Digital education evangelist

Ram Gollamudi is founder-CEO of the Hyderabad-based Edutor Technologies Pvt. Ltd (estb.2010), an edutech company offering digitised textbooks and related learning solutions to schools and higher education institutions (HEIs) in India, the Middle East and South Africa. Through its flagship product Ignitor, a textbook learning application/platform which can be loaded on most branded Android and Windows hand-held devices, Edutor delivers entire textbooks and supplementary essays, interactive quizzes and weblinks to facilitate exam preparation. The company has 110 institutional subscribers reaching out to 80,000-plus students. Newspeg. According to Gollamudi who was in Bangalore in early March, Edutor inked a strategic partnership agreement in February with the US-based McGraw Hill Education, one of the world’s largest education publishers, under which Ignitor will digitize 5,000 McGraw Hill higher education textbook titles. Through this initiative, Edutor expects to add 80,000 post-secondary students in 1,000 campuses countrywide to its subscription base over the next two-three years. History. An engineering and business management alumnus of IIT-Madras and University of California, Los Angeles, Gollamudi acquired 14 years of valuable experience in the US working with Ericsson and Entropic Communications and later as a venture capitalist before returning to India in 2010. Since then, Edutor has partnered with 35 textbook publishers including Pearson, S.Chand and Oxford University Press to provide its digitized app to 110 schools and colleges. Among them: Modern High, Barakhamba Road; Delhi Public School, Faridabad; CHIREC, Hyderabad; Indus World, Gurgaon; Aakash Institute; Career Launcher; SRM University, Chennai; and GATE Forum. Subscription fees range from Rs.2,000-6,000 for K-12 students and Rs.5,000-15,000 for higher education students. Direct talk. “In 2010 when touch screen Android and i-Pad devices were becoming popular worldwide, iPod touch devices were being used in US schools to facilitate young learners. I recognised the power of hand-held devices for engaging children and felt they could be used positively in Indian education. Therefore I teamed up with two of my IIT classmates — Prasanna Boni and Ramesh Karra — to co-promote Edutor as soon as I returned to India. We strongly believe digital devices will enable millions of Indian students to improve learning outcomes without lugging heavy textbooks to and from school and college,” says Gollamudi. Future plans. Encouraged by the positive response to Ignitor, Gollamudi has drawn up ambitious expansion plans for Edutor Technologies. “We are in the process of developing diverse versions of Ignitor to introduce in government and private budget schools in tier-II cities, and eventually rural India. Over the next two-three years, Edutor intends to reach one million students and radically improve learning outcomes in Indian education,” says Gollamudi. Fair winds! Paromita Sengupta (Bengaluru) Girl child champion A science graduate of City College, Kolkata and an educationist with more than 45 years experience of early years education, Kusum Bhandari is the convener of Udayan Care Kolkata (UCK), a voluntary organisation with ten chapters countrywide. Udayan Care was established in 2002 in Delhi by social activist Kiran Modi to provide shelters for homeless children, education scholarships and vocational training programmes. The Kolkata chapter of Udayan Care was…