Back in August 2012, Abhishek Patil and Satish Kumar, the founders of Oliveboard, an online test preparation platform, noticed that their nephews and nieces often travelled from tier two cities like Belgaum all the way to Bangalore in order to coach for entrance examinations.
“My relatives would set up shop for about two-three months in Bangalore just so that their children could enroll at a coaching institute. The lack of similar coaching centres for premier entrance examinations in tier two and three cities that forced people to travel, bothered us,” explained Abhishek. They then set up Oliveboard with an intention to address this situation.
“What Oliveboard offers is an online platform that enables students to access study material, take mock tests and even provides them with information about why they fared the way they did in those tests. Currently, we are offering test preparation for MBA entrance examinations, banking exams and campus placements,” described Abhishek.
Apart from the lack of such coaching centres in smaller cities, what also prompted the duo to set up Olive Board was the fact that most entrance exams had gone digital. “It was around 2012-13 when most exams moved online. We realised that preparation for those exams had only partially moved online. So, we knew this was an area where there were no other platforms,” he added.
Today, Abhishek describes that Oliveboard’s consumer base is larger in North India, with Delhi and Uttar Pradesh being among the largest consumers of their material. Since they cater to graduate exams, their consumers are mostly between the age group of 21 and 25. Sometimes, they include working professionals too from tier two and three cities.
One of the challenges for a platform like theirs, he says is the extent of internet penetration.
“This limits the ones we can reach out and sometimes flaky internet connections can result in a bad experience for our consumers. What we have tried to do to resolve this is ensure an internet connection is needed only in the beginning and the end of a two-hour test. So, for the time in between, the student can concentrate on the test and not worry about the connection,” he explained.
Oliveboard also offers what they call a ‘gamified group study platform’ which is like a digital simulation of a classroom quiz, for instance.
“We noticed that on a number of study groups, they were constantly trying to meet up, deciding which place and time would be suitable to all.
So, we thought, instead of physically meeting, they could all log in to our platform. All of them are asked a question and whoever answers the fastest receives points. There are lifelines to help them answer and a chatbox to clear questions,” he said.
It is a nine-member team based out of Bangalore that runs the platform with content providers comprising mainly ex-IIM OR XLRI students working on a freelance basis.
“We have put in a lot of effort to ensure that we use technology well. We don’t just provide test material and mock tests. We have designed an adaptive platform which also gives students feedback on how much time they took on each question, what their weak areas are and how they can be improved. This kind of personalised feedback is rarely possible in a coaching centre that hosts a big class of students,” he said. So, with more digital platforms such as Oliveboard, are coaching centres soon going to move online too?
“A lot of coaching institutes have already begun to adopt digital tools in one way or the other. But the resources and skill required to run a coaching institute are markedly different from the ones necessary to build and run a platform like this. We may not be able to run a coaching institute for instance,” he says.
