Virtual education gains force

For some time, satellite-based management education has come to the aid of senior managers who never went to a business school. The aid is becoming more focused now with a rise in the number of specific courses and that has led to a jump in enrolments.

The country's premier B-schools have joined hands with networking services companies like Hughes Communication India (HCIL), Reliance Communications and NIIT to offer executive management education programmes.

In an interactive distance learning classroom, live courses are delivered through the use of high quality video, audio and data tools from studios set up at the institutes reaching out to students in their cities. A one-year programme costs about Rs 2 lakh and a six-month programme about Rs 1 lakh. In many cases the parent companies bear 15 per cent of the programme's cost.

"These virtual classrooms might not be as good as a real class but are next best to it. Seeing the demand, we are planning to forge tie ups with schools in the Middle East too. We plan to include graduates too in these classes," says Partho Banerjee, HCIL's chief executive officer. HCIL, which controls 80 per cent of the IDL market in India, is looking at a 35 per cent growth year-on-year for the next five years. "The response from corporate India has been amazing," says Banerjee.

The company has seen a 100 per cent increase in enrolments in the last one year. In 2005, the number of working professionals enrolling for the programme stood at 1500 and in 2006, it went up to 3000 odd students. This year, HCIL expects to take the number up to 5,000 students.

Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIM-K) for instance, will offer four executive education programmes in finance, strategic management, marketing and operations management through interactive distance learning this year.

IIM Calcutta (IIM-C) too, which has been running a one-year executive programme in business management for seven years, plans to launch sector-specific programmes. "Our focus is to provide the senior working managers with a formal management education. There is a need to train them as per their flexibility and we are aiming at the same through these programmes," says Ranjan Das, a professor at IIM-C.

"In the last five years since we are conducting the programmes, number of enquiries and participants have gone up by 50 per cent. Enrolment will go up further when we plan to launch another batch for these programmes. We also plan to launch an executive MBA through this technology platform,'' says professor Keyoor Purani, Chairperson, IDL, IIM-K.

Around 40 per cent of the executive class at IIM-K belongs to the IT and ITES companies like Yahoo, Google, Infosys Technologies, Wipro, Hewlet Packard and Microsoft. Senior executives from MRF, L&T, Kingfisher et al form the rest of the class.

HCIL so far tied up with around nine B-school and two technology institutes including Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, Bangalore, Indore and Calcutta, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Xavier Institute of Labour Relations, Mudra Institute of Communication and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

The company is also exploring tie-ups with international B-schools that are interested in providing executive education programmes to the Indian corporates. HCIL has already launched programmes with Cornell University and the University of Phoenix.