Some Really Exciting Services in Education

As the technology advances, it also finds its way in different sectors. Education is not an exception. Information and communication technology is increasingly used in better delivery of the educational services. New ideas have come up that can aid or replace the traditional forms of delivery of education services. This blog post aims at providing a list of some really exciting ventures using information technology (IT) in the field of education.

 1. ThinkVidya.com

This website aims at providing solution to a problem that a lot of us have faced at some point in time. The problem is related to students’ (and their parents') difficulty in finding a right trainer/tutor or an institute to meet their educational needs. Sometimes, students are not able to find a tutor/trainer at all. On other occasions, there is so much confusion in a student’s mind that he/she often ends up making a bad selection thereby regretting in future. ThinkVidya serves this basic student need in following ways:

• It provides a strong network of 20,000+ qualified tutors and trainers offering services in different educational fields
• Students and parents can post their specific learning need mentioning the subject, preferred location and timing, etc. Then they receive applications from tutors and trainers in the ThinkVidya network along with their detailed profile. The students and parents can then review the profiles and make a selection that best suits their needs.
• ThinkVidya also provides a forum where parents can follow their schools of interest. They can read and share reviews/information about schools. Parents can also receive admission alerts for the schools of their interest. This way parents can make informed decisions about their children’s admission.

Not surprisingly, this website is getting popular day by day. On an average, it receives about 17,000 page views per day.

2. EduKart.com

This is one website that aims at completely replacing the traditional modes of education delivery. The website focuses on online delivery of various courses including MBA, undergraduate courses, post graduate courses, programming languages, project management, career enhancement, etc.  More interesting is the way the website is structured. All the courses are shown in a way as if someone is buying an item online on a website like amazon.com. The user needs to add a course of his interest in a shopping cart and pay for it. The online education delivery starts once the user has made the payment. This reflects a drastic change as to how education is perceived with the advancements in IT. I would say that this website is trying a transformational change by projecting education as a product instead of a service.

Though, the jury is still out on the quality and success of this delivery model, it nevertheless makes an interesting topic to analyze.

Finally, this is not an end to the list. I would like to write about other interesting ventures in my next post. Stay tuned for the same.