The world's most ambitious education portal

The world's most ambitious education portal

In September 2006 Seattle-based Kal Raman accepted a challenging assignment to design, develop and operationalise an online education supermall. On November 2 last year globalscholar.com offering a rain of products and services became accessible to the global public

On a cold rainy night in December 2005 India born, Seattle-based IT professional Kalyan (‘Kal’) Raman received a phone call from Michael Milken, the legendary Wall Street financier turned philanthropist. During the 90-minute conversation Milken outlined his vision of a KG-Ph D online education platform that would use the internet medium to revolutionise global education.

As he listened with growing interest, Raman’s mind’s eye travelled back thousands of miles to the ramshackle state government school he had attended in a remote village in Tamil Nadu. Raman remembered his one-room school, housing several classes without a library or even desks and chairs. He recalled his early years, being raised by a widowed mother who notwithstanding her income of Rs.420 per month, put all her five children through school because she believed in the power of education to transform lives. In an epiphanic moment he remembered how he had made his way through the Guindy College of Engineering, Chennai on merit scholarships and was campus recruited by the Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Engineers, later moving to Tata Consulting Services, India’s largest IT consultancy services company (1990).

For nearly a year Raman mulled over this proposal, finally quitting his high-profile job as senior vice-president of Amazon.com in September 2006 to accept Milken’s challenge to start-up the world’s most ambitious global e-learning platform to “provide the gift of quality education to learners all over the world”. A month later GlobalScholar Inc (paid up capital $42 million) was incorporated and promoted by the Los Angeles-based education conglomerate Knowledge Universe Learning Group, founded by Michael Milken and his brother Lowell; the Seattle-based Ignition Venture Fund led by Brad Silverberg and Peter Neupert, vice-president of Microsoft — a seriously deep-pocketed trio of investors. GlobalScholar’s objective: to design, develop and operationalise the mother-of-all education portals positioned as an education supermall providing a rain of products and services.

Working furiously in typical American project execution style putting in 16-17 hour days, and jetting all over the US and back and forth to India, Raman recruited a 65-strong Seattle-based NRI (non-resident Indians) dominated team of proven IT professionals and web designers, and simultaneously set up a 125-strong backroom technical operations and content development team in Chennai — all within a year. On November 2 last year GlobalScholar.com — the eponymous website of the company — became accessible to the global public.

Barely into its stride, GlobalScholar Inc has also taken the acquisition route to quickly expand its customer base. In February shortly after it raised $27 million in second round funding, GlobalScholar acquired Excelsior Software, a Colorado-based company which designs student gradebook and assessment software currently utilised by teachers in 1,000 school districts across the US. This acquisition has not only raised the profile of GlobalScholar within US academia and quadrupled its customer base, but has established the company as a major player in the education technology industry.

“The company’s investors and team are passionate about using technology to enhance the education experience of students and teachers around the world. And to quickly attain this objective, within 12 months we have created an online education marketplace where students, parents, teachers and schools worldwide can access high quality education services. Currently GlobalScholar.com offers an online tutoring platform on which parents and students can safely connect with trusted educators who provide one-on-one tutoring, homework assistance and self-paced learning. Moreover the GlobalScholar platform can be used by schools to enable teachers and administrators to effectively create and manage curriculum, student assessment and supplemental learning. Our mission is to integrate and align all resources in education — parents, students, tutors, teachers, administrators, and content — to improve efficiency, performance, and educational access both inside and beyond the classroom,” says Raman, who has invested 16 years of experience in several Fortune-500 companies including Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Blockbuster, and has put together a formidable team of information technology, education and marketing professionals to attain the company’s ambitious mission.

Structurally, GlobalScholar Inc is an Indo-American venture with the company’s high-end web engineering, design and development and marketing operations based in the US (Los Angeles/Seattle) while its 125-strong website maintenance and support office is sited in Chennai to take advantage of the relatively lower cost of high quality technical manpower in India. The GlobalScholar online platform was developed through 2007 by a group of highly-qualified and experienced engineers and integrates cutting-edge internet technology.

