e-shiksha learning portal is too good, and too unused

I am getting more involved in Shiksha in general and e-shiksha in particular. Got a look at their site, thanks to the account my sister has (who is a teacher and hence she can have an account). It is indeed a very good site, but sadly, very underutilized. I guess it is a chicken-and-egg problem, since there aren’t many users, collaborative content in blogs and forums aren;t really there, hence it is not useful for users to visit them and post more. I also started talking to Mr. Narinder Bhatia who is program manager for this initiative in CII, and I agreed to act as their ambassador to get more people come to this site and use it, and many other ideas on how to improve the site usage. Overall, I was interested enough to go out and create a network site (http://shiksha.ning.com) which I plan to use as the place where interested people like me can meet and evangelize this initiative. If you wish to be part of this and help increase this awareness, please visit the site, and become a member on the site as well as on the mailing list. also, let me know what you think of this whole effort.

Shiksha for the masses

An interesting post on venturewoods about e-learning+social-networking: elearning for all. Seems to be a good idea, and good thing is that all the technology requirements for such a venture is available. However, that sets me thinking: can such a technology be deployed to make the masses learn things? In such cases, I always try to look for 2020 vision of our president (soon to be ex-), and I found about http://www.eshikshaindia.in/, a portal for e-learning exclusively for teachers, built using open-source technologies. This also turned up president’s speech on the occasion of its inaugration (here), which, as usual, is pretty insightful and refers to his 2020 vision. He again talks about the gap between people being churned out of the universities and people who are employable. It is scary to note that there are about 10 million youths injected into the employment market every year (7 million 10/10+2 passout looking for a job, 3 million after higher studies).
What are we doing to bridge the gap of employability as well as creating enough opportunities at this rate? What do you think can be done?

Giving Back to Society

I had a long post on venturewoods about what can be the effective means of creating a non-profit which will help in solving some problems (like education) and still can sustain itself without depending too much on fund-raising and corporate sponsorship. You can read it here. It was good to see people do want to do things in that area, there were lots of comments. I will be interested in hearing from you how you would like to contribute in such an area which will make a difference, what your way of going about it would be. If all goes well, I expect to spawn this into a seperate blog/mailing-list soon.

Where has business ethics gone?

I was travelling to India for a week (by flying on the weekends and working on the week), and among other reasons to travel was a very important reason: we were  hiring my peer in India organization and I wanted to make sure I am there when he joins so that we can sync up correctly, I hand over the responsibilities etc, and we start talking about future. Everyone else in the company (HR director, recruiter, VP E) had been keeping him engaged, counting down to his joining date, which was to be the last day of my trip.

The day before he was to travel to our office, he became inaccessible via phone, and things went downhill after that, and finally, on the day of joining, he let us know that he couldn’t join because of some personal reason! 

I was utterly frustrated, more so by the fact that even people for senior positions do not have the guts in them to tell the truth, as early as they can. Or is it the case of missing business ethics?

I would be interested in hearing others’ stories and their experiences in these situations.. do leave your comments or drop me a note.