1. Leverage Your Social Network
Often times, teachers forget the value of their personal networks.Your friends & family will always show support, encourage them to engage with you via social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. The key here lie in engaging your network rather than just posting class details.

A third party recommendation builds credibility. Ask past students to recommend you by using the Facebook “like” button on your class page or ask them to leave testimonials and “endorse” you on Linkedin .

Tip:
Post articles about your subject in order to create awareness among potential students.

For instance:
If you teach a gardening class, you could generate curiosity by posting relevant videos such as Why seeds are as hot as sex (and just as important for our survival) or articles such as 7 Habits of Successful Gardeners followed by your class details.

2. Take Advantage of Forums & Groups Online
There are many professional groups on Facebook, Linkedin and Google where industry trends, upcoming events etc are posted regularly. Maximise your participation in such groups. Respond to questions, create events & invite group members, start discussions, etc.

Class event posted on Bangalore Startups

3. Ask and answer questions on Quora
One of the best forms of content marketing is sharing your gyaan. Quora is a knowledge sharing platform where you can post thoughtful responses to questions and can ask questions based on the industry you operate in.

For instance:
If you’re conducting a PR class for startups. You could start a discussion by asking a question such as ‘How important is PR for startups and aspiring entrepreneurs?’. This would in turn generate comments from interested individuals who could benefit from your technical proficiency and expertise.

4. Write an article or a blogpost 
A blogpost or an article authored by you can help establish your identity as an industry expert. Online portals are always on the lookout for meaningful articles. End these articles with a short line describing you, your teaching activities and link it back to your Gyaanexchange class page.

For instance:
We generated curiosity for Gyaanexchange.com’s  PR Workshop for Startups with a blogpost on Yourstory.in -India no 1 startup portal on How to do PR in-house for your startup.

5. Post a Classified Ad
There are many free classified ad sites where a teacher can post their class details. These websites also provide relevant student leads and enquiries.
Some such websites are:

• Olx.in
• Quikr.com
• Kyakare.com
• Clickindia.com

Tip:
Collate these leads and send them an email with your class details.

6. Optimize your class page for SEO
Try optimizing your class for search engines by including relevant keywords in the class description. Google has a free keyword tool link. Find keywords your students are likely to look for and use them in your class description.

For instance:
If you teach Jazz or Kathak, it would help you generate more leads if your class descriptions included the keywords “Dance classes in Mumbai” or Latin Ballroom dance classes in Mumbai”. Posting your Gyaanexchange class link on your personal website, blog, etc will increase the chances of Google organically discovering your class page. To learn more about SEO, enroll for a free SEO tutorial for beginners on Gyaanexchange.com

7. Offer Deals & Discount
Who doesn’t like a good deal? Gyaanexchange now allows you to generate coupon codes and offer discounted prices. You can now create and offer Group Discounts, Early Bird Discounts, etc. Contact us if you’d like to offer promotional discounts on your classes. For maximum visibility, we recommend posting these offers on deal sites such as:

• Rediff Deal Ho Jaye
• Snapdeal.com
• Timesdeal.com
• Offertalk.in

8. Hold a free webinar or demo class
This is a great way to generate leads from a relevant target audience. Students who sign up for a free demo class/webinar are more likely to convert into paid students than someone who has no idea about your teaching skills. For eg. Gyaanexchange’s free class with VC Guru Sasha Mirchandani got 80 enrollments in one week.

As a teacher on Gyaanexchange, you can now measure the impact of your promotion efforts. A widget on your class page allows you to check the number of visitors & the source of visitors to your page for any range of dates, making it possible for you to discover which kind promotion works best for you!
Increasing visitors to your gyaanexchange class page will automatically allow your class to be feature on the homepage of the website.

These simple yet powerful ideas won’t take more than couple of hours to execute. Feel free to get in touch with us on learn@gyaanexchange.com if you have any questions.

This post aims to educate the Indian electorate about what the Government is planning on doing with ICMS – the Indian Central Monitoring System. An all encompassing wide reaching system that can track every digital footprint – email, instant message, browsing history, downloads, uploads… you get it. And that too without any legal reason, warrant or cause. Failing to stop this from happening would be the largest failure by a democratic peoples.