“No other internet website offers a web 2.0 portal which provides a common forum for all stakeholders in education. In addition to our school district functionality, our tutoring platform offers an interactive white board system employing Flash technology and enables text and voice-based chat, allowing teachers to deliver live lessons to students anywhere in the world. Moreover all teacher-student interactions are fully recorded and confidential but are accessible to parents to monitor their children’s progress. I am confident that the GlobalScholar e-learning platform is the very best on the internet and the easiest to navigate and use,” says Muru Subramani, an engineering graduate of Madras University, with over 15 years of work experience in blue-chip corporates including Microsoft, Intel and Valve Software who is the chief technology officer of GlobalScholar Inc.

Navigation of the GlobalScholar.com website and investigation of its online tutoring service reveals several USPs (unique selling propositions). For one, in sharp contrast to the plethora of online tutoring sites which don’t offer students the option to select their teachers who are mostly full-time or part-time employees of the website, GlobalScholar.com is a virtual education marketplace where students (or their parents) can choose tutors after weighing their qualifications, experience, customer ratings and competitive tutoring charges. The 1,500-plus tutors registered on GlobalScholar.com offering tutoring in languages, maths, English, science, finance, economics, specific K-12 grades and SAT and ACT coaching, are not employees of the company but independent professionals offering one-on-one tuition and homework assistance at self-determined (by teachers) fees to students around the world.

Moreover there is no monetary transaction between tutors and students. Students pay GlobalScholar Inc who after deducting a 20 percent commission, directly credits the designated bank accounts of approved tutors whose professional antecedents and personal backgrounds are thoroughly scrutinised by the company.

“GlobalScholar promises students an online platform where they can safely connect with trusted educators. All tutors registered on GlobalScholar.com are obliged to agree to comprehensive background checks including education and criminal record verification. To be posted on our website, tutors must have at least a four-year university degree and some teaching experience. However approved tutors have great flexibility to determine their own price, tuition times and subjects. All tutoring sessions are recorded and archived for teachers, students and parents to playback and evaluate student progress. But the biggest USP of GlobalScholar.com is its global character. Some time ago the big story in business dailies and magazines was of teachers in India providing online tuition to students in the US. GlobalScholar enables a reversal of this trend. On our platform an Indian student can engage an American tutor,” says Shmuly Tennehaus, director online marketing, customer service and tutoring who is also a registered Bar Mitzvah tutor on GlobalScholar.com.

GlobalScholar Inc managers in Seattle are also bullish about another service provided by the company’s multi-featured online education platform: an information repository of education institutions in the US. The website’s SchoolFinder and CollegeFinder search service provides detailed information about thousands of schools and colleges across the 52 states of America. SchoolFinder offers basic information about elementary and high schools enabling parents to assess and evaluate them inter se. CollegeFinder does the same for colleges, including rankings of America’s top universities and colleges from US News & World Report and Princeton Review.

Although currently this service is restricted to schools and colleges in the US, the company is developing a matrix to assess and rank the world’s best colleges and universities. Raman’s objective is to make GlobalScholar. com’s rankings better than the league tables of the Times Higher Education Supplement, London and of the Shanghai Jia Tong University, China.

Given his considerable experience and understanding of socio-economic and market conditions in developing countries, especially of India, Raman is well aware that GlobalScholar’s B2C (business to consumer) operations are likely to be restricted to the US and perhaps to Europe in the near future. Indigenous factors such as erratic electricity supply, limited broadband connectivity and small populations of home-based computers in developing countries make B2C business development a long-term prospect. For instance in India less than 4 percent of the population owns a home computer and only 1 percent of the population has access to broadband connectivity.

Therefore ab initio, Raman’s master plan involved the development of B2B (business to business) markets in developing countries, especially in India and China. Thus in December 2007, barely a month after its online tutoring platform became operational, GlobalScholar launched its Curriculum Instructional Information System (CIIS), a web-enabled curriculum management, student assessment and gradebook software solution designed for schools and school districts in the US.

