Online Education Clicks in India

By Narayanan Madhavan
Sunday October 22 9:52 PM ET

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - If you don't find one school ma'am inspiring enough, you can click a mouse to make a change.

While market experts debate the pros and cons of e-commerce in India, online education has become hot in a nation betting on knowledge industries to create skilled jobs.

A number of Internet companies have mushroomed to aid homework and learning skills, while one offers video lectures on computer education downloaded from a leading U.S. university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Students at the university's Indian partner, the Quantum Institute, are lured by the prospects of the good placements that alumni get.

"If you get a good job, it's worth it,'' said bespectacled Tapan Goel, who is in the final semester of his course.

The institute has some 240 enrolments, although at $10,000 for three semesters the fees are hefty by Indian standards.

The institute employs tutors who help out its students and the Illinois university has a site for queries and discussions with fellow students and faculty members.

"They are graded and taught in the same way. They are simply doing the same course,'' said William Kubitz, professor and associate head at the university's Department of Computer Sciences.

Learning When You Want

India has only around 1.5 million Internet connections and about five million PCs in a nation of one billion people, but online education has seized the fancy of many.

"Education is such a big need in this country...parents are willing to spend huge amounts of money,'' Vivek Agarwal, co-founder of egurucool.com, told Reuters.

Egurucool, a pioneering education startup, has a name that is a twist on the ancient Hindu concept of ``gurukul'' (Guru's community), when students lived with their teacher.

Founded two years ago, it employs 120 people in eight towns, and has some plum venture capital money to spend.

The Web site allows students to do homework from vacation spots, offers online tests, chats and queries in a ``smart study program'' for which students pay 500 rupees ($11) to 3,000 rupees a year.

Some 5,000 students pay, and overall registered users number 175,000 people and 2,500 schools.

Egurucool.com raised $10 million in its second round of venture capital funding this year, and investors include media baron Rupert Murdoch's News Corp-owned Star TV, which has its eye on education broadcasts.

Local Students, Global Homework

Experts say online education can transform learning.

"A child must have the right to decide how much he wants to learn and how he wants to learn today,'' says Marmar Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration.

"The monopoly of the classroom as a learning resource is over,'' he bluntly told a recent gathering of school leaders.

Mukhopadhyay is advising Classteacher.com, in which infotech education leader NIIT Ltd holds a 35 percent stake.

Classteacher.com, besides offering Internet-based communication and learning tools, plans to create a digital library and host video chats.

Other related education sites have sprung up in India.

Studentsguild.com offers students a place to buy and sell used books and look for information on financial aid, accommodation, resumes, career options and access to libraries.

Piewebtutor.com offers specialized online coaching for the tough entrance examinations to medical colleges and the prestigious Indian institutes of technology (IITs).

Brainvisa.com designs ideal career paths with the help of software.

NIIT (www.niitnetvarsity.com) and the other leading computer education company, Aptech (APTH.BO), offer regular software courses online (www.onlinevarsity.com

Online Indian tie-up with US varsity yields rich dividends
Sharvani Pandit, New Delhi
March 2, 2001, 13:00 hrs (IST)

AN the Internet be used to provide world-class education in India from a leading university in the US, over 19,200 kilometers away?

That is just what the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) has been doing through a tie-up with the Delhi-based Quantum Institute in five Indian cities for the past two years.

Interestingly, 11 Quantum students holding UIUC degrees were offered jobs at global management consultancy major KPMG's hi-tech e-commerce division, headquartered in Mountain View, California, at a starting salary of $60,000 (Rs.2.7 million) p.a.

According to Roy Campbell, a professor of computer science at UIUC who is currently in India to give lectures to Quantum students, the idea of tying up with an Indian institute for online education was an experiment to see whether one can "transport education from one continent to the other" while retaining the feel of classroom interaction.

UIUC’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a world leader in its field. With 10 Nobel and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners on its faculty, it is hailed as a world leader in IT research and considered at par with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University.

"Another reason is to make sure India is well-trained in information technology (IT)," Campbell said, adding "computer science is central to cutting edge technology and at present, IT engineers in India do lower-end work such as manufacturing and software development and have to expand their base. They need to upgrade their courses and make them progressive".

"At the rate at which the industry is expanding, it just might need a billion brains from India to cater to the shortfall of trained people globally," Campbell told India Abroad News Service, and the UIUC-Quantum initiative, according to him, is to train them for work in any corner of the world.

According to Arun Dang, Vice Chairman of Quantum Information Systems Ltd., the only thing that hinders distance education is lack of classroom interaction leading to disinterest among students.

Addressing that fear in the ‘India Program’, as UIUC calls it, "Illinois professors present lectures that are recorded and posted on the university Web site for all its students, including those in India," Campbell said.

The lectures are run in India in the presence of moderators, experts in computer science from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and IT firms. Any queries students may have are dealt with online by teaching assistants (TAs) at UIUC.

So successful was the initiative that last year 30 Indian students – from Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore – became recipients of masters degrees in computer science (MCS) from UIUC, which has produced Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, and Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes among others.

UIUC MCS faculty selects Indian candidates from among first division graduation students after they take the same entrance tests as students in the US. The students then go through the three-semester course in one year. For the master's degree they have to maintain an average grade of at least 3.5. The course costs them about $11,000 (Rs.500,000), about a third of what it would cost them in the US.

In another first, now Campbell's lectures to Quantum students in India will also be transmitted to students at UIUC. "Two years ago, it was 380 students there and 20 students here. This time it is the opposite. My lecture here would be viewed by 380 students there," he said.

R.C. Malhotra, former director of IIT, Kanpur, heads Quantum in India, which has roughly 130 students in India. While it starts with about 80 students in every semester, about 20 drop out because they can’t handle the pressure.

As Mohit, a Quantum UIUC MCS student, explains: "At first there was dread. The pressure is tremendous. As a part of the program, I can actually be asked to do projects with students at UIUC or in other centers in India and that makes it challenging especially keeping in mind the time difference between the two countries."

"But at times when our queries aren't addressed immediately after a lecture, we do tend to get disheartened," he added.