Navitus Education: Equipping Education with the Power of eLearning Date:   Friday , November 21, 2014 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. The Silver Lining Navitus constantly strives to spot developments in IT and apply them to develop innovative & path-breaking eLearning solutions that are fit for purpose and easy to implement & deploy. \"We surveyed the online education landscape to understand what types of content were being offered, the levels of interactivity, LMS platforms being used as well as the new concepts being tried such as MOOC. We also tried to understand why certain concepts and tools did not gain wider acceptance and failed to live up to their expectations. Based on our research, we came up with specific offerings for content as well as the software tools,\" explains Vinayak. Interactive Learning is another aspect that provides Navitus an edge over other competitors. Navitus offers quality courses in limited domain areas but with high level of interactivity. The courses create highly interactive courses which constantly keep the student engaged in the course material. Journey of a Thousand Miles Vinayak explains how Navitus keeps a casual work environment, but also have a process for regular feedback and constant performance improvement. In the near future, Navitus aims to develop offer courses in the areas of Information Security, Business Analysis, Networking as well as Banking and Finance at iAthena.com. \"A newer version of our LMS will be available by the end of this year. We plan to upgrade our existing LMS clients to this new version for free and offer it at a discount to our early adopter clients before marketing it to others,\" concludes Vinayak. Offices Mumbai (Vile-Parle & Andheri) Key Management Vinayak P. Khadye, Executive Director With more than 18 years of experience in Life Insurance, Financial Services, Retail & Consulting industries, Vinayak has also won several prestigious awards from CIO Magazine, CMO Asia and Celent Model Insurer Award. At Navitus, he is responsible for Business Development and Sales. Priya Seth, Executive Director Priya has 10+ years of experience in e-learning, Business Analysis, Consulting, Process Management and Project. She is responsible for developing a mature and comprehensive mentor and content base for iAthena.com. Rohit Sankhe, Director Rohit has over 10 years of experience in system design, architecture and implementation large scale IT projects with marquee enterprise clients. He is responsible for the architecture, planning and development of Navitus LMS System. Shankar Khadye, Director Shankar brings versatile skill sets ranging from technology, product management, finance to corporate strategy and restructuring. At Navitus, Shankar is responsible for strategy and finances. Services: Learning & Development and Education Solutions, Technology and Consulting among others. Clients Clients in Banking, Insurance, Finance, Travel & Tourism and Training Institutions.