Dubai: An Arabic teacher based in the West Bank, a Spanish educator stationed in Laos, a mathematics instructor operating from Kolkata … all for a Grade 9 student who may be based in Singapore, Abu Dhabi or Manchester.
Welcome to the world of e-learning — the global classroom at your doorstep, sorry, fingertips — literally.
And for the next hour or so, as your child puts on that headphone and logs into his e-class through the internet phone app — to brush up differential calculus or for a better grasp of Macbeth Act V Scene V — you will be forgiven for wondering whether the good old brick-and-mortar classroom of yore is a thing of the past.
As online tutorials flourish — cutting across time zones and curricula — students as well as parents have every reason to feel empowered. Educators and entrepreneurs have joined hands all over the globe to turn the concept of home-tutoring on its head, offering customised private tutoring solutions to students right at the study desk at his or her home.
And for students based in the UAE, there is good news as Sammyo Halder and Karan Kumar, both Harvard Business School alumni, have come together to offer pupils here a cutting-edge option in e-learning with their vast repertoire of academic excellence and business acumen. Their initiative, eTutorHome, has already got around 100 students enrolled from the UAE, United Kingdom, United States, India and Singapore. While professor Tarun Khanna from Harvard Business School is the chief mentor for this endeavour, Dr Tayeb A. Kamali, former vice-chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE, is a board member at The Boston Initiative — the cradle for eTutorHome, selected among 15 business organisations globally by Harvard Business School as pioneers in innovation. Together they bring a rich resource pool of experience and pedagogical expertise right into the study rooms at households in UAE and beyond.
The idea of having an e-learning platform first struck Halder in 2012. “After very busy weekdays as a banker, my weekends would be completely taken up by running around for my sons’ private tuitions. That was when this idea of starting an e-learning service came up,” Halder, who quit his job as senior vice-president branch banking and offshore head at Citibank in Abu Dhabi, to be a part of this venture, told Gulf News. “Our operations started in Kolkata in 2012. Then we moved on to Boston in 2013, where we called it The Boston Initiative. Later, in 2014, we launched our UAE operations and called it eTutorHome,” Halder said.
For venture capitalist Karan, founder and CEO of Amalthea Capital, which operates out of Dubai International Financial Centre, the very idea of what he calls “bringing the classroom home” and the “excellent pedigree behind the project” were compelling reasons for a business tie-up.
“Just as most good businesses are born out of personal pain-points, so was ours. And the pain-point that all parents with growing kids share is availing of quality tutoring at an hour and place of their choice. The idea is to create a global platform that is agnostic to geography, region, location and education standard,” Karan told Gulf News.
Digitised communication and networking in education began in a big way around the mid-1980s when educational institutions began offering distance-learning courses through computer-based learning and training. In its initial stages, this module of disseminating knowledge or information was mostly aimed at mere transfer of knowledge. However, as time passed and technology became more user-friendly and affordable, the emphasis gradually shifted from knowledge transfer to a shared development of information — thereby sowing the seeds of the present-day e-learning avatar.
First, video conferencing, then open universities and, finally, proliferation of the world wide web have changed the way the world perceives the ‘classroom’.
For a technology and knowledge-intensive platform, cost is always a major factor. For Rajesh Nair, for instance, whose elder son, Dhruv, used to take online tuitions in Dubai, the price of the package was turning out to be a bit of a constraint. “My son’s fees were increased drastically for Grades 11 and 12, which had to be renegotiated.”
Commenting on the pragmatics of pricing, Karan said: “Because the platform is agnostic to region, the one area that we need to be very careful about is cost. We constantly try to make sure that the services offered are within the limits of affordability of an ordinary parent.”
Even as the allure of online tutoring grows, there are many students who feel that the classroom still has no alternative.
Ahiree Bhowmik, who has just completed her CBSE Grade XII from a Dubai school and will now be joining the Second Faculty of Medicine in Charles University, Prague, told Gulf News: “Studying in a classroom set-up is always preferred to an online module because, for me, it is important to see how the teacher reacts to a query. Secondly, studying in a classroom means you are studying with several others with whom you can share your questions, doubts etc.”
While physical proximity and the real feel of a classroom are areas that the online environment cannot yet match up to, there is no denying the fact that the customised modules of e-tutoring and their reach across multiple devices offer students an unparalleled advantage in terms of flexibility.
Keith Miller, father of James Miller, a grade X student at a British curriculum school in Dubai, said: “More than a classroom scenario, in e-tutoring, the scope for one-on-one interaction is quite intensive. That is why we preferred this mode.”
Or for that matter, take the instance of Vimal Venu Gopal, who will be joining the Vellore Institute of Technology in Chennai for his B-Tech in Electronics and Telecommunications. Until his B-Tech course starts, he needed something to keep himself gainfully engaged. This is where the online course he is doing with Udemy is coming in handy. “The C-Programming course with Udemy is quite helpful. I can access my classes from my mobile, laptop or tablet from anywhere I want.”
There are other benefits as well, of an online platform, as Karan points out: “In a conventional set-up, it is still very much a supply-side story where the instructors dictate terms, but in online learning, teachers can be replaced depending upon student-feedback.”
“When a child comes for enrolment, we have a one-on-one with the parent and the student to find out what the exact requirements are. The entire module can then be tailor-made to address specific areas of concern,” Sumana Halder, coordinator for an online learning service in UAE, told Gulf News.
While the time may not yet be ripe to spell doom for brick-and-mortar classrooms, for the tech-savvy generations, e-learning is certainly a viable complement, if not a potent alternative.
Time to plug in?
