The concept of education has taken a new dimension with the advent of online tutoring. Today kids, youth and adults want to get information on a click, instead of taking the pain of going to a library or referring plump books.
Bangalore based TutorVista caters to this segment. TutorVista is being used in schools for supplemental education. It offers both in-school and after school coaching to students on one-on-one or one-to-many format using online collaborative tools. Corporate training can be made more interactive and interesting with TutorVista.
“We have a driving mission, which is to provide world-class tutoring and high-quality content to students and professionals around the world. They use our comprehensive and thorough lessons and question bank to master any subject and have access to a live tutor around the clock,” said K. Ganesh, founder and CEO, TutorVista.com.
The technical challenges
Enabling a tutoring session between a tutor and a student throws up its own technological challenges, since both the tutor and student are in different geographic locations. Various issues like enabling the student to come online, pay, register and schedule their training session and also ensuring that the student is satisfied with the session, need to be looked into.
Hence, TutorVista required an infrastructure that could scale to millions of students and 1000s of tutors 24/7, 365 days and enable the tutor-student to collaborate in a secure and safe technical environment.
WebEx to be replaced by TutorVistaNow
The online portal runs completely on open source platform – LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP, built in-house. “We decided to build our own application because of a lack of off-the-shelf application available in the commercial as well as the open source market. There are some good course management softwares available but they don’t cut the ice for providing one-on-one online tutoring or homework help,” said Ravi Kannan, CTO and co-founder, TutorVista.com.
Currently, TutorVista is using WebEx as the tutoring platform. “We were the first people to use WebEx in a home environment where we had K-12 students using the tool for one-on-one tutoring. For the scale, size and the market segment we are targeting, we feel WebEx will not be adequate as we grow, so we have started working on our own tutoring tool called TutorVistaNow."
“The challenges our user base has with respect to WebEx software download and technical issues related to it, users’ expectation of a faster response time, and our desire to have complete control over the session motivated us to build our own tool named TutorVistaNow which is on trial now. Having our own tool also gives us the flexibility to integrate tightly with our portal to enable a seamless TutorVista tutoring experience to our student base. TutorVistaNow has been designed to scale and allow us to conduct 1000s of simultaneous tutoring sessions,” added Kannan.
Interactive models
TutorVista plans to launch its services next in Australia and Canada. Apart from that, there are plans of adopting different models in India including content, content + technology or click and brick models. TutorVista would also look into corporate training with more interactive models.
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