Excerpted from Forbes: “Lesson Plans: Educomp is cashing in by bringing computers to the classroom”, September 29, 2008
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India is pouring billions more into education each year in a rush to feed its booming economy with well-prepared workers. That spells big opportunities for education businesses … that provide computer-aided lessons in schools. They’re using technology to make education more available–and more interesting–to students across the country. But the company doing the best in this market is Educomp Solutions.
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Educomp’s main business is developing and licensing digital lessons, which are uploaded onto servers provided to schools. It also trains teachers (75,000 just in the last quarter), provides vocational training to students with courses such as accounting and marketing, and offers online and in-person tutoring. “We are all about how the education sector can use information technology,” says Shantanu Prakash, the company’s 43-year-old founder and managing director.
In 2005 it began opening private schools with not-for-profit educational trusts, providing the computers, the digital lessons, the books and sometimes the land and building. It aims to start 150 schools in all over the next three years.
Educomp’s big money-maker is Smart Class, a range of interactive digital lessons with animation and graphics that’s marketed mainly to private schools because they have deeper pockets than public schools.
The multimedia lessons–it offers 16,000 so far–are based on the different curricula in place across the country and use 12 of the country’s languages. Lessons feature video images that students can rotate to see from different angles, explaining hard-to-visualize concepts such as the splitting of an atom or the structure of human DNA. Educomp has 400 people developing lessons at three sites, in the New Delhi suburbs of Noida and Gurgaon and in Bangalore.
At one of the private schools it helps run, the PSBB Millennium School in Chennai, seventh-grader Shreya Sreekumar peers into her laptop on a recent morning as her teacher walks her and her 38 classmates through a lesson on the human respiratory system. As they study brightly colored pictures of a larynx and lungs, a potentially dull biology class suddenly becomes much more engaging. “It’s a fun way of learning,” she says. Once the class is done, the teacher sends the homework assignment wirelessly to each student’s laptop.
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Educomp is expanding abroad. It entered the U.S. market last November by picking up a 51% stake–for $24.5 million–in an e-learning company called Learning.com, which reaches 2.5 million students in more than 2,000 school districts across the U.S.
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By the Numbers Education in India
$40 bil Size of the private education market.
$68 bil Projected size of the private education market by 2012.
8.9% Share of a middle-class Indian’s monthly budget spent on education.
Source: CLSA.
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Full article;
http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0929/047.html?partner=alerts
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