The common cell phone, enabled with a unique learning and assessment platform has now become an educational aid that empowers the academia for the 21st century. Bangalore-based Ipomo, a technology start-up company, has launched India’s first mobile learning software called “interactive platform on mobile campus” (Ipomo Campus), in Karnataka.
“We want to revolutionise the education space. The need of the hour is to give institutes a technology that is simple, affordable and acceptable,” says Hari Prakash Shanbhog, founder and managing director of Ipomo Communications India.
Ipomo Campus seeks to facilitate active learning and also act as a mentor for students while simultaneously addressing the faculty’s need for handling internal assessments, student profiling, attendance and roll maintenance and consolidation of results.
So, how does it work? Upload the software ‘Ipomo Teachmate,’ which is awaiting a patent, into your mobile. Now you can download model and previous year question papers of various competitive exams on to your mobile phones for free. Students have to pay only for premium packages, where they can access question papers of certain training institutes. And “one has to just forgo a movie” to pay for this, says Shanbhog.
It took two years for the company to come up with Ipomo Campus. “We ran a trial run last year where we went to local and remote areas and conducted a mock mobile CET test for students. The response was excellent and we wanted to take it further, thus we launched it in a big way,” says Shanbhog, who quit the IT industry where he worked for 12 years before starting Ipomo.
“Institutes too have adopted mobile phones for conducting internal tests and monitoring attendance. The tests are of objective type and are held in the classrooms (two or three per bench) every month. Students will get to know the results immediately. The faculty can also access a student’s report on their mobile phone by simply entering the roll number.
In Karnataka alone, six colleges have adopted Ipomo Campus. “This technology is the future and we were able to integrate it with our system without making any major changes” says TL Shanta, director, Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni College for Women, Bangalore. “We are happy that this has the buy-in from students, parents and teaching community.”
“This technology is highly useful for students who are taking up competitive exams like CET, IIT-JEE etc,” adds Shanbhog.
— tasneem@expressbuzz.com