Online teaching classes beckon students in smaller cities

Akshay Acharya, a first-year BCom student from Hubballi, wanted to prepare for Common Proficiency Test (CPT), the first level of Chartered Accountancy (CA) examinations, after passing PUC II this year. But lack of good coaching institutes in his hometown proved a hurdle. "There are no good institutes here that offer such courses. Even the few that do were not recommended by my seniors due to their own bad experience,” he said. In such a situation, Acharya heard about an online test preparation platform, SuperProf, that offers the course, and enrolled for it more than a month ago. He wasn’t alone. His brother, who has studied BBA, enrolled for a course in Integrated Professional Competence Course (IPCC), the second level of CA examination. "There are some issues with the online course but I feel the teaching is 50 per cent better than that imparted by institutes around here,” said Acharya. A number of students and working professionals from tier-II and tier-III cities in Karnataka are increasingly enrolling into online courses instead of taking the traditional classroom approach, in order to prepare for entrances exams or increase their skills sets for a better job. Lack of good quality resources or teaching institutions in their cities, paucity of time or simply curiosity are fueling this interest. Take the case of Girish Gowda, a software engineer at Infosys in Mysuru. Realising that big data was the next frontier in his field, he decided to enrol for an online course in the subject from another online platform, Edureka, that offers learning in various courses such as data science, big data, cloud computing, to name a few. "The future will have huge amounts of data for computing and in order to handle this, traditional systems will not at all be useful. Since I am into software technology, I am keenly interested in new technology and want to know more,” said Gowda. Given his work, enrolling into a full-time course wasn’t an option for him. "There are just a few institutes that provide classroom training in cities like Hyderabad. So going the online way was my natural choice,” he said. The fact that such courses have been supplemented by mobile apps, interactive discussion boards and other online tools is an added factor for those enrolled into such programmes. "There is a large pool of untapped students in tier-II and tier-III cities which lack the right kind of platform. Our focus is to train and prepare them for government employment options,” said Anil Nagar, director and co-founder, Career Power, a test training platform for bank and government job entrance exams. Deccan Herald