Teaching with a difference: The webpage of an educational portal

It is 10.30 pm and Rajiv Sood, a student of Class XII at Mayo Boys School, Ajmer, is feverishly solving problems of integration. He is facing some problems with a particular sum but waits for his tutor to help him out. Nothing unusual about that, except that his tutor is in Bangalore and they discuss the problem online at www.compassbox.com. Says Sood, ?The website for me is an extension of my classroom, and I am happy that there is a tutor whom I can turn to with my problems at any hour.? Agrees Sangeeta Taneja, a mother of two, who has just purchased one of www.planetvidya.com?s online study programmes for her daughter who studies in Class V: ?My children had studied in Singapore earlier and were unfamiliar with the curriculum here. My son successfully completed his Class X exams after enrolling in this website; this has prompted me to take it for my daughter too.?

Web-based education is growing in popularity, thanks to growing computer-penetration in Indian homes. Says Shantanu Prasad, chief executive officer, EduComp, which manages PlanetVidya: ?The market for online education is currently small but holds promise for the future.?

Agrees Arindam Lahiri, vice president (academics), Compassbox Learning, who feels that there is, indeed, a bright future for e-tutor services. Compassbox was one of the first websites to be launched in 2000. The site initially catered to the preparatory tests segment. Eventually, Career Launcher bought the company in 2001. PlanetVidya was launched in 2001 and NIIT?s eGurucool launched its programme in 2003. And all these websites had one common mission ? to make learning fun.

L. Balasubramanian, president, NIIT K-12, explains: ?We realised that once a child steps into Class IX, fun and games are on the backburner, replaced by worries, concerned parents and a looming board exam. NIIT thus used its experience of launching the first online IT learning portal ? Netvarsity.com ? to start eGurucool programmes to prepare students for the board examinations.?

For Career Launcher, launching Compassbox for school students was an extension of its core programme of management training (it trains students for CAT and other tests). EGurucool offers tutorials in maths and science for CBSE students of classes X to XII, while Planet Vidya trains CBSE students of all classes, from KG to Class XII, for all subjects. As for Compassbox, it offers guidance in maths and science for CBSE students of classes XI and XII and in all subjects for classes IX and X.

These websites do not follow the typical format where a student is asked to download the question paper. Rather, care has been taken to build the content in a way that makes learning more fun. All chapters are segmented into interactive sections and there are little tests at the end of every lesson which students can take.

According to Balasubramanian, this helps the student to grasp the fundamental concepts without any pressure. Also, individual websites have their unique selling points. PlanetVidya, for example, has a Math Guru section that explains mathematics problems to students. Compassbox has night-time online tutorials, a time when many students prefer to study. A student can pose a query and get the answers right away. eGurucool follows a blended learning ? a combination of classroom instruction and self-paced, online education, which is available to students on an ?anytime, anywhere? basis. Every website has different packages to suit the needs of individual students and groups.

Since its inception, Compassbox has got over 1,500 independent subscribers in addition to a few tie-ups with schools like Mayo Boys School and Delhi College, Indore. NIIT also claims to have taught 1.4 million children till now while PlanetVidya boasts of around 10,000 registered members. Says S. Sriram, IT administrator and head of the department of computers, Mayo Boys School: ?The entire content of Compassbox is available to students offline. They find it extremely useful during exams.?

Agrees M. K. Tiwari, principal, The Scindia School, Gwalior. Says Nayantara Ramamoorthy who studies in Class VIII in Gurgaon: ?Maths lessons are animated and they have helped me understand the subject a lot better.?

Says Dheeraj Gupta, who studied in the eGurucool programme, ?Online education is like having teachers on your desktops.? Now, that?s something every student would crave for.