Seeking to offer personalised and one-to-one online tutorial lessons to school students, a group of four childhood friends and IIT alumni have come up with Vedantu (www.vedantu.com), a live online tutoring platform.
Vedantu, a Bengaluru-based online educational start-up, is a first-of-its kind portal which enables students to browse through a list of teachers and choose accordingly, based on their ratings and reviews.
“The quintessential pillar of establishing Vedantu is offering personalised teaching sessions to students, which cannot be achieved in classroom tutorial classes where one teacher teaches a group of students at the same time. When a student logs into a teaching session at Vedantu, he/she gets the undivided attention of a teacher who teaches the student based on his/her requirement. Students simply need to log in at Vedantu, choose the category of class, go through the list of teachers available and start a live one-to-one class. The teaching sessions are recorded, enabling students to revise the concepts any time after the session,” says Vamsi Krishna, co-founder and CEO.
The team also has co-founders Saurabh Saxena, Pulkit Jain and Anand Prakash on board. Currently, monthly tutorial sessions are available for science and mathematics for students of classes VI to X of the CBSE and ICSE boards. Doubt clearing sessions are available for science and mathematics for CBSE and ISC students in classes XI and XII. Plans are on to expand the ambit of classes and subjects in the next 10-12 months, says Krishna. Classes will also be offered to students looking to prepare for competitive examinations.
Students are given full freedom to choose their teacher as per their convenient time. They can select any teacher irrespective of their geographical location, from the comfort of their home and take a personalised tutorial class. Teachers are selected after a rigorous selection procedure and have to maintain a particular cumulative score to stay listed as a teacher.
“In order to get selected as a teacher, one needs to go through our online tests. Besides requiring a cumulative score of four out of five at the time of selection, teachers are rated and reviewed by the students after each session. If any teacher’s rating falls below 3.5 out of five, he/she is taken off the list. Besides this, we conduct reviews of teaching sessions and give feedback accordingly to the teachers, helping them improve,” says Krishna. While the project seems to be as a major convenience to students, teachers, too, stand to gain, says Krishna. People from other professions and home makers, with a passion for teaching, can also enrol as teachers.
Sessions are available round the clock, and for students who like to burn the midnight oil, Vedantu has teaching sessions for them too. Subscription rates start from Rs. 600 per month and can go upto Rs. 3,500 to 4,000 per month. The project was launched in October 2014, and more than 40,000 students from across 90 cities have enrolled so far.
“We have about 200 teachers on board,” says Krishna.
Currently available only on desktops and laptops, the team at Vedantu are hoping to launch a mobile phone application for easy accessibility. While there are demands for assistance in languages and social sciences, Krishna says his team is working on getting the required number of teachers on board.
