With the new academic session for school students beginning in April, E-learning is vying for its space in the education market that is worth billions of dollars. In order to give real classroom experience, some of the companies are developing software to enable students to interact online with high quality teachers.The worldwide market for the online tutoring is estimated to be $12 billion. In the USA, online tutoring market is estimated to be about $4 billion and is growing at an estimated rate of 10 per cent a year.There are no authentic figures about digital education market in India. However, one can have rough estimates from the fact that India has 9.5 lakh schools and 220 million schools students. An average middle-class in India spends 35 per cent of its annual earnings on their children’s education and a large majority of children from the middle-and upper-classes takes tuition from class VI onward.“The idea is to provide complete after school support to a student who would otherwise have gone to private tuition classes. Virtual class rooms would save him commuting time,” said Atul Kulshrestha, chairman Extramarks.com.The company is set to launch state-of-the-art virtual classes by the end of this month. With more than 40 highly qualified and experienced teachers developing content, the company is offering complete education support to school students.“Success of any online education project depends on technology and quality of content. It should be ensured that when a student comes to website he should be able to use it easily. No compromise should be made on the quality of content,” says Kulshrestha on the formula for success.One of the reasons why e-learning is becoming popular in India is that it has allowed the freedom of studying anytime, anywhere in an interactive manner. Extramarks.com has created a unique service which gives access to easy to understand format of school curriculum backed by teacher help, self study modules and self tests to help the child study at his pace and in his own space. The student has round the year content support and virtual classes to fulfill the educational needs of a child.Extramarks.com has ambitious plans. “We will launch virtual classes in the UK in July and in the USA in September,” said Kulshrestha.