What’s even more worrying is that we lack the basic legal infrastructure that guarantees our privacy and the security of our information and data, thus such a system could end up having wide sweeping power on intercepting any kind of communication.

This blog aims to bring together all that is happening and developing on ICMS, I hope to work with the people involved with galvanizing public civic action and opinion to prevent this from happening.

“The Central Monitoring System (CMS) may just be another step in the wrong direction, especially since India currently lacks privacy laws which can protect citizens from potential abuse. Yet, all telecommunications and Internet communications are to be monitored by Indian authorities through the CMS, despite the fact that it remains unclear how our data will be used.” – http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-big-brother-the-central-monitoring-system

You can start by signing the petition here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Stop_CMS_Monitoring_and_respect_our_privacy/

Further Reading:

http://www.datareign.com/anonymous-asks-support-take-on-india-governments-central-monitoring-system.html

http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-big-brother-the-central-monitoring-system

This post was cross-posted in http://stopicms.org/

The latest developments in understanding how the brain stores memory have enabled neuroscience researchers and the developers at Gyaanexchange to find a way for people to learn by downloading straight to the brain!

Starting this month GyaanExchange will be giving out its specially designed and patent protected ‘GyaanTransfer’ units, that are based on neural actuators, which allow anyone to download the fantastic learning related content from Gyaanexchange’s video library straight to the brain, a special transfer mechanism triggers the learning process – once in the brain the lesson expands to replicate the learning process in a matter of minutes.

We are as excited by you with this miraculous development and wish, in all sincerity, that you are having a great APRIL FOOL’S DAY!

Its good to know that the people who can affect so many of our lives know how to have some fun!

April Fools 2013, the world woke up with the news that YouTube is shutting down. The headline immediately caught my attention but it became clear in a matter of seconds that .. oh wait its April Fools and Google did it again.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite Google April fools jokes:

YouTube is Shutting Down

This year’s April fools is probably the best, read about why YouTube is shutting down

Space Analytics

Google imagines a future where sites will have visitors from different planets, and in doing so builds an analytics dashboard for space visitors.
PigeonRank

The secret of how Google finds relevant results revealed – its all about the pigeons!

YouTube Box DVD Set

Imagine buying every youtube video there is on a DVD collection with offline user interface and all - Click here to order ALL of YouTube

Mission to Mars

Some people at Google certainly have their sights towards the stars – Google and Virgin partner up to create Virgle – the first permanent human colony on Mars. Apply to be a pioneer now! 

Did you see our April Fools Joke today?

What are your favorite April Fool’s jokes? Spread the humor!

Gyaanexchange has made it possible for anyone to teach anything and learn everything.

Today, we’d like to share with you the next big thing at Gyaanexchange: Online classes.

Gyaanexchange online classes are a series of pre-recorded, short format videos that are organized into a chapter and topic structure. This format is based on research from some of the best examples of online learning delivery from across the world, and we want to make it easy for anyone to contribute.

Online classes are not, and can never be, a replacement for a real life class, nor should that be the intention of teaching online.

Why you should teach online?

1. A New Revenue Stream: Gyaanexchange’s online platform enables to you to monetize educational content, which means you can now sell your self created videos of you teaching a subject. Creating these videos is a one time effort that could generate multiple repeated returns.

2. Larger Reach: An online class will give you access to a massive audience of potential learners.

3. Its a new Medium: Online classes can never be like offline classes, but the corollary is true as well; offline classes can never be an online class either. The online medium lends tremendous value to the teaching and learning process. Here are just a few examples:

   1. You can break away from the monolithic one-hour lecture

      1. You can break up the material into short modular units of 8 – 12 minutes each of which can represent a coherent concept

   2. Students can go through your material in different ways depending on their background, skills and interests

      1. Some student might benefit from preparatory materials that other students may already know about

      2. Other students may be interested in a specific topic or concept as opposed to the entire course

   3. This format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education and puts learners in charge of what they want to learn, in what order and most importantly when.