“CIIS is a fully integrated school management solution which allows states, school districts and school administrators to set academic standards and develop advanced curriculums. It enables teachers to create curriculum maps, do lesson planning and use curricular resources to deliver differentiated learning to students. This online support programme also facilitates student assessment. Moreover it enables school administrators and district heads to analyse data to get a clear picture of how their schools and students are performing. Likewise a Parent Internet Viewer feature incorporated into CIIS allows parents to view grades, assessment and curriculum while enabling them to receive e-mail or text notifications,” says Chakrapani (‘Chaks’) Appalabattula, an alumnus of the National Institute of Technology, Warangal (Andhra Pradesh), former vice president at AskMe Corporation (USA) and currently director of development and operations for school districts at GlobalScholar.

Currently globalscholar.com’s CIIS is being market tested in the US but its global potential is mind boggling. Even in the US there are 15,000 school districts with an aggregate enrollment of 50 million students which are potential purchasers. GlobalScholar Inc’s first major breakthrough in the US was made on January 23 when the company signed up with the South Carolina school district to implement CIIS in over 1,000 schools under its jurisdiction. Under an agreement with the district administration, for a $10-20 fee per student per year, the company will deploy the CIIS system, help train all teachers and administrators, and offer ongoing customer support.

The development of the company’s B2B portfolio which could be immensely useful to India’s 1.20 million schools — especially the country’s 146,000 private schools — has received a massive boost with the acquisition in January of the Colorado-based Excelsior Software, which provides assessment management solutions for K-12 education. With this acquisition GlobalScholar.com will be able to offer Excelsior’s proven Pinnacle Gradebook software program which automatically tracks and reports student progress and attendance data to educators and parents at the individual, group, class, school and district levels. Moreover in its 21-year tenure in the education industry, Excelsior has signed contracts with nearly 1,000 school districts in the US.

Consequently GlobalScholar has obtained access into a large number of American high schools which has given the company the scale and opportunity to quickly expand and accelerate its US and international growth. “The wealth of education experience the Excelsior Software team brings and the integration of our products with theirs will allow us to address all our segments — students, parents and educators — simultaneously, enabling us to offer the largest range of online resources to augment teaching-learning experiences. While provision of online tutoring services is important to our growth, the big numbers for us are in the K-12 schools segment. Initially we are focusing our marketing energies on schools in the US but we regard CIIS as a content neutral web-enabled platform which can help schools round the world develop and manage their curriculums and measure learning outcomes continuously. India’s huge schools sector is next on our shortlist,” says Raman.

The flying start GlobalScholar has got off to is a personal triumph for Raman whose long and arduous journey from rags to riches (including a substantial equity stake and reported $600,000 annual salary package at GlobalScholar Inc) began in a village in Tamil Nadu four decades ago. Born into a family of five, Raman attended a local government school in Tirunevelli district (600 km from Chennai) often studying under dim street lights for school exams and helping his widowed mother to put four siblings through school.

Among the top performers in the state education board’s school leaving class X and XII exams, he was admitted into the electrical engineering degree programme of the highly-rated Guindy College of Engineering, Chennai as a merit scholar in 1985. Subsisting on Re 1 per day for meals in the crowded college hostel for four years, Raman graduated with a first class degree and was campus recruited by the Mumbai-based Tata Consulting Engineers where he reported for work in rubber slippers after having spent the previous night sleeping on the platform of Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus station. “The first reaction of my boss Mr. Kulkarni was to loan me Rs.200 to buy a pair of shoes,” remembers Raman.

A year later in 1990, Raman then 22 was laterally inducted by Tata Consultancy Services then (as now) India’s largest IT software services company which was just beginning its spectacular transformation into a global IT-enabled services and consultancy major. “It was in TCS that I learned that the new age of computerised technology had dawned and that its epicentre was the US,” recalls Raman.

