Gone are the days when people used to hire a personal teacher. As the technology is gearing up, people are looking forward to indulge themselves more into online tutorials. The minimum requirement of any student is doubt clearance. If anyone is available anytime and anywhere, surely it will be a boon for students.
CourseKart – the Education from within
CourseKart is our attempt to build a scalable, secure, cloud-based platform that enables instructors to engage, interact and collaborate with their students for a richer, shared learning experience. The idea behind CourseKart is to take learning outside the classroom by building the next-generation content delivery platform that connects coaches and publishers with students and allows students to learn, evaluate and collaborate anytime, anywhere.
Vishal Chopra is a graduate of Wharton’s MBA program (2006) and Purdue M.S. (2000), he has extensive technology, operational and business strategy experience with Sun Microsystems and IBM. At CourseKart, he is responsible for overall direction setting, business development and sales.
A graduate of USC M.S. program and NIT-Surat, Janak has worked in a variety of engineering and management roles at Microsoft (Seattle). At CourseKart, he is responsible for driving overall technology design and implementation.
[pullquote align=”right”]CourseKart is currently bootstrapped through founder funds and initial revenue flows. We were revenue accretive day one, and are ramping up scale and footprint to raise first round of venture funds later this year. [/pullquote]CourseKart have more than 13,500 students across 50 cities in India and 5 test-prep verticals – including GATE, CA, Bank-PO, Law that are using CourseKart enabled platform to watch instructor videos, review lecture notes, give tests and analyse benchmarked scores and strong/weak areas to improve their performance. This excludes the lead generation plays that is generated for their clients using tools such as Free Online Tests and smart social feeds.
CourseKart Market Strategies and Future Plans
Coursekart interviewed over 100 instructors of different sizes and across different test-prep verticals to formulate initial Proof of Concept. Going in with a baseline hypothesis had made the process easier. This form of primary research coupled with frequent client validation interlocks during the initial development phase helped ensured the team came to market with a viable product that fulfills a known market need.
[pullquote]When asked whether enough innovation is produced, with so many ed-startups trying hard? They said that the burst of entrepreneurial activity around ed-tech has seeded innovative content and delivery models that will surely make an impact – only time will tell if it brings about meaningful and sustainable change in learning outcomes.[/pullquote] By designing a solution that works on all devices (Android, iOS, Web) from day one – they have already let the students break free to a richer, collaborative learning experience.
MOOC Platforms such as Coursera and EdX focus on taking learning from some of the best schools around the world to students worldwide. These efforts represent a truly revolutionary approach toward democratizing access to the best education anywhere, anytime. CourseKart have adopted a more evolutionary approach towards learning. They believe that in many cases – instructors nationwide who are passionately working with students in classrooms are great at what they do – understand, articulate and deliver learning concepts to their students in the best-way possible. But what they lack is the ability to complement their strengths with the “means” to connect with their students anywhere, anytime.
CourseKart’s greatest challenge has been in “enabling” the instructors to be digitally ready. While there is increasing awareness and willingness to try out online learning models as a supplement to traditional classroom approach, the ramp-up time to get them activated remain a challenge. All CourseKart want is to bring access to the best test-prep instruction to any student anytime, anywhere and in any size. Besides building the next set of collaborative learning features.
We are working on innovative delivery models to realize our mission – so stay tuned, we have an interesting page-turner in the works.
