Teach a lesson or two

There seems to be no better time to start an online learning platform. With online courses selling like hotcakes, 34-year-old Raju Vanapala has cashed in at the right time with his online education venture, LearnSocial. It is a platform where students, job seekers and professionals can learn through real-time interactions with instructors, enabling two-way communication.

Vanapala’s main objective is to bridge the existing gap between academics-oriented learning and skill-based requirements of the workplace. LearnSocial has partnered with around 600 instructors who are professionals from organisations such as Wipro and Microsoft. While the courses on offer range from digital marketing and robotics to art and cooking, the course fee varies from anything between being free to ₹20,000.

All one needs to do is log on to the website, find what they would like to learn and enroll for that course. The company sees around 3,000-4,000 registrations each day. The revenue arrangement is such that 50% of LearnSocial’s revenue goes to the instructors. “While these courses increase employability, professionals can learn from anywhere, anytime,” Vanapala says. 

Prior to this, Vanapala started the country’s largest messaging portal, way2sms. Going forward, Vanapala hopes to replicate the same success and wants his company to become the destination for learning. “We are also working towards building an android app. We want to be the Amazon for learning,” he says.