Mettl rebrands B2C offering to Tutrr and will introduce online proctoring
Mettl, an online assessment platform, which currently services Wipro, the Times Group and Cleartrip among others, helps you measure and analyze prospective employee skills and improve that of current employees. They host, conduct and manage assessments for their clients world over. (Check out our earlier interview with co-founder Ketan Kapoor about this billion dollar opportunity)
Backed by Kalaari, The company is now in major expansion mode and has new developments. Their online B2C offering which was earlier known as Math.Mettl has rebranded to Tutrr.
The online math tutor
Tutrr.com, is an online platform which enables students from grade VI to grade X in CBSE and ICSE curriculum to practice math online. Speaking of the product, co-founder Tonmoy Singhal says, “the idea was to develop a formative platform of assessment which will help students gauge where they stand and learn from it.” Math, as Tonmoy says, is learnt experientially, with practice, and all existing online platforms show you the right technique to solve a problem but practice still remains an offline exercise.
We got a guided tour of the website to see how it works.
Besides practice, the site allows you to get your answers assessed at every step of problem solving, which is a big plus since that would allow students to access where exactly they go wrong, as they move ahead. Another interesting feature of the assessment is, instead of telling the students exactly how to solve the problem, the site chooses to only guide them in the right direction. The site, in that sense, is like having a virtual personal teacher.
Speaking of the dynamism of the product, Tonmoy says “it’s an algorithmic product and recognizes various ways of solving a problem, which is essential in a subject like math.”
The content in the virtual textbooks are so far being developed by Mettl’s in-house team but the company is in talks with some publishers to make popularly used textbooks available on their platform.
Currently, the site is free for use and the company is focussed completely on gaining maximum traction. The team says they are discussing various methods of monetizing the site, including making the content partly paid, but that will come at a later date.
The online proctor
The other announcement in pipeline from Mettl is, introduction of a new technology through which online assessments can be remotely proctored, giving you a valid, fair and ethical result for these assessments.
The online proctor works in a three step process. It prevent candidates from navigating away from the test window and blocks controls such as “copy-paste" and "print-screen", it capture live images through the web camera, besides allowing only registered candidates through verified test-registration fields.
Tonmoy believes this new technology is likely to completely disrupt the way assessments happen. Speaking in favour of online proctoring, Tonmoy says, ‘not only does it save time and administrative costs, it is also more foolproof than physical proctoring’.
This product is currently available to only a few existing customers, but they are talking to a whole lot of educational institutions (in India and abroad) to make it available for any online tests/courses.
The introduction of the two new products tells us that the company clearly sees a huge potential for growth in the online education space. Online proctoring, for instance, becomes increasingly relevant with the growing number of online courses where the biggest challenge is to manage certification.