Missing college? You can still learn

BANGALORE, INDIA: Learning is no more a boring business. You no longer have to go to your school or college to attend an important session. Simply listen to your teacher and clear your doubts, sitting in the comfort of your home or even while you are on the move. That too, in real time. All you need is a just PC and a connectivity.

A city-based start-up has come up with an e-learning platform that makes academics an interactive and thrilling activity. An education technology company, Elucido has developed a platform — Elucido Learning and Collaboration System (ELCS) — for synchronous teaching and learning, which enables the teacher and students interact and collaborate with each other in real time.

“ELCS is a unique platform. It enables real-time student, teacher and content-based interaction and collaboration,” explains Rajat Rakkhit, Elucido's chairman and CEO. “This platform also enables instant student assessment in geographically-distributed classrooms and among remote participants over the Internet,” he added.

The USP of this platform is that when a teacher writes something on the interactive white board, it magically appears on all the devices connected to the teaching console.

“We have something called a floating surface. It can be a PC, tablet, smartphone or an interactive white board. If the teacher writes something on the white board, it appears on the other floating surfaces connected to the teaching console, simultaneously,” Rakkhit continued.

Here, one doesn't go with the collaboration, but the collaboration walks with him.

ELCS provides a learning solution in a single classroom or across a combination of connected classrooms and other remote users with any devices. It also provides expert teaching access to more students by ensuring that a single teacher can teach students in multiple locations.

“It supports teacher to student, student to student and teacher to teacher interactivity and collaboration across remote classrooms and physical devices. It also allows annotation on live teaching content (videos, presentations and images etc) across all connected classrooms and devices in real-time. It allows recording and storage of annotated content as well,” he went on.

“If a student is unable to attend a class, he can can log in to his device from his home. The teachers can teach from any classroom across the network or by using a laptop from remote locations,” Rakkhit continued.

Elucido has tied up with a few educational institutions in the remote parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh to deploy the platform. “We are also in talks with some big universities in the country and hope to win a few hundreds of customers in the next few years,” Rakkhit added.

This e-learning company provides this software on a recurring payment model. “ELCS is offered to the customers in various business models, depending on their requirements. If the customer wants us to do the entire installation — both hardware and software — we will provide it. We are also offering ELCS on a one-time initial payment basis.” he said.

Rakkhit expects this product to revolutionize the education sector in India. “The biggest painpoint that I observe in our educational institutions is the inability to scale up. I am very confident that this solution will resolve this problem to a great extent,” he concluded.