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October - 2014 - issue > Startup of the Year - eLearning

Navitus Education: Equipping Education with the Power of eLearning

Nandini Mukherjee
Friday, November 21, 2014
Nandini Mukherjee

The meteoric rise of online education has forced educational institutions to try different innovative approaches. Flipped Classroom which blends conventional classroom learning with eLearning is on its way to become a reality. Corporates too are jumping into this foray and using it to improve the effectiveness and reach of their learning and development initiatives while reducing the training costs dramatically.

While working with India banking and life insurance industry, Vinayak P. Khadye saw the time and effort it took to train employees and distributors to get them productive. On reflection, he understood that this was a major challenge for other Indian companies across the industries as well which had to deal with skills development, improving productivity while dealing with high churn rate necessitating recurring training resulting in high cost. He sensed the opportunity eLearning presented and decided to jump right into it along with other co-founders who brought expertise in eLearning & Operations - Priya Seth, Rohit Sankhe and Shankar Khadye. This led to the formation of Navitus in late 2012."By leveraging IT, we at Navitus have developed innovative & path-breaking eLearning solutions that are fit for purpose and easy to implement & deploy," says Vinayak, Executive Director, Navitus Education.

Vinayak recounts how finding employees willing to join a startup was challenging for them and with time, became easy. "At present, we face difficulties to find the right skilled candidates for the team from technical as well as work culture perspective. We also have to worry about other companies poaching our trained employees just as they begin to be productive," he further adds. Despite all the hurdles, Navitus success is evident from their client list. "Initially, we got clients through referral and word-of-mouth publicity. We got referred to our first client, a training institution, through a referral," says Vinayak. The client, involved in providing HR Consulting & Learning & Development solutions was trying to figure out a good way to fill the need for mass delivery of a compliance course on 'Prevention of Sexual Harassment' in the workplace."One of our internal teams was working on an interactive course on project management certification and when we showed our work to them, their CEO was quickly on board. We developed the course with client's domain expertise". Similarly, Navitus got referred to a marquee client in travel industry and have successfully developed an orientation course for them. The client roster now includes clients in banking, insurance, and financial services industries.

The Value Added Services

In most cases, the early adopters of eLearning have invested huge amount of money in Learning Management System without thinking about the content. This has led to disappointing results and led to shocking failure eLearning initiatives. Navitus' solutions provide an opportunity to corporates to link their investments & expenditure to actual usage of the systems. Navitus offers eLearning Program Management Service, where organizations can practically outsource their Learning & Development initiatives in terms of system and content development. The company also offers Learning Management System (Navitus LMS) for corporates and education institutions which provide a robust, scalable and secure platform to distribute & deliver content online either to their students or employees or partners. The same LMS is being used to power iAthena.com, an online portal to enable mentors to host and deliver their educational content with little effort. The eLearning Content Development service of Navitus enables transitioning of traditional content to online medium.

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