corporate diary
“Higher Education Needs Scalable Solutions Like Cloud Computing” In conversation with Sarath Sura - Managing Director and Vijay Pasupulati, Executive Vice President, Winzest, Pragya Gupta talks on how eLearning in engineering domain has been expanding its wings with their plans and strategy for Indian market How do you see engineering education and management education evolving in India? How does Internet driven learning act as a pedagogic tool to enhance the learner’s motivation, knowledge assimilation and retention? Sarath Sura: Engineering and Management Education has seen a tremendous amount of growth since the opening up of the Indian economy in the early 90s. However, this mushrooming growth is bringing about a decline in the quality of education. This is very apparent especially in the large number of engineering colleges where they are facing many challenges including lack of adequate number of qualified faculty, lack of infrastructure and limited financial resources. This is leading to low employability among students where only 25 percent of the engineering graduates are employable as per the NASSCOM-McKinsey report. As demand for quality graduates will continue to grow significantly, the higher education system is also bound to grow rapidly. However, this future growth in capacity should come with innovative solutions where quality of education should not suffer. We foresee internet driven teaching-learning solutions playing a key role in the future of higher education. The reasons for their success would be their reach, efficiency, scalability and affordability. These solutions will also bring in a learner centric approach where the focus would be on enhancing learning outcomes. For example, a class of 60 engineering students would have a heterogeneous learning ability. The teaching pace in the classroom could be too fast for a weaker student and too slow for a smarter student. A teacher cannot alter the teaching pace in the classroom to address the needs for each student. In such a case, a digital learning solution can address the learning needs in a self-paced, non-threatening and convenient environment.
Sarath Sura Managing Director
Tell us about the genesis of the company in the e-learning domain?
Vijay Pasupulati Executive Vice President Winzest
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digitalLEARNING
november / 2011 www.digitallearning.in
Vijay Pasupulati: Winzest is a start-up company and like all start-ups we were looking to identify a market need and an appropriate solution to address that need. Also the solution needs to be differentiated, sustainable and scalable. In this process we identified the need for a solution that helps arrest the declining quality of higher education while supporting the required growth for capacity building. India has the largest school-going population in the world. This coupled with the objective to increase Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education is putting immense pressure to augment capacity in higher education. However, the challenge is to ensure quality with this growth. In this context we needed a solution that brings together academic depth, sound instructional design and good technology. This was the genesis of our e-learning product LearningWare. We also believe