BriSkGap, the online training platform - can it capitalize on the growing online education market?

The ability to broadcast information has been ever so simplified over the years with the advent of the internet. The internet, as a broadcasting medium, has far more reach than conventional technologies like television and radio. A course on the popular education site Soursera, can generate anywhere between 10 - 15 million worldwide views at any given time. Such a channel can truly overcome the limitations of brick and mortar educational systems and make top quality classes and lectures available to scores of people who wouldn't have had the chance to experience it.

A powerful channel such as this needs to be complimented with a powerful platform which would deliver content to be consumed by the masses and BriSkGap, is one such solution which aims to provide a virtual classroom environment for content creators, enterprises and educational institutions around the world. It is a technology platform which aims to enable a full fledged Learning Management System integrated with a Virtual Classroom and helps with Competency Management of trainees on the platform.

Better integration, better usability

Supratik Ghatak and Gurmeet Singh, the founders of a cloud solutions company, BlazeClan, had seen a common trend used by adopters of online education, which led to poor user experience and usability of the solution. Supratik says, " While working on an earlier idea we got exposed to a few opensource learning software and figured out that most organizations / academic institutes use a combination of applications for all their training needs. An internally hosted moodle environment, a third party virtual classroom solution, a different bespoke solution for classroom infrastructure management, all of this adds up to a poor user experience both from administration and users perspective. Total Cost of ownership for such solutions comes to be enormously high."

"This is where we thought that we can address this pain point by offering a holistic training solution offered as a SaaS with nearly zero capital expenditure, hence the idea for 'BriSkGap - Training Platform On Cloud' came into the offing . We are now extending it to create BriSkGap an India Centric Content marketplace ecosystem."

BriSkGap is currently being used by Organizations, NGOs and a prominent industry body in Pune. It also has the potential to help training providers to strengthen their digital learning offerings. It is a highly configurable, easy to integrate and eCommerce ready platform.

The product 

The focus of the product team has been to replicate every possible aspect of a real classroom into the virtual environment. Going by the features that BriSkGap has, it looks like they've been able to translate most of that focus into the product as well.

BriSkGap encompasses two sets of features. One set of features is to aid live training and includes White-Board, Desktop Sharing and Chat, while the other set of features aids users when a live class isn't in progress. These include Assessments, Reports and Competency Mapping. The product also has some specific features to learn software coding, such as an Online IDE which supports Multiple Programming Languages.

Our Take

One of the standout advantages that we see with BriSkGap is that it is a SaaS based product. This a) sorts out the problem of distribution and b) will work on any device as long as it supports a browser. With good, targeted marketing, this product will reach the people it is intended for.

Having said that, with enough solutions like BriSkGap in the market, the niche that they have chosen for themselves, isn't really a niche anymore. Online IDE's are available at a dime a dozen and very good ones at that. It would be interesting to know how many of BriSkGap's customers actually use it for its software education capabilities.

The good news is; the market is big enough for many players and with a focus of usability and user experience backed by some heavy weight features, 2013 might just be BriSkGap's year, within companies in its category.

Check out BriSkGap.