“The total market size for the multimedia content and ICT in schools sub-category is expected to reach US$ 600-700 million in the next 3-5 years” - Vikas Mujumdar, Surround School

Bringing teachers, students and learners together, Mumbai based entrepreneur Vikas Mujumdar is making learning easy and accessible for all. Swati Maheshwari catches up with entrepreneur Vikas, exclusively for YourStory.inVikas, what is the idea behind Surround School?

Surround School is a digital e-learning content aggregation platform with a concept map based visualization tool that allows teachers and subject matter experts to create online courses that harness the vast repositories of digital content both in the open source and commercial domain. Creating course outlines, or KnowledgeWheels as we call them, makes it easy for a learner to visualize the relationship between many concepts within a subject. KnowledgeWheels launch learning objects, which may include HTML, Text and PDF files, images, videos, presentations and podcasts. The learning objects can be sourced from open source content repositories such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare, etc

How many schools/teachers do you already have on board?

We launched the web version for individual users in January 2011, and currently we have over 2000 registered users. These users are a combination of teachers, school students and learners.

How many school students in India you think look up to internet for help with homework projects? And how Surround School is aiming to fulfill their needs?

Currently, according to our estimates, the number of students using the Internet for help with school work is a fraction of the total number of students in the country and restricted to the urban elite. This is due to three primary reasons: a) poor Internet connectivity, especially in schools b) limited awareness of what kind of e-learning content is available and how it can be used effectively and c) high cost of content subscription. The Surround School platform effectively addresses the last two concerns.

What are your thoughts on e-learning in India?

The Indian education market may be divided into two categories: Formal and Non-Formal. The Formal category is highly regulated and includes K-12 and advanced education institutions and constitutes 80% of the total market size by revenue. The Non-Formal category is currently unregulated and includes pre-schools, coaching classes, vocational training and multimedia content and ICT(Information & Communication Technology) in schools. Within the Non-Formal category, while the total revenues are far higher in all other sub-categories, the multimedia content and ICT in schools has the highest expected CAGR of 35-40% through the next 3-5 years while e-learning adoption picks up in tandem with internet penetration and the proliferation of 3G mobile internet. The total market size for the multimedia content and ICT in schools sub-category is expected to reach US$ 600-700 million in this period, including both products and services revenues. The Indian Market has been slow in adapting to E Learning and the expected annual growth rate on the Indian e-Learning Market is 20-25%.

E-learning is the way of future. However, in my opinion, it can never be a substitute for personal learning with brick and mortar schools and teachers. It should be used as a complementary system to either offer learning options to those who cannot attend school or provide learning content such as videos, animations or interactive simulations.What instigated you to start Surround School?

I was researching on aviation and aeromodelling. While I found well written, accurate material, it was in multiple versions. It took me at least a year of determined effort to gather sufficient information, which I compiled into a handbook that was shared with many young enthusiasts.That’s when I realized that while there is high quality e-learning content that could be found on the web, there are two things missing 1) a way of easily aggregating relevant content and 2) a way of defining a learning path to navigate through this content so that even a novice can learn effectively and quickly. The Surround School platform, at its core, provides a solution for these two pain points. The innovative and fun visualization tool, the social learning concept and the collaboration features, evolved along the way.

How much investment did you make to start Surround School? Was it self funded?

Since the time I started working on it about 12 months ago, I have invested about Rs 10,00,000 opportunity costs. It is still self-funded and I am able to keep costs low by working with a team of smart freelancers, ramping up or down as required.

What are your immediate expansion plans?

We want to partner with the best content providers across a wide range of subjects. In parallel, we are targeting schools and other academic institutions to sell this platform as a “white labeled” solution can be used for their private network of teachers and students. Our aim is to increase individual subscribers. We are also building a proprietary content mapping algorithm based on the industry standard SCORM content classification. This solution will be able to pull up the most suitable content for the subject needed, without any need for manual intervention.

Would you be integrating this medium with offline learning in someway?

Yes, we are planning to launch “Ask the Expert” feature wherein learners will be able to ask for clarifications and explanations from human subject experts.

Is there any direct competition for Surround School?

Surround School is often compared with a traditional Learning Management System, in which case there is a lot of competition from products such as Moodle in the open source space to Blackboard in the commercial space. However, unlike a typical LMS, Surround School is for the teacher and the learner than for the administrator. What this means is that there are fewer administrative features and this makes it easy for the teacher and the learner to focus on their core objective rather than spend time learning how to use a complex LMS. This also keeps the costs down. You do not have to pay for features you do not really need. There are a few non-LMS products that are similar to Surround School.

Please check out their website http://www.surroundschool.com And, share your thoughts on this story by writing to us at [email protected]