AESL Launches “Long-Term Courses through Aakash PrimeClass” for Students from Class VIII to XII and XII Pass

Aakash Educational Services Limited (AESL), the national leader in test preparation services, has launched “long-term courses for students” from Class VIII to Class XII and XII Pass through Aakash PrimeClass, a one-of-its kind Extended Classroom course delivered through New Age Satellite Technology. While one to two year Foundation courses will be offered for students from Class VIII to Class X, courses will also be conducted for one and two years for students from Class XI and XII and XII Pass who wish to become doctors and IITians.

Students can log in at www.primeclass.aakash.ac.in for more information.  Specific information on courses for JEE and NEET aspirants can also be seen at https://www.aakash.ac.in/prime-course-jee/and https://www.aakash.ac.in/prime-course-neet/

Giving prime importance to the safety of the students during this unprecedented time, sessions will be live streamed to the student’s home through YouTube. Aakash PrimeClass is a two-way interactive medium that will enable students preparing for Olympiads, JEE and NEET to study in a classroom environment while being in the safety of their home interacting with the Faculty@Aakash based in Delhi live on screen.

The program aims to impart an integrated learning experience to aspirants who are preparing for ‘Boards’ and competitive exams. The classes are delivered through a unique AV setup using a high-definition projection system and high-resolution classroom camera. AESL faculties also use smart assessment system, audio-video facilities, smart attendance system etc. to see, hear and talk to the students. They can see, listen and participate in a lecture while interact and raise queries to the faculty spontaneously as in a regular classroom set up.

Commenting on the launch of the long-term courses, Mr Aakash Chaudhry, Director and CEO of AESL, said, “During this challenging time, we want to ensure full cooperation to students preparing for JEE and NEET exams as well as Olympiads, irrespective of the geographical location. At Aakash PrimeClass, Innovative learning experience coupled with continuous testing and analysis will give students better insights and exposure to improve their academic performances. Our sessions will be interactive, allowing students to clear doubts, ask questions and be able to address their queries and concerns. We hope that students and educators will take advantage of this unique initiative.”

The Aakash PrimeClass courses will be delivered through the national network of AESL. The centres are VSAT-enabled and with the help of state-of-the-art studios & telecommunication facilities, they will channelize audio, video and data-enabled high-quality, faculty lectures to students.

Advantages of Aakash PrimeClass

* Aakash faculty is among the best in the country and have produced stellar results year-after-year

* The study material provided by AESL is acknowledged as the best among peers & is highly sought-after by discerning aspirants

* Web-based Text and Multimedia lessons are used to set the pace for upcoming topics along with PLA (Pre learning assessment)

* In-Class exercises are conducted to assess the learning of in-class teaching. It also enables Learning-Gap Analysis and Corrective action by student & faculty

* Post Class Assignments are provided for recall, revision as well as higher-order preparation

* A dedicated team is set up to resolve the doubts of students

* Planners are provided to inform and make visible class schedule, tests, and assignments

* All sessions conducted are recorded and are available in the students’ id which can be used for later review. Parents can also have a look at all the sessions

* Online review sessions are conducted to jointly review performance and plan accelerative or corrective steps

* Academic Help Desk for Query record and query tracking

* E-mail/SMS alerts are shared on events, changes, scores, assignment completion/ Incompletion, to parents and faculty

With Aakash PrimeClass available in their hometown, students from small towns will no longer need to shift to a bigger city for their preparation. They will get tutelage of the most experienced faculties of Delhi. Best in class content, tests, 24x7 doubt resolution and video archives will also be available. Plus it takes away the worries of parents about their child’s health, safety and security. 

Mentors Murthy, Nilekani, Premji To Help IISc Students become entrepreneurs

Learning from mentors who change the way you live and think is the chance of a lifetime. Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan did it in the past. Azim Premji, N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and C Ramadorai are doing it now. If you couldn’t spend time with greats of the past, how about taking lessons from legends of the present?

The IISc Alumni Association has come up with a cracker of an idea — it is setting up a ‘mentoring system’ in which great entrepreneurs (initially) will act as mentors or thinkers to students and research scholars, who wish to launch small firms or startups, or turn their research into technology and eventually take the entrepreneurial route in life.

