Twice a week Sandeep Kalra attends senior management programme classes conducted by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Calcutta. He interrupts his professor whenever he has a query, shares his notes with fellow students and actively participates in group discussions.

So what’s new?

Merely this — the 31-year-old Bharti Resources Ltd group manager is based in Delhi, his instructor sits in Calcutta and his classmates are scattered all over India.

Kalra is part of a revolution that is just about being born — the virtual education boom. If you can’t go to a school, the school will come to you. If you can’t join private tuition, the best of faculty will be available to you at the click of a button.

Education service providers are now ensuring that the classroom is available through several channels — your television set, the Internet or a centre in a remote location which links you to a prestigious institute. You no longer need a brick and mortar structure with a sprawling campus to acquire knowledge — new-age facilitators are out there to bridge the physical boundary between an educator and a student.

Last month, Greycells 18 Media, a joint venture between TV18 and education service company Educomp, formally launched Topper TV, a 24-hour channel for senior school students. The channel has on its board faculty from the Indian Institutes of Management and foreign universities.

“We want to provide students with a platform to revise, share notes and resolve queries sitting at home,” says Sunil Khanna, co-founder of the Noida-based Topper TV. The channel is currently available via Direct-to-Home or DTH (Tata Sky or Dish TV) television services for a yearly subscription of Rs 1,000 and has already got 40,000 students registered on its website.

Amity University in Delhi will soon launch Youth TV, which will cater to the educational and career-based needs of students. Anna University in Chennai too is planning a TV channel to aid distance education. Zee TV, after failing in an earlier attempt, is once again looking at launching a channel dedicated to education.

That’s not all. Tata Communications (formerly VSNL) wants to launch educational videos, among other things. Srinivasa Addepalli, senior vice-president, corporate strategy, Tata Communications, told The Telegraph, “We have kindergarten courses, rhymes. We can do an interactive maths lesson. TV gives us this but not when you want it, in the manner you want it. Why can’t a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, give lessons to students all over the world?” Addepalli says the Tata company is talking to some universities and has tied up with the Pune-based Tata Management Training Centre for this.

Everonn Systems India Ltd, a Chennai-based education and training company, has signed an agreement with IIM Indore for offering management programmes through VSAT technology. The courses are aimed at working executives as well as self-employed graduates and will be offered through Everonn’s education centres across India.

Others too are looking at launching virtual classrooms connected “live” to teachers in institutions. “We are redefining the classroom,” says Udai Singh, executive vice-president, NIIT Imperia, which has 22 centres across India and offers short-term management courses in association with the IIMs, the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, and Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi. Fees range between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh, depending on the nature and duration of the course.

NIIT Imperia’s Synchronous Learning Centres seek to bridge the gap between the real and the virtual world. “Good faculty is a scarce resource. So why can’t we have one professor talk to 10,000 students across India instead of 100 in the campus,” asks Singh, echoing Addepalli. Already, 1,000 students from NIIT Imperia have completed their course and another 1,800 are pursuing various programmes.

Clearly, companies have zeroed in on virtual education and regard it as a potential goldmine. According to brokerage firm CLSA Asia Pacific Markets, the e-learning market size in India is estimated to be worth Rs 105 crore and is projected to grow to Rs 1,092 crore in the next four years.

Innovative ways of teaching, clearly, will gain increasing student attention. “Because of Topper TV’s exam special episodes, I scored 99 per cent in maths in my Class X exams,” says Delhi student Karanjeet Singh.

Just how big the business is poised to become is reflected in the surging turnovers of education companies. Educomp Solutions, one of the biggest in the private education industry, reported a turnover of Rs 286 crore last year. This year, it projects a turnover of Rs 580 crore. “The informal way of learning is bound to grow at least by 10 times in the next three to four years,” says Rohit Kumar, president, Educomp.

NIIT Imperia too added 16 new centres last year and is rapidly expanding in smaller towns such as Jamshedpur, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar and Nagpur.

To be sure, the education business wasn’t always this exciting. When state-run Doordarshan made its foray into education in 2000, the concept was still new, and the format was ho hum. Zee Network’s educational channel, Zed TV, met with a lukewarm response too and shut shop within two years of its launch in 2000.

A lot has changed since then. According to research by Topper TV, parents, teachers and students feel the need for an educational channel that can break the monotony of classrooms. Technology has also come to the aid of education companies. For instance, Career Launcher uses technology that enables tutors to record a student’s progress.

So several online learning portals have moved into the virtual classrooms business, among them Extramarks.com, classroomteachers.com and Educomp. And Doordarshan now runs four educational channels. “We touch 8.5 million homes through web casting and DTH,” says V.K. Arora, director, electronic media, Indira Gandhi National Open University, which uploads the educational content for the state-owned broadcaster.

For all the hoopla, it will be a while before e-learning takes off. “The sector is still evolving as the physical presence of a teacher in a classroom is of great significance to a student,” says Anirudh Phadke, general manager (e-learning), Career Launcher India. “Technology can never replace teachers, just as Internet news portals have not replaced newspapers.”

Still, virtual learning offers a less threatening environment to shy students. All that they have to do is click on an icon and ask their questions.

Amidst all this, one thing’s clear — the classroom could take a backseat, though it won’t be out. “We have to keep pace with changes in learning and teaching. Things which we cannot otherwise easily demonstrate in class can be done on a virtual platform,” says Vibha Kumar, a science teacher at Queen’s Mary School, Delhi.

A popular advertisement on television sums it up. It shows a tutor giving English lessons to village kids through a mobile phone. As the ad-line goes: ‘What an idea, Sirji !’

Picture: Subhendu Chaki

Model: Sanjana