Final Assignment 3: Business Plan 30/03/01

Vijay Veerghanta (8092)

1. if this company is a symbiosis company, how would it be structured?

Symbiosis is an institute, which is highly diversified. One of the advantages of coming online is that the course, which is being repeated in various institutes with different faculty, can be brought under one roof. The problem arises when some of the courses cannot be offered online like say science and engineering where lab facilities are required. Yes tie up can be made up local institutes locally to offer lab facilities. Incase of course on demand, which the institute is not available with the institute it can tie up with another institute and provide link in the website.

2. What would be the front end tools that would be offered to the students? (Please describe in detail, can also give links to specific examples)

Once a student is registered in the online course he would get access to the course material. he would get link to the research material of the institute and whatever books that are available on line. He would have access to a personal discussion forum with the faculty for personal and also a common discussion forum where in he can interact with all the fellow students of the course. This is for info sharing. There would also be links to other relevant material on the subject. The tests would be conducted online and results would be available promptly. with broadband and easier and cheaper access to the net video conferencing would be another solution offered to the net. live online discussion.

another feature would be links to institutes from across the world. We could think interms of online discussion with experts in the field all over the world and access to material and their knowledge thru discussion forums. a data base of commonly asked questions and answers to them

3. what would be the tools offered to the faculty? (please describe in detail, can also give links to specific examples)

the faculty will be the key link in this course as students do not have personal access to him the effectiveness will be judged by quality of his material, his interaction, his response to the queries. We need to look at this from point of view of institute and point of view of his students. From the institute point of view facilities to faculty would include access to material world wide (wherever possible), online conferences with other faculty, access to mail facilities at home(taken for granted)

the tools from for instructing students. if we are assuming that students do not have access to computer at home, we need to provide a timing when the faculty would be available online for interactions and discussions. Assuming students are there world wide then there would problems of timezone differences. From student’s point of view we would talk of books, research on the net, we also can think of online tests, queries section, submission of answers etc.

4. who would be the stake holders?

the stake holders would be the students, faculty, recruiters, society, the Community, Vendors, ASP Operators, Software Developers.

5. The target audience for us will have no geographical boundary. Traditional management techniques and scientific principles teach span of control and in university case it will be student teacher ratio. However that is based on methods of communication without the aid of technology. If equipped with technology at various levels, it will be possible for us to expand this span of control

to millions. This is the hallmark of symbiosis website. Students enrolling can devise their courses, select the faculty and prepare online assignments in notebooks. If the students wishes to get it evaluated, then only evaluation will take place. The above are the product and nonproduct attributes essential to promote our institute. The most critical part is promotion across the globe, where we are not known. To get credibility, we will align with other universities, align with famous faculties and distribute course material, which promotes self-learning. The multimedia can be utilised to a great extent by having guest lectures. These are recordable and need not have physical presence. The promotional attributes will be convenience, high quality teaching material, self-learning exercises, Mass collaboration and community exercises(group discussions).

6. We would initiate and deploy the mass collaboration techniques, which will utilise knowledge available in mortar model transferred to net. The alliances will help in consolidation the mass collaborations. A web of alliances in knowledge sharing and design of courses will help in reducing operational expenses. It is agreed our upfront expenses will be very high. But we will tailor the course to corporates and our revenues will be this source.

7. The big change will be in the knowledge transfer, list of faculties in rolls and alliances which symbiosis had never had before. Alliances are critical as we have doing things all in isolation and thinking that competition for faculty, competition in introducing courses is critical for survival. Now the change to accept co-operation is great transformation.

8. Technology cannot change who we are or the way we treat our students, but it can help connect us with those at a distance and put us more in touch with the activities and thoughts of all of our students. First of all stating with this course contents, we would structure our course content on the lines of our competency and in the areas within which we can gather the best of the faculties, Our online education would essentially be also known for the quality of RESEARCH work being done by our faculty as well as our students. The areas that we feel would be good potential revenue earners are based on a competitive pricing mechanism as compared wiht the best in the Industry Standards. Since majority of the work in online education is being done in the areas of Software Programming / Social Sciences, Our teams research has revealed that companies such as Redhat providing online training in the areas of Programming cost from anywhere between \\$350-$450. per language.

A required Differenciation : Most web courses are simply electronic versions of the same pedagogically-unsound teaching that is going on daily in lecture rooms around the world. We need to differenciate it, the way we have differentiated our EMBA sessions. How can one say that these technologies are actually having a positive influence? In our view they are simply another medium for the same teaching that has been going on for centuries - both good and bad, but especially bad.