4. Of course, as educators, we all know that students do not learn by passively watching videos. This medium allows teachers to focus on the more valuable aspects of engagement – feedback and assessment. Allow your students to learn online, but engage with them using the multitude of tools that the internet makes available – Skype (host virtual office hours), Google Docs (create tests and quizzes) etc. Very soon we will be building an ability to create assessments as well.

Gyaanexchange.com now enables you to teach your craft online. It can be anything under the sun, so long as it delivers a specific learning objective.

Here is how you can get started

• Create a framework for your class, give it a name description and tagline.

• Set the price of your class. Students will pay to get access to your video for a stipulated period of time, which is decided by you.

• Structure your module into chapters & topics to make it more appealing to your students & ready your videos for uploading.

Click here to teach your first video class on Gyaanexchange
Click here to view content which is available on Gyaanexchange.com

Starting now you can find over 100 hours of incredible video content on subjects ranging from Freelance Journalism to How to do PR for your startup.

Teachers have already started using our technology to sell their video content, here is what Meera Jain from Nurture Talent had to say about our platform.

” The Gyaanexchange team has been proactive to bring courses by Nurture Talent Academy to their learners, with seamless technology & customer support they have enabled us to reach a much wider audience through a one time effort. We are glad to work with Gyaanexchange and bring more offerings for Entrepreneurs”

As always, we rely on you, our most valuable stakeholders, to guide us and realize the potential of online learning. Give us feedback, tell us what you like and what you don’t – trust us every word will be taken seriously and acted upon.

Oft times a new technology or idea comes around that changes the world. An idea that disrupts the way we do things, causes a paradigm shift in our thinking and alters our behavior. It starts as an idea. The idea is laughed at, rejected and mocked. It is called unnecessary and its proponents declared crazy. But in keeping with the age-old adage – ‘nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come’, some people start accepting – a minority, the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. And then? Before you know it, it becomes the norm, a way of life, something difficult or impossible to live without.

Think about it. The wheel, the printing press, light bulbs, the internal combustion engine, television, the personal computer, the internet, mobile phones, tablets, social networks, online shopping and lots more. Each of these went through this cycle, starting off as crazy, seemingly useless ideas adopted only by a few eccentrics to becoming the convention in the way we do things.

Over the last decade the internet has transformed the way we communicate, shop, navigate, date, consume media and information, organize, pay our bills etc. I believe that the next area in our lives that is ripe for disruption is the way we learn. While there have been remote learning models that have come up on the past such as Britain’s Open University in 1971 that taught via radio and TV and the University of Phoenix that’s been teaching online since 1989, few have really had the kind of impact and success in terms of changing the way we think about education.

In 2004 a Bangladeshi-American hedge fund analyst by the name of Salman Khan began tutoring his cousin in Math using Yahoo’s Doodle notepad. In order to help more people he recorded and posted these tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity rose exponentially leading him to quit his job and focus on online tutorials. Thus was born Khan Academy in 2006.

In the 1990s, Lynda Weinman started recording computer skills tutorials on VHS tapes and selling them. Today Lynda.com has one of the largest libraries of computer skills tutorials online and has more than 140 teachers who earn royalties from them.

In February 2010, two Turks and one Indian-American had the idea of making on open platform where anyone could teach over the internet and decided to raise money for their idea. They were rejected 30 times as everyone thought it was a terrible idea!
So they bootstrapped and by July had over 2000 courses and 10,000 users. That was the birth of Udemy.com – The Academy of You.

Finally, in 2012 two startups at Stanford – Coursera and Udacity and one at MIT – Edx started offering university courses online known as MOOCs (massive open online courses). Today they offer a wide range of courses from top universities such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan and many more. The best part is – they are all free! Students pay only for certifications and exams if they opt for it.
Today, these 3 startups combined have almost a million users taking course from all across the world because of the simple advantages of convenience, access and affordability. Until now a student from a middle class family in Asia or Africa could not even dream of taking a course at Harvard or learning from the CEO of Yahoo. Coursera and Udemy have made that possible today.

The ability to sit at home whether you are in Miami, Milan, Mumbai or Mombasa and take courses from the best academicians and private practitioners in the world is revolutionary in its own way. Whether its pre-recorded video lectures and tutorials or virtual online classrooms, e-learning is here to stay.

