Rediff On The Net will focus on education
The Times of India, (Manoj Chandran), January 25, 1999

Come Republic Day, Indian students will have logical reasons while asking their parents at home and teachers in the school for permission to surf the Internet. After all, they will be able to solve their mathematical problems or rehearse the three laws of Newton.

On January 26, Rediff On The Net, our very own Indian e-commerce company, will launch its website with hosts of free services, exclusively focused on the field of education. This will cater to the needs of students, teachers, educationists and parents. Model test papers, online chat session to solve problems, career counselling and links to related sites will aim at attracting eager students to the site.

To start with, the site will have model question papers on various subjects for the tenth standard students of Indian Certificate School Examination (ICSE), which is present across the country. Four papers on each of the subjects have been made available on the site, which will have both objective and subjective questions and will be frequently updated with new questions, according to Rediff On The Net sources.

For the objective papers, students answers will be evaluated on-line and results made available immediately. However, since the computer cannot judiciously evaluate the answers to the subjective questions (for English and History papers), students will be able to compare their answers with the ones provided on the site, and thus conduct self evaluation.

For obvious reasons, model papers of Hindi, French and other subjects have not been included. After all, how many software applications do we have in the Indian languages? Moreover, the untrained students will find it difficult to use a language keyboard. For the geography papers, maps of various places have also been made available on the web site.

The site will allow students to chat with the teachers who have prepared the model papers and get the answers to any of their problems and enquiries on the respective subjects. "We will have new teachers on our chat list every week," says Rediff On The Net creative director Arti Dwarkadas.

In a phased manner, the company will extend similar services for other important examinations such as Central Board of School Examination (CBSE), Graduate Record Examination (GRE), Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT) and Common Aptitude Test (CAT).

The web site will also provide details on the various important examinations that are held nation wide for professional courses such as medicine, engineering and management.

The education directory of the site will have information for the students who wish to go abroad for further studies.

The site will also provide links to other web sites that contain information on various foreign universities and their courses, thus simplifying the efforts of the students to find the exact site.

The student services section will have tutorials, apart from links to the web sites of their schools and colleges. "We will encourage the students to use our free e-mail facility to contact their friends and teachers," points out Ms Dwarakadas.