Let's face it. To maintain complete control, you really have to create the content yourself. Most people in this position opt to spend some time building their on-line content from scratch. This has an upside and a downside. On the upside, this can be a wonderfully rewarding task. It requires one to reevaluate both the contents one are teaching and the way in which one teaches. The evaluation can be as simple as cleaning up your notes before putting them on-line, or as extensive as examining the mission. On the downside, this is very time consuming. It is a labor-intensive task. This is not a "good thing" as most of us simply cannot afford a lot of time, especially if we are teaching new courses all the time. Yet, many of us still do exactly that, going on teaching the same thing over and over again, and making a Cash cow of our resources.

Hold it, there is a down side here too ??? But what if you simply do not have the time necessary to build the content from scratch? There are several possibilities for reducing the time required. If the distance course you are preparing also has a lecture-based offering, then one of the most simple solutions is one that are slightly similar to the courses employed by WEBCT. Wherein the Professor asks his/her students to take notes and massage them into a web-ready form after each lecture. Sometimes the Professor will offer incentives such as bonus grades for the best prepared notes from the submissions received. We justify this because we feel it is an excellent exercise for students to sit down and reconstruct the day's lecture as needed to explain it to someone else. It will become immediately apparent to the student what he/she did understand and what he/she did not understand. This will cause them to investigate further - a wonderful way to learn.

I hope somebody can co-relate it the EMBA seesions, where in the first semester of this course, the teams were actually doing this - preparing the courses online, infact a few of the best sessions has also been put online on one of our team sites. Coming to the issue of assigning grades to people, this results in a complete, very rough, set of initial course notes. We still need to do some major rewriting before the content is suitable for a distance course. However, we estimate that the time spent doing so in using this collaborative procedure would be comparatively be much less tedious and time consuming than that needed to write from scratch.

Rule #1 The direct cost of developing and delivering learning—whether it is via elearning or traditional training—is just the tip of the iceberg.

Indirect costs—which include overhead and employees’ compensation while they are learning—are typically far greater than the direct costs of learning.

Rule #2 Costs and benefits are co-determined.

It can be inexpensive to develop learning interventions—traditional or elearning—We doubt whether Creating highly beneficial learning will be inexpensive.

Rule #3 Just because costs can be shifted does not mean that they are zero.

The cost of workplace learning has three components:

For elearning, the direct costs consist of development of course content, purchase, and/or licensing of materials and hardware for delivery alongwith the Cost of hiring and subscribing to Softwares, Though in such areas, working on an ASP model would be a smart option. Almost all elements of cost have both marginal costs (those that vary with the number of learners) and fixed costs (those that do not vary with the number of learners). Indirect costs consist of compensation—the wages and benefits paid to learners while they are learning—as well as the overhead costs associated with both the direct and indirect costs. The available evidence suggests that the indirect, compensation costs of traditional learning are typically at least as much as the direct costs. Opportunity cost consists of the lost productivity that occurs when employees take time away from their work to learn. Although we know little on a systematic basis about the opportunity cost of traditional learning, a reasonable estimate would be around twice the indirect compensation cost.

One of the major attractions of elearning; it holds the promise of reducing all three categories of costs, but perhaps, most significantly, the indirect and opportunity costs of learning. We did come across a few papers on the net, where firms have estimated the total cost of elearning to be less than half the cost of traditional learning. 

* Indicates that these costs are likely to be (or can be made to be) negligible 

The total cost of a learning intervention is calculated as follows: Total cost = sum of all fixed costs + (sum of all marginal costs X the number of learners)

A quick glance would make us all realise no wonder, why is everybody going GAGA over elearning, and why is so that every body is also venturing into this model—the number of asterisks on the right side of the table far exceeds the number of asterisks on the left side.

Costs are irrelevant. (Hold it !!) Cost-effectiveness is what matters. A cheap solution that does not produce the intended result is a waste of money.

Finally we just have one thing to say that the course content and delivery better be really good and impart beneficial learning—from the perspective of the learner—or else it is only a matter of time (which will probably be short) that you may have to unlearn what you yourself have learnt as a Symbiosis over the course of time.  

10. Challenges will be in implementation. The strategic issues of design of courses, collaboration can be worked by anyone planning an on line course. The success however lies in implementation. The process is in course design making it self learning, identifying

Faculties in the areas of expertise we never had before, implementing technologies and forming alliances. Why should someone well known lend his name to this institute? Why is that is being taken to the table apart from financial capital. It is these issues that will be major challenges. Our threats will also be in implementation. Speed is the essence, in forging alliances and promotion. Heavy word of mouth has to be generated to be heard and tried. A bigger threat is the protection of course content by people incharge in the institute. Their fear of losing control is a bigger threat.

11. Executive Summary: Online learning also called virtual class room is truly virtual only when product/service is delivered instantaneously on demand. The symbiosis on line learning will offer this virtual course structure through interactive course design.This flexibility is possible by huge database. The target audience will be consumers, Corporates and even academicians. Courses beyond our current teaching will be offered such as personality/skill development, investment basics etc. However we have apprehensions on entering into any specific area by calling it focus. As virtual classroom can venture into any territory ideally. We would prefer to be a generalist.