There are predictions of many brick and mortar universities going bankrupt. Sebastin Thrun, the founder of Udacity predicts that in 50 years there will be only 10 universities left in the world!
While we can take Mr Thruns clairvoyance with a pinch of salt, these trends are certainly a harbinger of a tectonic shift in the way we think about and access education.

The author, Vishad Shanghvi is co-founder at Gyaanexchange.com

“Which PR tools and techniques should I adopt for my particular business model?”

If these questions are troubling you,  then its time you learn how to do PR in-house.

In simple words, PR is the process of maintaining and creating strong goodwill of an organization or individual in the eyes of all its stakeholders.

Remember, PR is NOT a substitute for advertising.

What are the differences between PR and Advertising?

1) Credibility: PR is a third party endorsement; a respected journalist or blogger recommending you or your company increases credibility.

2) Cost-Effectiveness: PR is a far more cost- effective marketing tool than advertising.

3) Goodwill: PR establishes strong goodwill and does not guarantee sales. Advertising is the hard selling of a product or service.

The Basic Steps of Successful PR

1) Identify Influential Writers
Read news articles and blogs relating to your industry and identify which popular journalists and bloggers are prolific in your area of business.

For example, a health start up will get in touch with a journalist/blogger who writes about health, fitness or medicine as opposed to someone blogging about education

2) Create a Master Database
An official email address can usually be found at the end of a news article.  Once you’ve created a database of these writers, get in touch with them introducing yourself and your company.

3) Prepare the Perfect Pitch note
This is the love letter that will pique a journalist’s curiosity. This note should highlight your product or company’s USP to make the writer get up think, “Ah! Now that’s worth writing about!”
For more information on writing the perfect pitch, click here

4) Be Proactive and not Reactive
Remember journalists receive hundreds of pitches and mails daily so make sure you follow up with them regularly without frustrating or overextending them It is this very approach that will differentiate you from your competitors.

5) Don’t Spam a journo
NEVER spam a journalist or send a mail with heavy images. You don’t want to get blacklisted before you have even started your PR campaign.

Finally, PR is like a marathon, so make sure you run the full course.

Next in this series of articles on Public Relations: “How to Build and Manage Media Relationships”.

The author, Dev Dave, has been a PR practitioner for 4 years and has handled reputed brands like Zee learn, Rediff.com, Fitness First, Essilor, Samira Habitats etc.

• Most schools didn’t see the value of technology in improving the teaching learning process, it was looked at a way to justify increasing fees charged to students.
• We were too small to convince one of the oldest industries in human history to think differently.
• The sale process was too long for a start-up to wait out (on average schools take 6 months to make a purchasing decision).

It was around this same time that we came across the term ‘Discretionary Education’. Simply defined, Discretionary Education is an investment in learning that is not part of a degree or certification program. It is becoming apparent that traditional education is beginning to fall short when it comes to equipping graduates with the skills they need, not only to be successfully professionals but also actively contributing members of society. It is primarily because of this, that we see a huge opportunity in this sector.

So we decided to take the same model that we were trying to implement in the academic space and open it up to discretionary education. Thus was born gyaanexchange.com – an online platform that served as:

• A catalogue with ratings and reviews for almost every kind of non academic learning related opportunity happening in your city
• A promotion, monetizing and community building platform for those individuals that had skills worth teaching
• A payment gateway to allow would-be teachers to enrol students that pay in advance and are thus committed

While we were building Gyaanexchange we also started thinking about using learning as a way to better market a brand or service. Both Vishad and I, being what our friends and family call us – Unpaid Apple Sales representatives – saw the value of a brand taking the effort of educating its customer rather than straight out selling. There are multiple benefits when a brand takes the effort of doing this, the most immediate being the direct one-to-one relationship that can turn a customer’s negative experience into a highly positive one that could even make that customer a proponent of the brand in the marketplace. (Read about Apple’s Genius Bar strategy).

We wanted to enable companies to engage potential customers through knowledge leadership – imagine a sports shoe brand conducting workshops to help you improve your running technique. How many people who attend that workshop would make their purchases from said brand? I’d wager that most of them would.

