E-learning Solutions: Challenges & Opportunities

Most of you will agree that we all get stuck at crossroads sometimes in our daily routine. It could be a situation of taking a simple decision where there are limited options or even a situation where we are provided with several options. It could be our career, family, education, sports or could be as simple as what to wear today!

Let us take the subject of education. There are several hundreds of young and bright students who pass out each year, armed with degrees. It is at this point they get stumped at this hypothetical crossroad on what to do next – whether to continue with higher studies or take up a professional course or to attempt getting into a job. Temptations are many while peer or parental pressures start to build up.

Many an opportunity is lost when bright students get sucked up by Corporates during campus hiring, thereby depriving them of an opportunity of higher education. BPO/Contact centres rope in youngsters who get lured by big money, which hitherto, they would not have laid their hands on. There could also be social demands for fresh graduates to get into jobs at an early age to either support their families or to repay loans taken by parents.

Traditionally in India, it is true that parents play a large part in influencing their wards on the next steps with or without competent knowledge or without checking the aspirations of their wards or perhaps even being over-cautious about their future, thereby resulting in unfavourable decisions.

There are instances where young aspirants have undertaken professional courses but end up choosing wrong careers, thereby leading to frustrations and causing levels of anxiety down the path.

In all of the above situations, it is very clear that there is a lack of professional counselling in both education and career sectors. According to a TOI article in May 2019, close to 93% of students in the age group of 14-21 years do not have access to counsellors in their educational premises.

More surprising is that these groups are aware of only a handful of career options whereas India boasts of 250+ such options. Likewise, it is yet to be seen how many skill evaluations or assessments of employees in organisations have helped in choosing or being realigned to right roles within the organisation.

This calls for strong government and/or private-public intervention in a large way if India’s youth need to progress and lead a contented life.

However, all is not lost. With the advent of wireless technology and mobile applications, online education or e-learning options seem to have come to the rescue. Educational or career enhancing options are abundantly available online and seem to have filled the gap in a big way.

This provides a great window of opportunity to youngsters and professionals alike to take up the most relevant course in order to help them in enhancing their careers or knowledge. There are several e-learning websites today which offer a variety of self-paced, anytime and anywhere courses at reasonable prices, which one can take advantage of. Many of them provide online counselling too in order to help the aspirants to pick and choose the right path.

Corporate L&D teams who wish to implement regular or specialised training programs for their employees can now just link up with one of the providers and set it up with minimal cost, time and effort. Further, they have an option to either introduce their own customised course by using the provider’s platform or pick from any course that the provider also offers.

Mock tests, exams, tuitions, certifications, study or reference material, user manuals, progress trackers, dashboards, live interaction via video/audio sessions, webinars, study groups, etc are the various facilities available through these channels.

The only disadvantage one can see from online courses is the lack of interaction with one another – be it the faculty or other students. The atmosphere of a classroom would be sorely missed though one would ‘virtually’ be in touch with each other.

In the words of the great children rights activist of USA, Marian Edelman, who once quoted “Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it”.

Vinod Gulvady is the Director of Operations at Fynamics Training Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
He specializes in making the Payroll processing an interesting activity rather than a complex task.
The solutions help in risk assessment, process controls, documentation, project management, payroll review, and implementation.
Mr. Gulvady, the HR Operations specialist has over 35 years of hands-on experience in managing India and APAC countries operations.