It’s a concept almost reminiscent of one of the bustling stops on the ancient Silk trading route that connected the east to the west – marketplaces filled with eager participants from all walks of life purchasing goods from around the world. Except the platform is a little different: Canadian company SKILLSdox has taken their marketplace online, and they’re looking at millions of students ready to tap into a wealth of global educational courses right accross India.
For a country with a skilled workforce making up less than two percent of the total population, education could not be a more pertinent part of the government’s efforts to skill the nation across sectors.
By now we all know that by 2030 over half of India’s 1.2 billion strong population will be of school and college-going age. We also know that India is considered the world’s second largest internet user base.
Realizing this, Canadian entrepreneur Brad Loiselle says India was a no brainer for setting up provision of access to quality education – crossing the range of free and paid programs from K-12 and accredited university and college programs to professional development course. All boosted by the fact that English is widely used across the nation, ensuring less need for online programs to translate their courses.
“We are like Amazon is for products, we are for online education,” says Loiselle, describing his company, SKILLSdox’ platform, School of Skill, “we are the gateway and access to the world’s leading educators.”
Aiming to help educators get their brand names into the mass market as well as give students access to educators they would otherwise never have been able to connect with, is the key goal of the company. “We work to create a win-win-win model,” says Loiselle.
Foreign educational institutions cannot legally peddle their content in India unless they are in collaboration with or selling through an Indian company. To date, accessible education remains a very insular endeavor.
With a $30 million marketing budget from Bennett Coleman and Co., India’s largest media conglomerate, and owner of the nation’s widest circulated daily, The Times of India, SKILLSdox has also collaborated with online learning providers that include Harvard-MIT founded edX and San Francisco based online course content provider Udemy.
They’ve partnered with educational online content providers in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, Taiwan, and India so far, says Loiselle. And to make sure their premise of providing access to everyone is fulfilled, SKILLSdox has also joined up with DataWind, India’s low-cost tablet provider who offer free internet access on their devices, to ensure that any potential purchaser will have pre-loaded access to SKILLSdox educational marketplace.
“Now people who could previously not afford to buy the technology, afford the internet, and otherwise would not have had access to global education, will, with us and our partners,” says Loiselle.
One of the toughest parts of achieving that goal was to ensure that payments could be collected in rupee form, and from a mass population – most of whom have never seen a credit card, let alone have their name stamped on one.
“We’re able to collect in 200 formats,” says Loiselle, referring to the numbers of ways anyone can pay for their classes. It took them two years to get that set up, he says.
“Our goal is to become a household name in India and attract many more global leaders in education,” says Loiselle, “the vision is to take this proven model and duplicate it in other emerging markets.”
