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Anjali Prayag

Corporate executives don't travel more than five km from home or office to brush up on skills, thanks to Hughes Direcway Global Education Classrooms that beam live from the IIM Bangalore campus.

This is as close to classroom education that distance education can get: Executives stationed in Thiruvananthapuram, Vadodara, Dehra Dun, Mumbai, Delhi and in 15 other cities in the country can now look forward to attending education programmes of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), without travelling more than five km from their home or office.

Thanks to Hughes Direcway Global Education Classrooms, executive education programmes, hitherto restricted to the four walls of the institute classrooms, are now being beamed across the country. So, while the professor is handling a session at the IIM campus, he's reaching out to several students across the country who have logged into any of the 39 Hughes Direcway centres.

And this is not just a one-way lecture session, explains J.R. Saligram, Chief Programmes Officer, IIM-B. The system allows participants to interact with the professor at any point of time during the lecture. The system incorporates broadcast video, two-way data and audio interactivity. All this is achieved using a PC connected over a local area network to a satellite transceiver that in turns connects to the IIM-B classroom. It allows the faculty to use presentations, video, audio, white boards and the like to communicate with participants anywhere in the country.

The Direcway classroom is the outcome of a rising demand for executive education programmes at the institute. "We find that it is getting increasingly difficult for both executives and the professors alike to move out of their workplaces," says Saligram.

He explains, "While talking to our clients, we found that employees are extremely hard-pressed for time. It's impossible for a company to spare more than one or two executives at a time for a course at the institute." And it was the same case with the professors. The institute has had to refuse several requests from corporates to conduct on-campus programmes for them.

"You see there are at least four programmes running at any point of time at the Institute and the professors are really busy with their regular classes and consultancy services." So when Hughes Escorts came up with an offer to resolve all these issues at once, there was no doubt that the concept would find acceptance among all the stakeholders. But like all inventions, a lot of refinement has taken place from the first experiment that was attempted a year ago.

Initially, the professors were taken to a Hughes recording studio, where classes conducted in-camera were beamed to long-distance participants. The professors were a trifle uneasy with this idea as they were used to an interactive classroom with about 40 students facing them. "It was like asking a musician to play without an audience," says Saligram.

Realising that talking to a camera is not a professor's style, Hughes and IIM-B came up with the solution. "That's when we thought, why not let the professor be in his natural surroundings, the classroom and beam a live classroom session to our outstation participants," says Bopanna S.U., Centre Head, DWGE, Bangalore. The experiment, launched in mid-May, is getting a positive response from the corporates, says Saligram. Apart from the open programmes, the institute plans to run the sessions for customised programmes too, he adds. IIM-B runs about 50-odd open programmes every year. The Institute has just concluded a programme in `Negotiating and Managing Commercial Contracts', which was beamed live to several centres in the country.

Saligram expects to run full house for its other programmes such as `Finance for non-finance executives' and `Fast Track General Management Programme.' The ideal number of students would be in the range of 100-120, he says. Refusing to divulge the financial details of the partnership with Hughes Escorts, Saligram says this would mean a huge cost saving both for the students and the company. "Outstation students would pay the non-resident fee. Plus it also saves them the cost of travelling to Bangalore and back. And more important, they can be in touch with their workplaces even if they are sitting in the virtual classroom the whole day."

Currently, 39 centres in 24 cities have Hughes Direcway classrooms. In the near future, IIM-B and Hughes plan to take these classrooms to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and West Asia.

anjali@thehindu.co.in

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