When you educate a customer you build rapport and this has become one critical use case that we are looking at working with brands and companies in the near future.

I think that all of us at Gyaanexchange are at a certain level inspired by the potential for change we can cause in society, we believe that if we do our job right we can help societies become smarter, help those that don’t have access to traditional education opportunities find a way to skill themselves in a way that is both affordable and convenient.

We live in a country where 85% of our graduates are unemployable, where highly talented and enterprising individuals everyday are overlooked because they didn’t have access to the highly limited availability of quality education resources. If we’re successful – we will level the playing field, and give everybody the chance to make it big on their own.

Since Gyaanexchange has launched we have been amazed at the incredible things there are to learn and are confident that we will be able to bring on board the best teachers with the most diverse range of classes anybody has been able to offer thus far.

Until next time.

Keep learning,
Siddharth Bhansali
Founder/CEO Gyaanexchange.com

The way contemporary education has evolved in India, and in most countries, is one where the pinnacle of education is a “technical training” in engineering, accounting, IT, finance, management, medicine, law and so on. I believe that this is a very utilitarian way of looking at education. It was conceptualised in the West to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution, where getting a job in industry with technical skills had become highly coveted, and therefore a system of mass education based around these skills was invented.

Before this, however, the perception of education quite different. Only the elite were were educated. In ancient India, for example, they were learned in the Vedas, Sanskrit, Philosophy, Literature and such subjects. Similarly, in the West it was knowledge of Latin, Grammar, History, Mathematics, Religion, etc that were the pinnacles of learning.

Technical abilities were transferred to young people by means of an apprenticeship with a mentor, not through a formal education. The purpose of education then was to create leaders and an intellectual elite to rule over peasants and workers, and maintain order in society. With the Industrial Revolution, certain professions started involving a large amount of complexity whose knowledge and skill needed to be transferred to the masses and so the game completely changed.

The world is changing at a dramatic rate where technical, intellectual and soft skills are considered equally important. We need to look at education not as simple training but an “intellectual journey of discovery”.

Engaging both the left and right sides of the brain is extremely critical. Although, the former continues to take precedence simply by virtue of being tangible and more easily measured, we must accept that a well rounded education involving both aspects of our brain leads to a better understanding of the world and in turn, a better chance at success.

The Importance of Technical Skills:
The benefits of having technical knowledge are obvious – they help us get better jobs. However, let us look at it from another perspective:

The skewed nature of our education system
A student of the arts — say of music or literature — has little or no exposure to the worlds of economics, business or science. This creates a huge gap in their understanding and perception of the world. Also, for example, the reason many top companies hire engineers today is not for their knowledge of thermodynamics but for their ability to break down a problem into logical steps and arrive at a reasoned and rational conclusion – a skill which may not easily be found in a person whose education has been focused only towards the arts.

The Importance of the Arts:
Why should a businessman or an engineer ever need to have a more than popular understanding of music, literature or have studied history? It isn’t easy to measure the benefits but, from the perspective of society as a whole, they are far greater than most people imagine. For one, liberal arts teach us not just what to think but how to think. They give us a deeper understanding of the world, the way people and systems act and behave and of the human condition.

Consider this analogy, to understand importance of liberal arts:
When hearing of a teenage girl and activist getting shot in Pakistan, a person who has had little or no exposure to the arts would simplify the situation by painting everybody from that area and culture as terrorists and fanatics and change the channel to the latest Bollywood hit or the Kardashians. However, a person exposed to a liberal arts education would have a higher chance of understanding the social, historic, economic, cultural and psychological circumstances that led to that situation and possibly be much more likely to suggest an informed long-term solution or even just think about it more deeply.

Further, the ability to understand and appreciate the poetry of Tagore or the art of Salvador Dali enhances ones power of perception and increases a person’s emotional quotient in a way that no technical training ever can. It teaches one to think not just purely form a utilitarian stand point but also emotionally.
Appreciation of the arts make us happier people. Which is why people flock for plays and music shows, derive great pleasure in reading books or painting or enjoy visiting beautiful cities like Paris and Prague.

