Acquire new skills here just like shopping on eBay

BANGALORE, INDIA: Fancy a knowledge-sharing forum almost along the lines of a daily deals site that gives a lot of options to choose the best products you like?

Well, here it is. Based out of Mumbai and operating on the Web, an education and skill training start-up, Gyaanexchange.com, is an open Web-based video learning platform promising over 100 hours of crowdsourced, affordable, credible and high quality content in multiple disciplines, such as academia, professional development, technology, literature and mathematics, among other topics of interest.

And the best thing about it is, unlike online tutors, which employ mostly qualified professionals as teachers, any skilled individual proficient in anything under the Sun can be one and share what they know with others.

As for what spurred the initiative, Siddharth Bhansali, chief executive officer and co-founder of Gyaanexchange, says that the thought of current curricula at educational institutions in India are falling short in practical life skills was the motivation. "We thought that we needed learning opportunities that are relevant, convenient to access, affordable and available easily."

Basically, the platform that was launched in October 2011 and started offfering online classes from last month aims at offering a large repository of skills- and academic-based content by enabling anyone to contribute to the platform by crowdsourcing something like a video encyclopedia. At Gyaanexchange.com, videos can be uploaded to the platform in a simple manner, facilitating anyone to teach or learn from anywhere at moderate or no charge.

"There are no traditional teachers here, but people like you and me who share what skills they learnt. We also organize actual workshops, seminars and classes offline," says Bhansali, on what differentiates them from online tutors.

In order to ensure authenticity, Gyaanexchange verifies and checks all contents for quality, accuracy and credibility, besides extending support in creating and producing high-quality educational content. It, however, holds a view that not every subject can be taught online, but certain skills in the fields of professional development, technology and academics lend themselves beautifully to the online medium.

Freelance Journalism, SEO tutorials for beginners, Game theory, Mathematics are some of the video classes currently available on Gyaanexchange, which currently has both free and premium videos available on its video platform. The premium videos are priced from Rs.100 and are available in three different packages of one-month, three-month and six-month subscription periods.

Also, it encourages users to take videos from sites like YouTube, TED and Vimeo, and create an online class. Bhansali says, "We believe our video platform is the missing piece in making high-quality and relevant education accessible to millions around the country - by empowering anyone to teach and learn online, we are laying the foundation for disrupting our failing education system."

Besides facilitating training by others, it has its own content as well, which are either free or charged based on the category.