The Hindu Business Line : GE Capital runs courses for staff on Hughes platform

HIGHER education may no longer be the cause for a high attrition rate, as BPO companies tie up with educational institutes to bring management education to the desk of their employees.

Leading the way is GE Capital International Services (GECIS) that has tied up with Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd (HECL) to provide its employees an MBA from Mumbai's Narsee Monjee right on their desktops.

Christened the `Shift MBA' programme, it is currently being beamed across four GECIS centres in India - Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Jaipur - where students receive management classes in the afternoon before they start their day's work.

The classes are virtual, but held in real time as they are powered by the Hughes's DirecWay Global Education (DWGE) satellite broadband platform. Here students attend a virtual classroom session where they can view and interact with the teacher delivering the lecture through a two-way audio and one-way video system. It is possible for the student to ask a question on his or her end of the desktop and receive an answer immediately from the lecturer who would be able to ascertain the profile and the identity of the student. DirecWay uses a blend of broadband satellite technology and interactive learning technologies.

"Over 850 employees have already enrolled in various programmes offered by GECIS University (GECIS's education division that offers the courses to its employees)... it enables us to run standardised programmes across all our locations. On the anvil are management programmes from various other management institutes that will be provided via the DirecWay platform", says Mr Sanjay Goel, Business Leader, GECIS India.

For HECL this is the first instance of a large scale `Direct-to-Corporate' delivery of management courses.

The DWGE platform, launched in March 2002, is in the process of delivering management courses to call centre and corporate employees from institutes such as XLRI, Jamshedpur; IIM, Kozhikode; Narsee Monjee and Cornell University, USA. Over the last 20 months, Hughes has set up 33 classrooms in 23 cities in India. Around 2,000 students are taking about 14 different management courses from seven different Indian and international universities.

"HECL is also in the process of offering other courses such as insurance, corporate banking, advertising, language and so on," said Mr Partho Banerjee, CEO and President, HECL.

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