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Top officials of NSDC resign
Following the tiff between the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) on the way of functioning of the later, Dilip Chenoy, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director and Atul Bhatnagar, Chief Operating Officer of the National Skill Development Corporation have resigned from their respective portfolios.
According to the sources, their resignation papers were submitted to S Ramadorai, Chairman of NSDC ‘s Board of Directors. It is believed that the inability of getting the private sector involved, lack of transparency and non performance of the sector skill councils are the prime reasons for the top officials resignation.
Game Jam Titans – 2015
ARK Infosolutions has recently organised Game Jam Titans (GJT), India’s only game development competition for school kids held across six cities in India New Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune. The game teaches you to adopt a creative thinking mindset, a step-by-step way of making things work and solve challenges.
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For the love of foreign language
Alok Arora, CEO and Co-founder, LingosMio tells to Elets News Network how the foreign language market is gaining momentum in India. The company is offering four languages English, Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin at present.
Give us the brief of the various reasons behind starting LingosMio.
It was only through self experience of not being equipped to find a good tutor for foreign language, the idea of LingosMio came to my mind. LingosMio is a language-learning platform where you can learn a language fast and with ease. Users can learn languages by way of full-fledged courses online and through a phone application. At present we have Spanish, English, Hindi and Mandarin Chinese courses available.
All the users need to do is to download the app from the Google play store, register with LingosMio and get started. At present Spanish and English courses are available on Android. The courses are organised into chapters, which consist of explanations, a lot of fun and interactive exercises and conversations, which teach the student everything from the alphabet to more advanced concepts of the language.
What are the various difficulties encountered in doing business on ground level?
Personally I am not a foreign languages teacher and I am not a programmer. Thus the first biggest challenge was to assemble a team of like-minded people. The next big challenge was building the course material both on paper and also presenting the same in a highly effective and interactive manner. Particularly since something like this had not been done before. However, if you have a clear vision of ‘what’ you want to do and have a capable team in place, the ‘how’ starts falling into place.
Marketing the product was also a major challenge and getting the initial users on-board was not an easy task. However, since LingosMio is as effective as it gets when it comes to language learning, it spread very quickly.
What is the market size of the services offered by you in India at present?
The language learning market in India is huge and the biggest of them all is probably for English. Again, this is due to the increasing smartphone usage. Something interesting we noticed was that a lot of our increasing user base consists those who want to study Hindi and are from India, something we did not expect.
Like India, in the rest of the world the numbers of language learners are those who want to learn English. However, there are also a lot more people who want to learn other languages compared to India. The idea of learning another language online is not as big in India as compared to the USA or Europe at present. The global language learning market is about $60 billion of which only about 6-7 per cent is digital.
What are the major benefits for organisations or Individuals adopting your solutions?
A lot of people, particularly in India do not have the resources to go out and learn languages. Lot of times it is expensive and ineffective also. Being bilingual is a great asset in terms of both professional and personal life.
LingosMio has courses that teach languages from scratch at cheaper costs. It is possible to learn languages without going to any institute. The courses at LingosMio have a huge focus on conversational skills with all the chapters ending with a real life conversation with real voices recorded by native speakers.
The programme also uses voice recognition technology, which tells the student where he is making a mistake in pronunciation. Thus, it covers all the elements of classroom teaching into a programme.
What is the vision of your company for next two years?
In a short span of time LingosMio has emerged as a great tool for language learning. LingosMio app is ranked in the top 5 in 8 countries and in the top 10 in another 5 countries, which goes to show how effective it is. At present LingosMio have courses in English (for Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Urdu speakers), Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin (for English speakers). We plan on introducing these courses in different languages thereby increasing our global presence. Moreover, we plan to introduce more tools for our students, which will help them improve their conversational skills or help them prepare for formal examinations and improve language skills in general.
We also plan on introducing more courses (We are working in Portuguese and Arabic course as of now). The above will enable us to position ourselves at the go to people for language learning not only in India but also globally.
What are the various methods you are using to increase the visibility of your organisation?
The biggest effort one can make is on the product itself. We have carried out little promotion and are already ranked as the one of the top education app in many countries. This is because LingosMio is as effective as it can get with language learning, resulting in a lot of repeated usage by the students. To increase our visibility we will work on more courses and introduce more features that will help our students improve their language skills.
The biggest visibility for the LingosMio app comes from being on the top of education charts of the various countries we are present in.
How you can differentiate your services from competitors?
When it comes to language learning there are a lot of apps and websites. However, most of these serve as additional tools that help you learn a language. We wanted to create something that helps students learn a language from scratch and independently of any teacher. Since there are a lot of people out there who do not have the resources or time to take expensive and time consuming classes offered in their respective cities, lot of people taught are inexperienced and ineffective teachers.
We believe that languages are a thought process and it’s important to understand that thought process in order to be fluent in the language. People try to memorise, which is the reason most people give up on learning languages very quickly. When you learnt Mathematics did you memorise the result of each and every multiplication or did you learn how the multiplication was done? Similarly, you need to understand the root of each word and how to use the words to make sentences on your own. The courses at LingosMio are created with this mindset.
