Mangalore: Web portal links students to tutors

The Hindu

Mangalore, 23 June 2011: When Shumi, a school student in Bangalore, was looking for a coaching centre in Bangalore to help her study law, she went online. “But it was painstaking, looking through link after link. A website with information on coaching centres would have been a help,” she says.

 

 

Now, an online portal is available that is eyeing the requirements of people like Shumi.

 

Called ThinkVidya, the portal was launched a month ago to provide information about coaching centres, trainers, and tutors to school and college students. The portal banks on the idea that small training companies find it difficult to locate students while students find it difficult to get the right training centre, said Santosh Kevlani and Rakesh Kalra, portal’s co-founders.

 

Aimed at the learning needs for children, youth, and adults, the portal wants “to get learning seekers closer to learning providers,” they said. The portal has 12,000 trainers, tutors, and institutes on 600 subjects across 16 cities, said its co-founders Santosh Kevlani and Rakesh Kalra. It had 10,000 schools classified variously, including on the basis of the education boards they were affiliated to, and the medium of instruction they followed. It featured tutors and training for subjects ranging from learning Mathematics to dance classes for beginners.

 

Trainers and tutors do not need to pay the portal to appear on the portal. However, if tutors wish to get special features such as appearing at the head of the list of tutors on the portal, they should pay, said Mr. Kevlani. He said that the portal was based on advertisements and banners for revenue.

 

Young software professional Ankesh said the web portal was good for getting city-based information. “But the results are not that satisfying .” Hari, from Bangalore, said that the information was accurate at random sampling while the search criteria section was easy and user-friendly.

 

He said: “The alert facility, when admission starts, is a useful feature .”

 

The portal, say the co-founders, was different from a classifieds list as users could review the trainers and tutors and the portal provided a detailed profile and contact details of tutors. Future plans include allowing portal visitors to register for courses from within the portal and increasing the number of trainers and tutors. In the last one month, the portal added 2,000 trainers, he said. At present, the portal had an ongoing online rating of international schools in Bangalore.