What is the vision behind lunching the online teacher '24x7 guru'?

24X7guru aims to delink the memorising factor, which is a major reason for increasing stress levels in kids, and consequently in their parents. The kids mug the information to retrieve it during a three hours examination. If the retrieval button works, they succeed, and if it doesn't, they fail. How can we pass and fail a kid on the basis of a three hours test? So Bodhtree and Unified Council jointly lunched 24X7guru.com, the online diagnostic and self-assessment tool, which assists students to study efficiently and evaluate their own progress in real time. The aim is to make the students from class 3 to class 10 secure better grades with this self assessment tool in subjects like Mathematics and Science.

Its purely an assessment process, for which no supplementary education material like CDs or DVDs are provided, rather the efforts made by the schools, teachers, and parents are being complemented. The basic idea of the portal is to facilitate assessment of skills like reasoning, analytical, application, logical, etc.

Currently, we are following nationally recognised syllabi like CBSE and NCERT. However, we are planning to cover all the major Boards followed in India including all State Boards.

How and what kind of need analysis surveys did you undertake for this project?

24x7guru is a well planned initiative based on sufficient market analysis. The venture is backed with one of our educational assessment companies- Unified Council that conducts National- level Science talent examinations every year. This is the only company that has got ISO Certification on assessment platform.

Our market surveys have found that a person earning INR10000 per month is spending INR 2000 per kid per month apart from school expenses. The whole 24x7 package costs just INR1200 for 5 subjects for whole year.

Examinations follow a pattern which is different from your assessments, do you think of voicing for a change in the examination pattern?

NCERT has recently suggested that schools have no business to pass or fail a student, they need just to assess them. We believe the whole education system has become obsolete; replace it with one that is based on thorough skill assessment. Students who perform well in their primary or secondary examinations have been observed to perform badly when they appear the senior secondary examination. It doesn't work in subjects like Science and Math. We deal with these subjects, both of which does not require a subjective pattern in order to assess the understanding and skill level of a student instead of mugging.

What are the other initiatives that 24x7guru is taking up to promote primary and secondary education?

We have lunched 'Destination NASA Knowledge Challenge competition 2008' for school kids of class 6 to 10. It is a nationwide knowledge assessment programme that will discover meritorious students based on 24x7guru's assessment application.

At present we provide content for the entire Active Learning, a quiz based educational service provided by TATA Sky, covering Mathematics, General Knowledge and Science for children in the age group of 7-11 years and reaching 1.25 million homes. We have also entered into partnership with Tata Indicom, Aditya Birla group, HCL, and YOU Telecom with over 2 million customers, etc. Reliance web world is also interested to provide 8 hours of free broadband access to 24x7guru subscribers.

URL: http://www.digitallearning.in/interview/interview-details.asp?interviewid=287