Most langugage learners struggle to make conversations. The biggest things in the courses at LingosMio are the accent on conversation skills. Each chapter ends with a conversation recorded by native speakers which teaches the students to make conversation with what they have learnt and also encouraging the student to take part on such conversations.
What are the ways of engaging the customers with you. Can you share any special case study?
The biggest engagement factor comes from the product. The students are required to engage in various reading, writing and even speaking exercises. We have had a lot of people write to us about how the voice recognition feature really helps them to start thinking in the languages and it also helps them to improve their pronunciation. Since the tool actually points out the words to the students they have not pronounced properly just like a classroom teacher would.
We also communicate with our students on a weekly basis teaching them certain idiomatic phrases in the language they are learning. Moreover, we also allow our students to reach out to our experts to ask any doubts they have. This also helps us to further improve our course content.
What are the major stakeholders and sectors you are focusing on?
Anybody who wants to learn a language is a potential stakeholder for LingosMio. At present we are focused on four languages English, Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin. Our major market focus is the English speaking audience and Latin America. Soon we will expand our presence to those who speak Russian and Arabic.
What are the various initiatives taken by your organisation to emerge as a market leader?
Our students have pointed out to us that LingosMio has worked better for them than any other product they have used for language learning. A lot of them have even gone so far as to say they are quitting their regular classes at the local language-training institute.
LingosMio is also ranked above Duolingo (considered to be the market leader not only in language learning but also digital learning) in a couple of countries. This show that with time and greater visibility we can actually emerge as a market leader. We will continue to focus on our students and their learning needs since that is what matters at the end of the day.
Now, a separate cadre for skill development
In an attempt to give the skill learning and educational education more thrust, the government has sought to set up an Indian Skill Development Service cadre of officers, informed official sources.
According to official sources, all the officers of the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGE&T) will be subsumed in the cadre and they will have the same rank and scale enjoyed by other central civil services, also referred to as Group A services, like the Indian Revenue Service, Indian Audit and Accounts Service and Indian Railway Services. In contrast, the IAS, IPS and Indian Forest Service officers belong to the All India Services, set up under Article 312 of the Constitution to serve with the state governments.
The Cabinet is expected to clear the proposal this week.
The Indian Skill Development Service officers will be mainly posted with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. The Centre will be setting up a new cadre in the Group A services after almost three decades, reversing a policy of closing down several of these cadres. The last such cadre to be set up was the Central Labour Services in 1987.
A new cadre will encourage the officers to push the mandate of job creation, which has been one of the key thrust areas of the NDA government. DGE&T officers run national and state level programmes of vocational training. One main area of operation is the countrywide network of employment exchanges and Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs).
IITs to shelve fee for differently-abled
In a welcome move, the Indian Institute of Technology has decided to waive off the tuition fee for the differently-abled students. The decision was taken by IIT council headed by Human Resource Development minister Smriti Irani.
Irani shared the news on her social networking Twitter handle and wrote, “Happy to report that IIT Council has decided to waive off fees for our physically challenged students.”
The council had earlier suggested that IIT should hike tuition fee of the students from Rs 90,000 to Rs 2.5 lakh to meet recurring expenses of the institute, however, the HRD minister put the proposal on hold. Irani also insisted that they cannot overlook the interest of socially and economically weaker sections.
Another proposal by IIT Joint Admission Board (JAB) to increase the quota of students appearing for JEE (Advanced) from 1.5 lakh to 2 lakh had been approved in the meeting.
Hiring trends for a techie
Intro: For a techie who wish to kick start his career either with an IT firm or a start-up, Bhawna Satsangi of Elets News Network talks to Siddarth Bharwani, Director, Jetking to know more about the hiring trends in the domain. The excerpts from interview will guide the techies on how to choose their career path to be successful in their respective field of work.
What are the criteria of hiring a techie for a start-up or IT firm?
For most startups, each hire is an important one. They are looking for talent that is smart, intelligent and battle ready. They seek talent that’s willing to go that extra mile and quick get on board with the rest of the team. Most startups expect their hires to be willing to go through the grind to get ahead and they even reward these hires accordingly with added performance incentives.
While IT firms tend to handpick the talent that makes it through their carefully crafted selection procedures to ensure only the brightest that would make a great cultural fit get through. The candidate is expected to have holistic skills, not only of the domain he is operating in but also in the allied domains of his functions. The will to go beyond and add extra value to his organisation and knowledge by keep abreast with latest technology in the industry is what companies are looking for.
Before hiring a techie, what all points are kept in mind?
The recruiters must ensure that the skill sets they are hiring the techie for are relevant to their long term goals. The firms must have a clear vision about the role and responsibility that the techie they are hiring will perform and must aim for a long term relationship which is mutually beneficial.
What are the latest trends you see in hiring a techie for start-ups and IT firms?
At present, there is a talent war raging between the startups and IT firms as each one is willing to pay good money to get the best talent. However, startups seem to have the upper hand, thanks to easy availability of funds. They are willing to offer packages as high as 5-10 Lakhs, well above their older counterparts who pay between 3-4 Lakhs.
