It's time again for the annual brouhaha that is the medical and engineering entrance examinations. For those who can't up and go to places such as Thrissur and Pala to enrol for crash courses at entrance coaching centres, young techie Saiju V. Stella and his team at the Technopark-based Oztern Technology have come up with a viable solution – an “e-solution,” to be exact. Hopeful candidates can either head to one of the 2,200 citizen centres of the Akshaya e-services network to ‘e-learn' the entrance training programme or subscribe to its online version at www.entrancewisdom.com. Since late 2010 Oztern has an exclusive tie-up with the Prof. P.C. Thomas Classes, a leading entrance coaching centre in Thrissur.
Personalised training
“Oztern partners with content providers such as P.C. Thomas to provide personalised training to candidates. We don't create content, we just provide a platform to digitise existing content,” says Saiju, who began Oztern in 2009 with funding from five “like-minded” investors. The company specialises in cloud computing and has established itself as a player in the online education industry, capitalising on Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure, Windows Azure, “to address the needs of training institutes, students, and education entrepreneurs alike.” To achieve this, Oztern created Rainbow, a comprehensive e-learning platform that enables customers to design and create content quickly and easily.
“E-learning is an emerging market in India. Most institutes and coaching centres have a good knowledge base in terms of content and expertise. Thus there is great scope for digitisation of content. Rainbow is an easy to use, simple-knowledge management platform, which any business user – be it a corporate, educational institution or government body – can use to gather and organise scattered knowledge assets that exist in their organisation, and efficiently deliver it to their learners, and that too with zero programming knowledge,” says Saiju, who worked for eight years in the United States and Northern Ireland before coming back home to the city to kick-start his ventutre.
“I've always been a fan of green technology, and wanted to start a software firm that specialises in environmentally-friendly cloud computing. That's why Oztern is named as such, the Oz referring to Ozone-friendly and ‘tern,' short-form for ‘tattern' meaning solution,” says Saiju.
His company, in association with Cell Technologies, also recently launched the e-tutor, a portable cloud-based e-gadget that makes available CBSE, ICSE, and State syllabi, supported with curriculum based info-graphics, all at the click of a button. The e-tablet was lauched by Infotech guru Sam Pitroda in January.
