Over the past few days, I have been trying out Babbel to learn French. They have obviously iterated over their interactive courses to come up with an incredibly nice solution (and the speech recognition is just the icing on the cake). I have been telling about this to anyone whom I can. And, that has resulted in some great conversations, especially with some people who have traveled around the world.
Disclaimer: Online Learning Platforms in this post means products that are not affiliated with colleges for the award of degrees/ course credits. Hence, the #epic courses from universities like University of Phoenix do not qualify.
However, products like Edufire, for instance, do qualify. Some of these platforms have been around for a long time [3-4 years or even before]. None of them has really hit the big league and with each passing day, the prospect looks increasingly bleak. Here are seven reasons why this could be happening and why no Online Education company will ever make it big:
Youtube owes its success to increased bandwidths across the world as well as two key features -> streaming videos as Flash [well they have graduated to HTML 5 streaming] as well as embedding functionality. The latter, allowed YouTube to penetrate websites, blogs and forums. The key, YouTube made itself [and the videos] available to where the people already were. Eventually, YouTube itself became a place that people started visiting.
This is a guest post by Vikrama Dhiman. He is an accidental software product manager who has worked with teams across India’s IT centers – Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Chandigarh as an Agile Software Development Coach and a Product Manager with Internet companies.
iPhone has been a massive failure in India. Yes, there are two hundred and seventy people [I made up that number] worrying about iPhone 4.0 not releasing in India but most just do not care. And, this in a country that is obsessed with everything fashionable in Umrika [that's desi for America]. So, what went missing in India?
