Tata McGraw-Hill, Vriti tie up to provide adaptive courses on tablet

Tata McGraw-Hill Education, a joint venture between the Tata Group and McGraw-Hill Companies that serves the pre-K-professional learning space, and Vriti Infocom, a 'smart' education platform, have tied up to launch free, online 'Smart Courses' on tablets for engineering and management students.

The educational content of Tata McGraw-Hill will be integrated with the platform developed by Vriti – providing e-books, assignments, videos, multimedia, detailed assessments and personalised tips, all wrapped in intelligent lesson plans. The courses will also create students' edu-social communities on the Cloud globally. The partners plan to introduce over 100 free courses in the higher education segments (engineering and management) and the first set of courses are planned for release early next month.

Swapnil Shrivastav, founder and MD of Vriti, said, "We are excited to work with Tata McGraw-Hill to provide access to such expensive and summarised content for free. With our platform, we bring the interactivity, peer communication and self-paced pedagogy required to convert a static book into an adaptive and personalised course."

The company uses its large student assessment data to create personalised, adaptive learning experience for students and also provides a digital marketplace for authors globally. In other words, it brings authors, students and institutions (schools/colleges/coaching centres) together on its platform.

Handset manufacturer Micromax has already tied up with the companies and consequently, the courses will be available pre-bundled on the company's Funbook tablets. However, the pre-bundled courses will be short, summarised ones, upgradable to full-fledged 'Smart Course' offerings once 'e-payments' are made on the tablet.

Commenting on the venture, Micromax CEO Deepak Mehrotra said, "Tablets have huge potential in the education sector. With our upcoming Funbook Pro tablet, the focus is on higher education and we have tied up with Tata McGraw-Hill and Vriti for this purpose."

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)