Education – a business proposition

Opportunities in education business in Australia and India

Indian Link has already covered the useful and much needed business conferences on education and training organised by Pradeep Khanna of Global Mindset earlier in the year.
His initiative of ‘Integrating Australia with Asia’ and building a community of like-minded people comprising of Australian and Asian entrepreneurs and business executives to do business in the Asian century is gaining momentum.
These conferences are helping Australians and Asians to engage with each other, understand the problems and attempt to solve them by customising the products, processes, resources, knowledge and skills that they already have.
For example, Australian companies have the opportunity to build large scale and size in their business by deploying strategies for serving large numbers in a market like India. The growth prospects of a company that can successfully achieve this innovation can go ballistic with India’s population being more than 50 times that of Australia. Tim Tams in India, anyone? Desi Vegemite? In fact, consumer businesses such as the coffee chain Gloria Jean’s and cookie chain Cookieman can be found in Indian shopping centres.
Pradeep Khanna’s initiative is helping to encourage Australian and Asian businesses to come closer.
The latest conference on October 29 specifically tackled the topic of using data analytics in higher education. Moderated by Tim Dodd, the education editor of the Australian Financial Review, IT and learning managers of University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australian Catholic University (ACU), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Government agencies such as Office of Learning & Teaching, Education Services Australia and consultants such as Deloitte Analytics presented their thoughts on how education is now managed with the help of data and analysis as large number of data points are collected and then used to improve learning outcomes.
Devin Fidler of US-based The Institute of the Future connected on Skype to talk about how education is changing. He mentioned how the best lectures are now on the web because of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). He stated how University of the People has aimed to bring a degree to anyone who needs it by offering bachelor’s degree courses for as little as $5,000 in America. Other examples of innovations in education  include:

1. Duolingo: Free language lessons.
2. Codecademy: Learning programming.
3. General Assembly: Entrepreneurship training.
4. Coursera, uDacity and edX: Free online courses offered by leading universities.
5. Lynda: Subscription based fee for hundreds of technology courses.
6. uDemy: Courses that can be hosted or taken by anyone.

Organisations such as Global Mindset, initiatives such as ‘Integrating Australia with Asia’ and communities such as TIE Sydney (the local chapter of the global entrepreneur community originally started by Indian professionals in America), have done much to help Indian professional and business community to benefit from opportunities in their adopted countries.