Two years later while on assignment in Scotland for TCS, he accepted an offer from Wal-Mart and re-started his career as a software engineer, quickly rising through the ranks to head the company’s technology division four years later. In 1996 he quit Wal-Mart to sign up with Blockbuster, a video rental chain, where he rose to the position of senior director of technology. In 1998 he signed up with the internet service firm Drugstore.com. Rising to the position of chief executive officer and information officer in 2001, he helped the company’s revenue to grow by 70 percent to $264 million (Rs.1,056 crore). This stellar performance attracted the attention of Jeff Bezos, the legendary promoter-CEO of Amazon.com, who signed Raman to head the company’s worldwide non-books business division. Two years later came Michael Milken’s call to roll out GlobalScholar.com. “Given my personal experience of the transformative power of education for people all over the world, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse,” recalls Raman who lives in Seattle with his wife Vijayalakshmi and two children Mitra (15) and Nikhil (10).

Now 18 months on, at the helm of GlobalScholar Inc, the hard-driving Raman believes that the company’s team has engineered a sui generis education portal offering a unique combination of B2C and B2B products and services which co-opts rather than competes with other online education service businesses.

“We take a much broader view of the online education business than just hiring tutors to deliver tuition. We regard tutoring companies — both offline and online — as our customers and partners rather than competitors. In fact we are already working with a number of tutoring companies that are building and growing their business on our platform. This is what distinguishes GlobalScholar.com from other online education service providers. We expect a major chunk of our future business to emanate from tutoring companies using GlobalScholar’s B2B platform to offer tutoring and supplementary learning to students worldwide,” says Laurent Burman, an alumnus of Queen’s University, Canada and Harvard Business School and currently vice president of marketing and business development, GlobalScholar Inc.

Quizzed about numbers and data testifying to GlobalScholar’s fast start off the blocks, Burman says that the company is “well on its way” to offering the largest community of online tutors as well as developing a large institutional customer base. “As a private company we don’t disclose customer numbers or financial data. However I can say that within the next year we expect to offer the largest community of tutors and supplemental resources of any online education provider. We will have a user-base of several million students, parents and teachers and a truly global footprint,” he vows.

Inevitably given the predominantly NRI composition of GlobalScholar Inc’s top management, India which hosts the company’s back-office operations, looms large on their radar screen. With 450 million children under 18 years of age, a dysfunctional government school system and a growing middle class which is increasingly veering towards prizing quality education above all else, there’s a big market for the company’s online tutoring and B2B platform.

Moreover, fortuitously for Raman and his team, India already boasts a booming brick-and-mortar exams coaching industry which rakes in an estimated Rs.5,000 crore annually by way of tuition fees and is growing at 20 percent per year. Therefore there is a sizeable ready market for Global Scholar’s online tutoring service which offers customer convenience and high quality personalised mentoring. To this end GlobalScholar recently acquired Class of 1, a Chennai-based company offering online tuition to American students, and is reportedly on a shopping spree for other supplementary education companies. Moreover India’s 146,000 private schools, which are rapidly embracing new technology innovations to improve student learning outcomes and measure student progress, constitute a high potential market segment for the company’s culture-neutral Curriculum Instructional Information System.

“No doubt India offers massive opportunities for every education provider. The opportunity is real, and our timing is good. Yet our market development strategy in India will be the same as in the US — to deliver enjoyable, value-added customer experience. Therefore our focus will be on providing one-on-one customised services to students, teachers and school administrators with the expectation of great business results. Our ambitions are global; we want to take advantage of IT infrastructure and leverage the best available internet technologies to improve teaching-learning outcomes worldwide,” says Raman reiterating the company’s ambitious mission.

Ever since the wonder global communication medium that is the internet, was invented by researchers of the US defence department in 1969 and transformed into the worldwide web in 1989, this global information and instant connectivity miracle has belied its initial promise, particularly in education. Now driven by the altruistic objective of improving universal teaching-learning standards, enlightened promoters and a formidable Indo-American operations team, GlobalScholar may well catalyse a technology-driven education revolution worldwide. And given this path-breaking company’s deep India connection, this country’s much neglected education system will be a prime beneficiary .