondly, any new concept, especially related to technology takes sometime to gain acceptance. We found parents to be highly excited about the idea of being able to access school information, pictures and real time class updates in an app. But we did face some challenges in getting acceptance from technology averse schools that still trust the tried and tested methods.
What is the market size of the services offered by you in India at present?
The pre-school and K-12 market in India is pegged at USD 43bn. There are 1.5mn schools in India, of which 2,80,000 are private, unaided schools and pre-schools put together. That’s the addressable market size. We are currently testing the market, while the concept has shown great acceptance in the early childhood education segment across tier 1 and tier 2 cities, the ERP features of the app makes it quite useful for the K-12 segment.
What are the major benefits for organisations and individuals adopting your solutions?
HOP brings schools, teachers and parents on a common platform. It engages teachers, involves parents and simplifies the school processes. HOP is a cross-platform, making it accessible through smart phones and web.
The app helps teachers connect and collaborate with parents, at the same time, gives them smart tools to organise their day to day activities like lesson plans, assessments and attendance. It gives parents a one click access to all the important school information and keep pace with their kids.
The real time push notifications, dashboards and reminders ensure that parents will never miss out on anything important in their child’s schooling. HOP’s features like in-app fee payment, admissions and emergency alert simplify the jobs of the administrative staff. At the same time, its interactive features like instant chat messenger and bag pack keep parents informed on what needs their attention.
What is the vision of your company for next two years?
At HOP, we want to continue creating smart education enablers that make learning interactive, engaging and efficient within school and beyond. We want to establish HOP app as a trusted brand name for both teaching and parenting needs. We are currently targeting at a base of 10,000 potential schools for the HOP app. We also plan to launch a parent engagement initiatives in the coming year.
What are the various methods you are using to increase the visibility of your organisation?
As we are a B2B organisation, we believe in applying more on-the-field ways of promoting our organisation. Our visibility is mainly through participating in seminars, school events and regular interactions with school management. However, to increase our visibility amongst parents and education influencers we have now taken up the digital marketing route as well.
How you can differentiate your services from competitors?
There are very few similar products in the market and the concept is still very new. Also, we are not just providing a product, but a solution. HOP app integrates with the current teaching methods and the current technology being used in a school. It is customisable and can be integrated with the existing ERP of the schools, making it easy for teachers and administrative staff to adopt HOP and continue using it.
What are the ways of engaging the customers with you. Please share any special case study?
Schools are our direct customers. We are working towards enhancing the visibility of the schools through the use of HOP app. We are also running a series of videos to help teachers and administrators use technology to enhance teaching and bring efficiency in their day to day work. Teachers and administrators are the ambassadors for any edtech company, the more they adopt technology the smarter will be the education system.
To engage parents, we have taken the social media route. We have also started working on parent engagement initiatives, which will focus on parenting and nurturing. The idea is to give parents a platform to share experiences form focus groups and get expert advice.
What are the major stakeholders and sectors you are focusing on?
HOP has been made with an objective to serve the education sector. We are focusing on school administrators, principals and educational consultants. We would like to primarily focus on private players. When we are ready for a very large scale operation, we shall move towards government sector and international markets.
What are the various initiatives taken by your organisation to emerge as a market leader?
Firstly, to be a leader we believe that knowledge and speed of execution are most important, which can only come from a talented and driven team. Also, we are continuously working towards making HOP, a comprehensive tool for all the school needs. While at the core, HOP is a communication and engagement app, the ERP and social feature upgrades are ongoing. The other important thing that we are doing and determined to continue with is building strong relationships with the customers. It is from them that we learn something new every day and implement it in HOP.
Government schools to have separate toilets for girls and boys
Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi has launched Swachh Vidyalaya Programme with an objective to provide separate toilets for girls and boys in all government schools within a year. Department of School Education and Literacy under Ministry of HRD has took this initiative to help government schools to provide clean environment to children.
States and Union Territories have reported construction of 3.17 lakh toilets till 27th July, 2015. Around 300 central observers are deputed to review the progress of the Swachh Vidyalaya Initiative.
The NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training) is revamping the education modules for students of class I to VIII. The entire rehash is done to give a new dimension to the present primary education infrastructure. The indicators will also try to level the parameters which are used to monitor the learning curve of the students.
The NCERT has already pin pointed a plethora of subjects, which includes, English, Hindi, Urdu, EVS (Environmental Science), Science, Social Science and Art Education. The learning indicators is a well known practice amongst the global education fraternity and now this is foraying into the Indian education system.