To ensure they do not miss out on hiring the cream candidates, IT firms too have bumped up their salaries to remain lucrative employers for aspiring professionals. The promise of stability is not enough as the next wave of graduates seem to have bigger risk appetites than their predecessors.
What do techies look out in a job profile while applying for start-ups or IT firms?
Techies who join startups expect a chance to jump on board a growing company and seek bigger packages and faster career growth alongside the firm. The firm’s growth story excites them and they are lured by the high incentives that these companies offer.
But even during the explosive growth of the startup boom, there are those who still prefer to join the older IT firms. These candidates are risk averse. A well-defined career path and long term security are the main motivators for them.
Do you also run some training programmes to make the hiring lot suitable to the job offered?
Jetking deliver the complete package. We do emphasise on delivering quality talent to the industry. We not only ensure the talent is technically skilled but also ensure the talent is in tune with the industry expectations with great soft skills. We are committed to creating globally competent IT professionals through our innovative teaching methods, advanced courses, exceptional faculty and thought leadership in IT education. Our unique and award-winning training methodology of SmartLab Plus lays emphasis on hands-on learning and collaborative sessions through experiential learning. Our Arjun and Drona labs facilitate effective theoretical learning along with best in class practical training to students.
India, Germany strengthen education ties
Minister for Human Resource Development Smriti Zubin Irani and Dr. Johanna Wanka, German Minister of Education and Research held bilateral discussions on the range of issues related to enhancement and deepening of traditional ties.
The two ministers exchanged views on collaboration in science and technology, skills development, the Global Initiative for Academic Networks (GIAN) as well as cooperation in the field of promotion of languages of each country in the other. The leaders expressed satisfaction at the progress made in the bilateral relations.
During the meet, India and Germany signed two Joint Declarations of Intent (JDIs) and an MoU for enhancing cooperation in education. The two JDIs and the MoU were signed in the presence of Smriti Irani and Dr. Johanna Wanka.
The first JDI seeks to implement a new programme titled “lndo-German Partnerships (IGP) in Higher Education” over four years from 2016-2020 to encourage and support cooperation between higher education institutions in each country. The University Grants Commission (UGC) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Germany, the respective implementing agencies for the JDI also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for operationalisation of the cooperation between the two countries in the field of the Higher Education.
The MoU will develop a joint partnership programme aimed at enhancing long-term partnerships between German and Indian institutions of higher education. New and innovative areas of cooperation would be opened, enabling participating institutions to develop teaching and research profiles and contribute to their internationalisation strategies. Each side will contribute 3.5 million Euros for the initial programme period of four years. The IGP will fund a number of projects, which would be identified based on a competitive selection process. By concentrating on top-level strategic partnerships, the programme aims to improve the overall quality of teaching and research and to strengthen inter-disciplinarily within the participating institutions.
Odisha to unveil 100 model schools
To practice holistic learning while providing optimum facilities in its state, the Odisha government has sought to start 100 model schools from the next academic session (2016-17), an official informed.
“While the state government has set a target to open model schools in each block, 100 such schools will begin functioning from next academic session in the first phase,” said School and Mass Education minister Debi Prasad Mishra.
The decision was taken in a meeting here chaired by chief minister Naveen Patnaik.
Mishra said a total of 1,772 employees, including 1,332 teachers, would be appointed in these model schools. The appointment process of 1,332 teachers and 440 staffers in the 100 such schools would be completed by March next year.
The model schools, meant to impart education from Class I to Class XII, will be carved out at par with the central government-run Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV), an official statement said.
Vocational courses would also be a major part of the curriculum, it added.
Patnaik directed officials to expedite the construction of buildings and other infrastructural works to ensure that education is imparted in the model schools from the 2016-17 academic session.
The model schools, to be managed by autonomous bodies, will also have residential facilities for students.
KVs to impart German in its schools
In an MoU signed between Germany and India, the Kendriya Vidyalayas will now impart German as an additional foreign language while modern Indian languages will be taught in Germany, a senior official informed.
“German will be taught as an additional foreign language,” Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has said. He added that side by side modern Indian languages will be taught in Germany.
An MoU was signed between the two countries on the occasion of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit and under the understanding, a pact will be signed between the KV and Max Mueller Bhavan to formalise the arrangement.
This marks an end to the controversey which had erupted about a year after KVs decided to stop teaching German as third language and replaced it with Sanskrit.
The governing board of KV had in its meeting on October 27 last year directed that teaching of German language as an option instead of Sanskrit be discontinued.
The new understanding is a sharp departure from the earlier agreement of 2011 between the two countries to offer German as a third language in the KVs.
HRD Minister Smriti Irani has been maintaining that teaching German was against the spirit of the three-language formula and violated the national education policy.
The KV’s decision had triggered an uproar and had threatened to derail ties between the two countries. The government, though, had announced that German would continue to be taught as an additional or hobby subject from class VI to VIII.
