Intinno’s Paathshaala – A Web 2.0 Approach to Classroom
Intinno – is a web 2.0 startup aspiring to bring social face to an Indian classroom with Paathshaala – an LMS platform that brings administration, teachers & students together in a collaborative way. Paathshaala allows handling of assignments, sharing of questions & answers among students, notifications between faculty & students through email & SMS and other goodies such as access to resources like lectures, study material etc. which would bring student closer to the academia.
The app is designed in a modular way, in the sense that new requirements of individual universities can be added to the core structure of the application on case-to-case basis. Some modules such as one to detect plagiarism, another to auto-evaluate C-programs written by students form excellent assisting agents for faculty to ensure competitive responses from their students. 
While Paathshaala does have great value for Indian schools, universities & colleges, but lack of awareness & reserved psyche of the Indian market might pose a steep climb for sales for the startup as it would be possible only through typical offline meeting methods. More importantly, many of the big education houses tend to hire services agents which end up installing Moodlerooms, Blackboard, Sakai and other plenty LMS’s available in the market.
Joy Deep Nath, the co-founder of Intinno agrees that scaling their application would require them to introduce SAAS philosophy and open their application for signup & use in the global market. Providing a well hosted solution with cleanest of UI would be a critical differentiation for Paathshaala. Another good opening for Intinno to consider is to throw open development of “modules” by enthusiasts across the internet. This would do their product good, albeit with some gutsy decisions in the background.
Intinno has been funded by IIT Kharagpur’s entrepreneurship cell, and is now based out of Gurgaon, Haryana. Dear Pluggd.in readers, do give Paathshaala a spin & your valuable inputs too.
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Helloo
A Great Work.. Will check for holes soon
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
A collaboration platform for Indian classrooms – Sounds like a good idea. My concern is about the long term viability of the company especially since schools have to put their data in your system. You need to be able to build a trust factor that the company will be around for sometime. Using open standards and making the data portable to other systems will help mitigate the risk. How about using existing software services like Google Docs in the backend? This will give more flexibility to users.
Dear Kamal
What i think is making a product is a hell work.. and connecting it to another products of other companies is also another hell.. See people create product to simplify one task, so better if this is going to solve some problem, let it solve
And coming to security, service the people must provide a bond that they will provide service for a period of time. and coming to data security, each and every school management needs to know where the data is being stored and how it is getting protected. So that this will enable the knowledge in school management sector..
Lets hope a Web 2.0 government
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
Hi Kamal and Sai,
I am Arpit from Intinno. To answer Kamal’s concern, all data uploaded on Intinno is stored in a SCORM compatible format which is the current standard for storing e-learning data. And, so it is portable to any service of your choice.
As far as security is concerned, we use cloud base hosting and our servers are pretty secure. For schools/colleges who are too much concerned about their data being stored outside their campus, we provide and maintain offline installations as well. However, we don’t prefer that
Hello Arpit Jain
What an Idea Sir ji
( Dont take it to serious ). Well offline installations and providing service is a old ship. Yes i agree that you created the product with new technology and the every thing matching to your product might be storage, security etc etc will be from new technology only
Because when u thought to be big and new you will start with new only to make it big.
I congratulate you on this good task.. and let me know about the marketing issue, r u planning to have state wise marketing guys who can visit schools or collages provide demo and get them as clients OR open to all who sell will get commission amount?
Let us know..so that i might try a bit
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
Yes, I do agree that offline installations are not preferred now, but many colleges now have their own server centres and they prefer to host inside. For two reasons mainly : 1.) They are apprehensive of their data going out of the campus, 2.) Video streaming is much faster with an in-house installation.
Anyway, we provide support for both
Please send us your details and queries regarding sales at sales@intinno.com and we will contact you.
Hi Arpit,
The fact that you are using open standards will definitely boost your case. There is a lot of potential for cloud computing in the educational sector. I tend to think adoption will be slow but steady. Best of luck.
Great going guys!
great platform , adoption would be a concern. In todays day and age any webapp thats not as simple as twitter is a tough sale
The point here is the Indian classroom is already social in real time wit teachers and students , are we talking of a duplication of tasks online , again a great app for a virtual classroom when we get there
A students mind ‘I have had enough of my teacher at school why do I want to connect with em on a SN’ ?
Hi
I am in the same field. Students do want to access their notes on the fly and when I did the market survey its the staff who don’t want to take much of pain to upload the things..
However, things are changing and we are hoping for the best.
Thanks
Well I might have to disagree on that. We build this platform while studying at IIT and everyone(both teachers/students) used to love it for many reasons. Users have instant access to all the assignments, lecture notes, assignment submissions, grades etc. And most importantly, students used to have discussion over problems on the forums
Consider a class of 500 students (1st year). Its very difficult for a student to ask a question in the class and same way its difficult for teachers to address to each and every students query. These queries are pretty easily answered on Intinno’s discussion forum where even other students can help you in your problems.
Moreover, we successfully conduct test/exams on Intinno which helps teachers a lot in grading/evaluation.
Well Arpit,
See this product will rock. because as far as i know i didnt saw this type of product and will surely succeed in foreign schools or colleges if implement online video module
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
Schools in America & Europe already have such systems, infact, some that are probably even more complex and extensive. They also have online video modules, so that is no longer a market differentiator.
Argument of market differentiator doesn’t hold here because purpose of this service is not to compete with West but addressing basic needs of Indian market which have always been neglected by Indian entrepreneurs.
So who pays for the SMS alerts? Do the school/college pay for them or is it built into your subscription fee that you charge the school?
The product looks neat though from the screenshots. Good luck in cracking the Indian market. Its a big opportunity with very little innovation around provide services to this sector.
IITians lack ideas. They are good only as servants of foreign MNCs.
In addition to that, IITians also lack communication skills to converse with Indian users and understand their needs.
They make most of their little ideas by copying West but fail to talk with actual users(Indian schools, teachers) and improve, customize product to Indian scenario.
IITian’s should first come up with original ideas and stop copying Western ideas. This will happen when they put Indian needs and scenario at center of their thinking.