Some of the most successful companies in the world like Google, Apple, Amazon and Infosys pride on innovation, critical thinking and aesthetic sense as keys to their success as much as technological expertise. They hire people from not only technical backgrounds but also those who specialise in languages, history, sociology and art.
In this new and dynamic direction that the world is moving in, there is no place for having only technical abilities or only artistic and theoretical knowledge. One needs to have both and soon it will not just be an advantage but a necessity.

It is my sincere belief that all school and college curricula must give equal importance to Science, Math, Languages and the Arts. In my opinion, it should be mandatory to have elective courses in subjects other than a student’s major. Engineers and MBAs should have to take mandatory courses in subjects such as history, literature, philosophy and so on. Similarly, Arts students should also have compulsory courses in Accounts, Finance and basic sciences.

The importance of a well-rounded education can be well summarised by the famous 19th century poem about six blind men in India who went to observe and learn about an elephant. Each person came across a different body part – its side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear, tail and concluded that this thing was very much like a wall, spear, snake, tree, fan and rope respectively. And then they argued with each other, ‘stiff and strong’. Each one partly right in his own way, but each one also wrong.
The poem ends with a moral…

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

(Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887))

The author, Vishad Shanghvi is co-founder at Gyaanexchange.com

Here is our take on the top 5 Winners of the “Rejection Criteria” – books which people have donated but will not be sent to the children’s NGO Goonj

1) Hitler Mera Baap – Aditi Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s foxy bombshell illegitimate daughter from his Indian mistress, a certain Bhagyasrhee is out to revive the Nazi Aryan legacy by destroying Israel. Action packed with James Bond like high speed car chases across the Yamuna Expressway to helicopter gunfights over the Persian Gulf this one gives Robert Ludlum a run for his money! Some of the notable characters that come alive are Aditi’s lover Atif Shalom, an undercover ISI agent and Tony Singh the colourful Head of CIA.

Set between Dubai and Dusseldorf, the book reads as if all characters are from Wasseypur. O Womaniya!

A dark tale of deceit, murder and betrayal Reema Bharati’s riveting thriller ‘Hitler Mera Baap’ is a sure shot page turner that will sweep the heartland.

2) Just friends-

A sensuous, compelling & contemporary romance for todays woman.

Though Josh simmons is freakishly handsome he has a hard time finding a date. However his “friend” Lynne farrel sets one up for him. Lynne suddenly finds herself very attracted to Josh & decides that she wants him all to herself. Ten points for guessing what she does next (Not!).. Yes murder, lust & paragraphs describing beautiful bodies pretty much sums the book up.

A MUST read for anybody who doesn’t wish to be “Friendzoned”

You’ve gotta love Mills & Boon.

3)“Golden Angel and The darkness of Midnight”- A beautiful book cover would compel anyone to purchase this book but who knew that it would mark the onset of a laughter riot for the reader on reading pages filled with grammatical errors.

Phrases like, “Ishan was stood besides me”

“Dejectedly I heaved a huge breath and sat on the chair holding my head”

“When I again opened my eyes arranging daring to see, it started disappearing”

“My heart was beating one twenty kilometers per hour and I could feel the thumping in the side of my neck”

The author Satyapal Chandra- A student of University of Delhi, originally from Bihar is already an author of five books. Latest reports from the UK have informed us that Wren and Martin are tossing in their graves.

4)Dangerous to love- The kind of book which would give a stiff competition to any Bollywood movie.  A lady in distress, her superman in action saving her from villains similar to those of Bollywood like Shakti Kapoor, Om puri etc. Like Bollywood this novel wonderfully ends with victory of Good over evil and the hero and heroine of the novel live happily for the years to come.

5)A year of loving dangerously-Mission Irresistible

This book is about Alicia Corbin, an agent whose mission is to persuade brooding SPEAR operative East Kirby to return to the field as her partner, who ‘invades’ her heart instead (Big surprise there). She was there to catch a traitor, getting emotionally involved with the stubborn and sexy East Kirby was not an option for Alicia.

The whole obvious turn of events and pitiful description puts this book into our Top 5 Rejection winners.

A definitive read for no one.