The mentors will be from across the globe, including Bangalore, and will keep in touch with students identified and selected for mentoring.

The man behind the idea, Association president Dr K R Srinivasan, told TOI that “already a few top people” had agreed to be mentors. “They include people not associated with IISc but who can, and are, willing to make a contribution to IISc. They are people in the league of Narayana Murthy...”

Net connect

Srinivasan said a website will connect the mentor and student/ scholar in the first phase of interaction. “The website will have the mentor’s profile and expertise and the student’s request. A software will bring together the request and expertise to see if they match. If they do, then the mentor and student will get into live interaction. So interests of both have to match.”

The mentors will act as thinkers and shape the form and direction of a project that the student hopes to turn into a product or start-up company. “The mentors will take time out and be in personal touch with the student or mentee. They will make concrete suggestions, offer advice, show routes that could be taken. The system will be open to IISc and IIT students, initially. If it turns out positive and productive, it will be extended to engineering colleges too. We wish to leverage the strengths of alumni as well as non-alumni, who are genuinely interested in turning ideas into products of some sort,” Srinivasan said.

Infosys, Wipro and TCS are not just companies but stories of extraordinary entrepreneurship and creativity in an atmosphere of red tape, bureauracy, large-scale public lethargy and corruption. Some of the great space labs, like the ones at Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore, Mumbai and Sriharikota, were creative battles against dormant mindsets. IISc Alumni Association hopes to replicate some of these stories.

Timesofindia.com

Guruji to take on Google, Yahoo in the search engines space

Guruji.com, Indian’s Internet search engine, focused on providing better search results to the Indian consumers is eyeing to emerge among the ‘Top 3’ search engines by 2011. The search engine major is presently growing at 20-30 percent per month and is eyeing one million searches in the future.

According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), the search engine market in India is presently worth $50 million in 2007 and is expected to grow to $100-$200 in the next 5-6 years time. However, China is far ahead of India and has already touched the $100 million mark.

Anurag Dod, founder and CEO of Guruji says, “we want to emerge as a dominant player in the search engine space and for this we are leveraging on proprietary algorithms and content for the Indian consumers.”

Guruji.com was founded by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, two Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi graduates in 2006 by the backing of venture capitalists Sequoia Capital. “It is the first time that India is seeing a "desi" search engine,” he said.

As per the latest Commscope report, the English search engine market is dominated by basically by six players namely – Google, Yahoo, ASK, MSN, and Guruji among others. In fact, Aaidu.com, a search engine in Chinese and Daum and Naver are the dominant search players (Korea) and are more prominant than Yahoo, Google in these countries. So is Yandex in Russia. “We are now focusing on the Indian consumers and so have extensive searches on cricket, music, images, city focussed seaches like movie tickets,” says Dod.

Even though, we are catering to the English speaking market, still 80 percent of the traffic comes from India while the rest 20 percent is spread across US, Middle East, UK etc.Dod says Yahoo was initially a portal site and in December 2003, that bought Inktom followed by three more companies Overture, which has bought Alta vista followed by Fast. So Yahoo’s search engine is a combination of these three companies. MSN is mainly a portal site player and less of search engine, ASK acquired Teoma, while Google that has a 80 percent market share in the search engine space is the only pure search engine player.

We initially started with web search, city search in 2006 and moved to local laungages –Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam in 2007. Later on we added cricket and music that has a large customer base in India. So will be offering live match scores updates and historic cricket database that is good for data mining, says Dod.

. “We are looking at raising funds but are presently adequately funded and will sail through this global recession.” Guruji secured an investment of $7 million from Sequoia Capital that is the same venture capitalist firm that initially funded Google as well.

The company claims that they remain unaffected by this global recession. “Our organization the attrition level is 0 percent for the past two years and will grow from the present employee strenght of 63 to 100 over the next 1.5 years. Besides we have also opened an office in Mumbai.”

The salaries we offer is very competitive to any product design company like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Cisco and much above service companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys, Dod claims.

Earlier search engine companies like khoj.com focused on subscription based unlike Guruji that is focused on news, features, e-commerce, education, music, cricket, technology that are free.

Over the next few years, the company shall focus on entertainment, which is a big category besides music, images tickets by enhancing the capabilities. The company has invested majorly in the web crawlers software that was locally developed,” Dod adds.