iScholar Partners with Anand Kumar of Super30; Targets High Percentage Into IITs by 2017

iScholar, a start-up that provides online courses, has partnered with Anand Kumar of Super30 fame, in an effort to bring down costs of IIT-JEE entrance exam coaching by 90 per cent. Now the start up is hoping to get about 30 per cent of the students into various IITs in 2017 academic year.

Anand Kumar, who became well known in the media and academic circle is the brain behind Bihar-based Super30, which yearly selects 30 meritorious students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds aspiring to get into IITs.

“We know that students coached by Kumar have a 100 per cent success rate when it comes to IIT entrance. We want to replicate this for more students who are unable to afford coaching,” said Rajendra Prasad Nadella, Chief Managing Director, iScholar.

A typical IIT-JEE preparation course runs for a whole year and costs ₹80,000 to Rs 1 lakh and upwards. The annual fees for the iScholar courses works out to ₹6,000, which includes features such as access to content, computer-based training coaching in real-time and interaction with faculty.

Reports indicate that each year over 2.5 lakh students appear for IIT JEE entrance exams and about 1.5 lakh take the test but only 10,000 students or so get in while another 10,000 odd students opt for the Regional Engineering Colleges spread all over the country. What's interesting is that, 80 per cent of these students are from urban India . Now we attempt to get more students from the rural areas into these esteemed university, says Nadella.

For students who do not have access to internet, the start-up will provide downloadable courses. “The courseware will help more aspiring students to get into IIT,” said Kumar. iScholar students will get access to professors such as Aniruddh Sinha, Ravi Ahlawat, Kashish Mathur and Akhil Narayan.

Further, to avoid instances of course material being illegally shared, the start-up has encrypted the courseware, which can be accessed only through its learning management software.

The website has been created by professionals from top IT companies using C++, Java and open source platforms for live streaming and along with video tagging to enable to watch particular videos. The content can be accessed even on a 256 kbps dongle. "Today we have over 450 hours of video and since every one should get access to high quality education, we have developed it as a low-cost two way audio, video and interactive platform targeting the BPL families in India," adds Nadella.