The Learned Man | eLearning Blog

CEO Speak: Brainvisa & Hurix Systems

CIOL has of late been doing interviews with the CEO’s of Indian e-Learning companies. The Learned Man! has taken some important questions (from an industry context) from the first couple of these interviews (Brainvisa & Hurix Systems) and juxtaposed the responses of the CEO’s to make it easier for the reader to have a combined perspective.

Q: How big is the E – learning market and what is the share of the Indian players?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa): Globally the E – learning market is about 30 billion dollar, out of which India has a meager share of 150 million dollar.
Subrat Mohantry (Hurix): I can give a wide range; according to my guesstimate it could be anywhere between $200 million to a couple of billions annually, depending on how you define the market.

Q: What are your views on Brand India in the e-learning domain?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa): There is no big difference. The Indian companies are as competitive, creative, innovative and focused as their foreign counterparts. Right now India is shining and would continue to shine, as more and more work would flow in. Now it's a compulsion for the foreign players to come shake hand with us due our competitive and skilled workforce.
Subrat Mohantry (Hurix): Times have changed drastically, when I started off selling the e-learning concept abroad in 1996-97, the companies were a bit vary of our capabilities and unsure about outsourcing their work. The global success of Indian IT services has changed all that, clients across the globe associate positive things with India. We in the e-learning industry have also proven our worth in the international market, and now 'India' tag can be quite favorable during a sales pitch.

Q: What are the compelling reasons for clients to outsource their work to India?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa): In e –learning it is crucial to understand the culture and language of the target group for better designing of the course. Also it is very hard to find dedicated workforce in this field other than India. Though come eastern European countries are picking up the trade techniques but still India remains a strong contender.
Subrat Mohantry (Hurix): There are a couple of factors that can be termed as compelling, namely: quality, cost benefits, etc. Companies also look at India for project development, when a great deal of work needs to be accomplished in a short time frame. Finally, the expertise, India has a proven track record in the e-learning industry and has many highly qualified developers working in this space.

Q: What are the emerging trends in the e-learning space?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa):  Well, flash exhibits and facilitates to built a more focused solutions. Thus it remains the most favored with 95% of the market using it.
Subrat Mohantry (Hurix): Macromedia Flash is the platform of choice for the industry due to its rich user experience. Flash Lite for mobiles is going to open new vistas for learning. Some of the technology that is going to play an important role in the future is multi-role synchronous learning, like gaming or multiplayer interactive simulations. And the next frontier is obviously mobile handheld devices.

Q: What needs to be to promote e-learning in India?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa): It will take its own time in India. Budget needs to be allocated with increased bandwidth to facilitate faster connectivity. Everybody concerned needs to give it a serious thought.
Subrat Mohantry (Hurix): The industry currently lacks visibility, not too much is talked about this market. It is due to the fact that there are not many publicly listed companies or a corporate figurehead, who goes about talking for and about the industry and becomes the spokesperson for the industry. As most of the clients are based overseas and lot of companies spend their advertising money in the foreign market and not in domestic market. Previously getting business was a challenge; now getting the right people is a challenge. I am pushing for an industry forum, a place where members can share concerns and learning. The e-learning companies could have a forum under the NASSCOM (National Association of Software & Service Companies) umbrella.

Q: What are your views on opportunities in domestic market?

Supam Maheshwari (Brainvisa): There is potential but no one is bothered to use it. Someone needs to budget and plan it. There is no governmental initiative in this regard. The basic infrastructure for e- learning is lacking. In Singapore e – learning programme is used to train taxi drivers.
Subrat Mohanty (Hurix): It is a mind-boggling proposition. I get goose bumps when I think what technology can achieve in the Indian market, and it will happen in the years to come. The traditional learning method is not an option, as we do not have that kind of infrastructure, e-learning will democraticize education in India. Millions of people in India who have the right base are waiting for the enabling layer to make them efficient, and that can happen through technology based learning alone. We are in talk with different parties. Personally, I feel India requires someone to own this vision and drive it.

The full interviews in original form can be found here:
With Supam Maheshwari, CEO, Brainvisa
With Subrat Mohanty, CEO, Hurix

Instructional Design: The Crash Course

The Learned Man! Blog has found mention in the January 2005 issue of Training Mag.

The reference to The Learned Man! Blog is part of a sidebar in an article titled "Who Has Time To Design" by Holly Dolezalek. Titled "Instructional Design: A Crash Course" the sidebar covers handy resources that you could turn to "if you dont have the time to go back to graduate school before designing your next course..."

Click here to see a scan of the page and the other ID resources mentioned within.

"Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee": Clark Vs. Masie

Wow, I was trudging through Technorati and came up this gem of an exchange! Allow me to fill you in..

Sometime back I wrote about Donald Clark's review of Elliot Masie's Learning 2005 event. Donald reviewed this event in his inimitable style, adding his inimitable touches of humour, sarcasm, cynicism and what not to the review. Bloggers loved it, but I'm guessing Elliot Masie did not.

So when fellow blogger Clive Shepherd posted some stuff about Donald Clark, Elliot was on it in no time, leaving behind a bait for Donald in the form of a comment which went, "Hi.. Elliott Masie here. Interesting that Donald Clark's BLOG does not allow responses. So, I guess when he attacks someone, he really does not want interaction. I sense that his version of Blogsphere is Meanosphere..."

