Clearly Blue: Empowering Businesses to Market their Products

Clearly Blue
Padmaja Narsipur | Founder | Clearly Blue Digital

In today’s world, digital marketers are constantly competing for their target audience’s attention. Marketers are publishing more content than ever before in order to stand out. As a result, consumers are bombarded with content from a variety of sources, and they can’t possible read everything they’re interested in, even if they wanted to. This necessitates a rethinking of how marketing professionals approach the challenge of effective content marketing. How do you make your message stand out among all the numerous distractions your prospects face? What are the best forms for accomplishing this?

Clearly Blue is a good solution to this question. Clearly Blue is a Specialist Content & Design Studio. The company’s forte is superb content (be it written, visual or video), a great understanding of technology and the experience to make these work together to help your business grow. The talented team at Clearly Blue takes the time to understand your business, ideate on strategies that suit your goals and budget; and implement them rapidly. No matter how large or small your company is, crisp communication about your products and services is imperative.

This may take many shapes and forms – marketing communication for customers, prospects, stakeholders and the press, e-learning for workforce training, customer training, brand awareness or building; or technical documentation for your product’s developer community. Sometimes, your content may be your product! Clearly Blue can help you with all these requirements.

Read along to know more about Clearly Blue in the following interview.

 Kindly mention in detail about your company/institution.

Clearly Blue is a knowledge services and solutions firm working with healthcare, education and B2B technology companies. We have three verticals – learning, content marketing and design.

 Brief us about the featured person and his/her journey in the e-learning space.

Clearly Blue was founded by Padmaja Narsipur, who returned to India after working for Intel Corp. USA.  Previously a software engineer, she was trained in e-learning instructional design by SAP Germany. She has undertaken numerous content creation projects in the learning and marketing spaces for some of the biggest companies in the world before starting Clearly Blue.

Our vision is to sharply focus on delivering world-class content in the form of innovative e-learning courses. Clearly Blue is a full-services e-learning firm delivering technology and management courses incorporating the latest in learning and instructional design, graphics design, 2D animation and other forms of video creation, gamification and other frontier methodologies.

Clearly Blue has a social mission to support women professionals returning to work after a career break. Many of our instructional designers are engineers who’ve returned to work under this program.

What is the current scenario of the Indian e-learning market space?

While content has become commoditized, the imperative to learn, unlearn and re-learn has never been more important as it is today. All industries are getting digitally disrupted. Workforces must be made responsible, responsive and ready with 21st century skills to be productive contributors.

EdTech companies are focusing majorly on skill-building professionals with the latest tools and technologies. However, engagement and completion rates of e-learning courses are abysmal due to low interactivity and length of courseware.

The need of the hour is to engage learners with a combination of engaging content, lively communities, interaction gamification and storytelling.

 What is the current scenario of the global e-learning market space?

Globally, the pandemic has acted as a forcing function for employers as employees increasingly work from home. Increasing automation of several roles and tasks means that constant relearning is required – not in skills anymore, but to develop an interdisciplinary broad-based set of competencies that will help knowledge workers add value in any role. These twin forces are vaulting e-learning to the front and center of HR and L&D leaders’ strategies to keep their workforces sharp and ready.

How is technology complementing e-learning in the broader spectrum?

Technology-based learning has been around for over two decades. However, with immersive tech such as AR/VR and interactive tech such as gamification platforms, tech-based learning has become engaging. Aided by AI-driven learning management systems, educators are now able to offer personalized learning paths for learners based on their aptitudes and interests, and map those learning paths to what the industry is seeking. Recruiters can transparently assess learners on such platforms and recruit from the best and brightest.

 How has the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic influenced the global e-learning space?

As mentioned previously, the pandemic is a forcing function giving e-learning the exponential turbocharge that other industries have faced over the last two decades. We are in the beginning of this disruption – education as we know will change forever over the next decade.

What would be your strategic approach to scale your business in 2021 and beyond?

Clearly Blue is looking at providing holistic upskilling to modern-day workforces, beyond mere skills and certifications. The need of the day is to build T-shaped individuals who offer a sharp specialization along with broad communication and collaboration skills. We have a vision to help enterprises build such professionals who will bring tangible value addition to their employers.

 What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the e-learning space?

This is a very exciting space to be in currently. I would advise budding entrepreneurs to keep the learners at the front and centre and build disruptive solutions that will make learning immersive, engaging and fun.

Any other unique program by Clearly Blue?

We have launched SmarTEN, a mobile app to help 10th Standard students revise key concepts in just 20 minutes per day and ace the board exams. SmarTEN is being launched next month after a successful beta release.

Clearly Blue also has launched SmartStart, a mobile learning platform for professionals. We are starting a pilot with a major enterprise customer this month. We will announce details shortly.

Where do you envision yourself and your company to be in the long run and what are your future goals?

The vision to equip modern-day professionals has already been elaborated. Within 3-5 years we aim to bring this vision to anyone who wants to learn.

How is e-learning going to shape the education industry worldwide?

As Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis mentions in his keynote “The future is faster than you think”, we are entering an era of abundance from an era of scarcity – abundance in energy, data, information, and yes, in learning. E-learning is instrumental in democratizing education as we know it. This dramatic change has been brought about by cheaper devices (mobile phones, tablets), cheaper data, cheaper memory and the content creator economy.

As we step into the third decade of the 21st century, content creators are everywhere – in YouTube playlists, short WhatsApp videos, sending out Substack newsletters, opining on Twitter threads and posting visual content on Instagram. Content has been commoditized. So, one might almost sing the elegy for e-learning courses.

Yet, the need for a guiding hand has never been felt more by learners: for expert mentors, coaches and teachers who can help guide learners’ paths and be available for feedback, insights and clarifications. Man is a social animal – throwing a bunch of videos at him and asking him to ‘self-learn’ is a sure-shot recipe for disaster. Learners want a supportive community, they want constant engagement and they need feedback to learn, to thrive, to grow.

This leads me to make a ‘safe’ prediction: the days of gargantuan video-driven courses with multiple choice assessments are over. The future belongs to engaging, immersive, community-supported, cohort-based special purpose e-learning with all the bells and whistles. Collaborative mode? Check. Online games, competitions, puzzles and leaderboards? Check. Immersive AR/VR aided learning? Double check.

E-learning is here to stay, whether as a supportive addendum to bricks and mortar learning for schools and colleges, or in a pure digital avatar for busy professionals. It will mimic real-life more and more. Our grandchildren will look back at classroom-only cohorts as quaint anachronisms.

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