Several tailor made parameters are set to measure a child’s development. For example a student of standard one should have possessed the knowledge to write proper words and letters with proper spacing. A fellow student of class II should be comfortable in writing rhyming words and he or she must contribute in the school magazine. In a similar way a class VIII student should have the acumen to understand new concepts and should have an eye to explore unknown areas of the knowledge domain.
The regimen of a subject will also change under this plan. The EVM subject will not only deal with environmental issues but it will create a bridge between natural and social environment. It will also help the child to understand the diversity of the environment and it will also help them to increase their interest on the subject.
The entire system will not only help the students to bloom but it will also help the teachers to gauge the student’s growth level.
The Karnataka Education Ministry is all set to doll out several new policies targeting the kids living below poverty line (BPL). The Minister of Primary and Secondary Education of Karnataka, Kimmane Ratnakar stressed on expanding the ambit of the entire education system, to benefit these underprivileged kids.
The State government is ready with a gamut of people friendly plans which includes, the plan of starting LKG in government schools and providing immediate admission to children of the BPL card holders under RTE.
Little did the two ex-Infosys employees and IIT alumni knew that their small project of tutoring 60 engineering students would develop into a 30-crore company. Edureka, founded by Lovleen Bhatia and Kapil Tyagiis now fastest growing online education market place addressing the growing global skills gap in new age technology.
“The journey of Edureka started in 2011 when we started a small pilot project by tutoring 60 students of the ABES Engineering College in Ghaziabad,” said the founders.
After launching Eudreka with an investment of 1.5 crore, the startup grew bigger to Rs.30 crore company, generating 2,768 per cent revenue (FY 2013-14). Today, Edureka is a market leader in offering online courses for not only mid and senior level professionals, organisations but also freshers in the tech and business domains.
“Our tutorial model, unlike the free and pre-recorded videos of MOOCs, consists of real time instructor led live online classes on tech and business courses with 24×7 experts help support and free access to upgraded content for lifetime,” says Lovleen Bhatia.
Kapil Tyagi says, “Being interactive and available all time, this tutorial structure has addressed most issues of online education like lack of personalised feedback and assessment, one-on-one attention, content overload and most importantly not having the option to interact (live) with like-minded people.”
The popularity of the model helped the firm to register 30 per cent MoM growth in India and 20 per cent in overseas markets and reach break-even in the second year. Analysing global skills gap issue, offerings such as online education, live chat, interaction with tutors have been included by Edureka in niche tech domains like Hadoop, Big Data & Analysis, Cloud, Apache, Mongo DB, Spark, Scala, Python etc.
Its tutorial model, which garners 70 per cent course completion rate against MOOC’s, 4 per cent among industry professionals, is due to its high level of learner engagement and live interactive sessions.
Presently, Edureka has over 25,000 paying learners and has built an active community of 2.5 lakh learners from more than 50 countries within a span of four years. Over 65 per cent of its revenue comes from US and UK market with a majority from American and British tech NRIs who wants to skill up fast.
The demand of offerings by Edureka has been increasing from Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi based techies whereas global student base are coming from USA, UK, East Europe, S-E Asia, Far East and North African markets.
Dhanuka Agritech Limited, an agrochemical formulations company of India, recently launched a course on Agricultural Extension Services in Public Private Partnership mode. The course jointly launched in association with Junagadh Agriculture University in Gujarat is said to benefit the agri-input dealers and distributors.
A one year diploma, the course will focus on Agricultural inputs and services and training for new technologies. Previously, the course has been launched at Anand Agricultural University, Anand and Navsari Agricultural University, Navsari.
The Agricultural Extension Course devised as per the norms of IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University) is offered on a distant education learning mode. The duration of the course will be for one year and would be divided into eight modules in which applied topics will be taught by scientists of different faculties.
A total of 2,234 students of Indian Institute of Technology-Madras were awarded degree on its 52nd convocation ceremony held recently. This year’s convocation marked the first time that Dual Degrees (M.S and PhD) were being awarded.
Prof. Manjul Bharagava, Fields Medalist 2014, R.Bradon Fradd Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University, USA, was the Chief Guest at IIT Madras. Prof. Bharagava was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by the institute. Dr. Pawan Goenka, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Madras and Executive Director, Mahindra & Mahindra, Presided over the function.
The Chief Guest along with Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras handed over the prizes to the students.