Clive then fanned the flames further by offering to pass that comment on to the Donald.  Finally Donald took the bait and came back to say, "..Happy to interact Elliot. You should have my email address, as I've paid for, and attended, your events in Florida for years..."

Priceless!

(The Learned Man! sincerely hopes that all is well now and that Donald and Elliot have kissed and made up!)

Business Blogging: The Two Sides Of The Coin

Trawling through the blogosphere, I came across a couple of great posts on business blogging. There are some great take aways in there.

Chris Wetherell of massless in his post titled, "Corporate blogs, written well." says "I've grown to enjoy the official Yahoo! Search Blog and the Ask Jeeves Blog. They update frequently, have substantive, well-written posts and each blog has a unique style and is engaging. That corporate voice whose tenor usually creeps into the-song-every-company-likes-to-sing is dampened and even absent at times. Often each product announcement or investigation highlights a personal story that allows excitement to be palpable but downplays self-aggrandizement and often exposes the author's voice. It's real (or seems real) and it makes each post fun to read.

The Google Blog hasn't caught up yet. It's a surprising mis-representation - the culture we work in is fast, decisive, and colloquial but the blog voice is stiff. It's your not-so-cool uncle unbuttoning his shirt, listening to The Postal Service (but only the single of Such Great Heights) and proclaiming that Yeah, I totally dig your stuff you kids, this hip-hop speaks to me too. Um. Dogg. *flashes hang ten sign*."

I tend to disagree just a little bit on the Google blog, I have really liked their "How I Got To Google" series where they take up interesting recruits and get them to share their stories / talk about how they got to Google.

Dan James who is the CEO of silverorange, in his "CEO Blues" has a post titled, "Companies Can't Blog" where he says, "Companies don’t blog, people do. This simple truth is why we have CEOBlues.com, AcstofVolition, DeltaTangoBravo, WorksinTheory, and Newrecruit instead of blog.silverorange.com. A company, no matter how large, is a collection of people. It is those people that are interesting, not the company. It is those people that are best suited to shape a site and its content. It is those people who are the best representation of a company."

What Dan is saying is that instead of having a multi-user blog like http://blog.company.com you get your people to have their own blogs and let their individual personalities shine through. That may work great for Dan but I think the other way around where you actually have a http://blog.company.com and get your bright minds to blog on this one site will work well too. Being involved in the e-Learning space my case in point would be the in-the-news Tata Interactive Systems Corporate Blog which is a multi-author blog and which seems to be shaping up quite nicely. Good selection of topics, well written posts and good use of pictures to bring out the culture and personality of this company. These are interesting times and let us see how both of these kinds of blogs shape up and evolve!

Conversation is the new kingdom, Trust & Community the new kings!

I have been thinking about community, context, content, conversation, building trust over the last couple of days and a foray into the blogosphere has thrown up some great conversations, discussions, posts on the same.

Let me start with Harold Jarche's post on the same. Harold believes and I tend to agree with him that if you were to be an eLearning company, you should be very interested in finding ways to connect people and address their learning and performance needs rather than be focussed on developing content, or selling learning objects.

He concludes that "..content is not king. Context may be important, but community is the new king (queen, ace, or whatever you prefer). The next ultimate learning solution may be the ability to link trusted experts with novices and help communities of practice to develop. Blogs may be a precursor, and the next technology to exploit this could be an eBay model that allows for apprenticeship in a virtual, caring environment."

Coming to Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine who says "Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom...In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution. The value is in relationships. The value is in trust..."

Jeff adds, "...But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want."

So finally if content is not king, conversation is the new kingdom and if trust and community are the new kings, then who are the players who will shape the tools we now use and bring newer, better integrated tools to our disposal. My bet is companies like Pune, India based Krawler Networks, and creator of Krawler [x]. According to their website..."Krawler [x] is a full-fledged tool to create, share, search and securely manage communities and content – stuff like Office Documents, Presentations, Help-files & Tutorials, Assignments, Project Data, Whitepapers etc. Krawler[x] lets you create your own personal secure social network right from your desktop.

Web-based Social Networks have been around for quite some time. Krawler[x] takes social networking to the next logical step. It lets you build on it. Krawler[x] provides an interface to find and interact with people who are part of a community, not necessarily bound by Geographic or Institutional boundaries. Krawler[x] lets you share your knowledge. Right from your desktop..."

Anand Lunia Joins Hurix

Anand Lunia, best known for co-founding Pune based e-Learning company Brainvisa, has joined Mumbai based e-Learning company Hurix Systems as EVP - Operations.

Why this news is bound to be viewed as significant within the Indian e-Learning context is that after Brainvisa, Anand moved on to Lionbridge (erstwhile Mentorix) as a Business Delivery Head. And from here, he is now back to the ultra competitive world of the Indian e-Learning Industry.

The Learned Man! would like to wish Mr. Lunia all the best in his new assignment.

Tata Interactive Buys Overseas Companies

Finally it has happened, Tata Interactive Systems has made its first overseas acquisition. And it seems to be a smart move to get into the European markets, overcome the language barriers and create entry barriers for other e-Learning companies by consolidating this market. The competition is about to get fiercer!

New Articles on Indian eLearning

Wow! My RSS Bandit has been burning up today! For the first time ever, I saw two Indian publications put out pieces on eLearning within hours of each other. Check them out:

India: e-Learning's Knight in Shining Armour by CIOL

The e-Learning Boom is Here by CXOtoday.com