Virtual classrooms

e-learning costs one-third of a conventional classroom.

Indian companies are busy taking lessons from the $21 billion global e-learning industry. While some have already gone past the preparatory stage, others are all set to catch a piece of the action.

Infosys, which employs about 66,000 employees located across 36 centres worldwide, uses e-learning extensively to provide corporate training to its employees.

About 30-35 per cent of the learning in Wipro happens through e-learning. 24/7 Customer, a BPO firm operating from half a dozen centres across the country aggressively uses e-learning solutions to train its employees.

As Indian firms are busy in spreading their footprints within the country as well as globally, the e-learning industry in the country is all set to spread its wings among different segments of businesses. "Companies in rapidly growing countries like India are adapting to e-learning primarily because they are recruiting people in large numbers. Training programmes have to be held several times in a month and can't be done only once on a centralised basis," said Rama Kumar, CEO and MD of Bangalore-based Tarang Software, a provider of e-learning solutions and courseware.

E-learning is a web-based training using techniques like animations, visualisations and using a lot of creativity in building training programmes. This helps the people to get trained at their own place based on their own convenient time when they are free from their day-to-day work.

According to industry estimates, since e-learning provides a higher level of interactivity and personalisation for each of the trainees, the retention of knowledge after the training programme is about 25 per cent higher for e-learning as compared to a classroom-based training. Besides, the web-based training programmes also help enterprises to train their employees any number of times.

The shift from class-room based training to e-learning is mainly gaining acceptance among those companies that have a sizeable number of global workforce. It needs lot of resources and effort to bring all of them to a centralised location for training. Says M P Ravindra, senior vice president and Head, Education & Research, Infosys Technologies, "Infosys is a geographically distributed company with employees located in various locations in India and overseas. E-learning allows us a structured content deployment process besides making it simple for the Education & Research department to provide the latest and up-to-date training to employees."

In India, the e-learning market is still at a nascent stage although many companies like NIIT, Tata Interactive, Sify and Tarang Software have been specialising in providing e-learning solutions and courseware designed for different industries.

NIIT, one of the early entrants to the field today, has a team of over 1,600 corporate solutions team, which is catering to the needs of a whole of lot of companies across the world. "The growth in the e-learning space is not only coming from the West, but in India too, NIIT has been delivering learning solutions to a large number of private and government organizations, including ICICI Bank, MSource, the external affairs ministry, the Rajasthan Government, Reliance, State Bank of India and Wipro," says Ashish Basu, president, Knowledge Solutions Business, NIIT.

The Nasdaq-listed Sify, which provides learning solutions to more than 20 large organizations, including GE, Microsoft, Cisco and UNDP worldwide, says that the Indian market for e-learning is widening up now. "We have already seeing tremendous increase in domestic opportunities for corporate e-learning services. There is a high-level of awareness among Indian corporations on the benefits of e-learning, and I would think the pace of adoption is clearly accelerating," says V M Kumar, senior vice-president, E-learning and IMS, Sify Ltd. Sify entered the e-learning space in 2001.

E-learning promises a good return on investment to the companies. Usually, there is a 30 per cent saving from an e-learning programme over the conventional classroom-based learning. However, the cost benefit becomes more prominent when the volume is high.

"You derive significant cost benefits through e-learning with scale. You invest once and can use it again and again. Since we have large volumes, e-learning offers high savings over classroom programmes which are expensive," says Selvan D, senior vice president, talent transformation, Wipro Technologies.