EDUCATION SPECIAL...India is logging in for tuitions

India is logging in for tuitions 
 

7pm, 15year-old Delhi student Shilpa Trivedi puts on her headphones, logs in to her Skype account, switches on her laptop camera and spends an hour dissecting complex questions with her biology tutor.

Till June, Trivedi attended a popular south Delhi tutorial class. But when her favourite tutor left, she felt her motivation slipping. A chance visit to a friend’s house in the middle of his online class got her hooked to the new learning medium.

“It’s been brilliant,” Trivedi said. “There’s no going back for me.”

Across India, thousands of students like Trivedi are making the switch from conventional face-to-face tuitions to an online alternative. Dismissed as gimmicky by many educationists when they started in the mid2000s, online tutorials are now here to stay, commanding a Rs1,500 crore market that industry chamber ASSOCHAM estimates will grow to Rs3,500 crore by 2015. For Rajiv Shah, the benefits are impossible to ignore. The Class 12 student from Ahmedabad is preparing for IIT admissions with Delhi-based Vidyamandir coaching classes — online. “I get the best tuitions without travelling to a different city,” said Shah. After taking over Vidyamandir in 2010, Educomp Solutions — one of the country’s first e-tutorial providers — expanded the coaching centre’s imprint online to 22 cities. Like Shah, students go to centres where they study long-distance with the Delhi institute’s famed teachers.

“We see this market as the future,” said Chandan Agarwal, Educomp business head.

E-tuitions offer both students and service providers a major cost advantage. Unlike the physical space and infrastructure that classrooms require, online tutorials only need internet connectivity.

This enables e-tutors to earn more than they would traditionally, while still charging lower than what students pay for face-toface classes.

Lalita Jain, studying for her math PhD at Jaipur University, supplements her varsity stipend by teaching school and college students online, from her apartment desk. “My elder sister also funded her studies by offering tuitions,” Jain said. “But she had to visit students’ homes, whereas I don’t.”

Poor broadband speeds and low internet penetration — only 10% of India accesses the web — still limit the reach of online tuitions. But internet access is improving and for students like Trivedi and Shah, etutorials already offer opportunities for a better future.

Charu Sudan Kasturi HT121216