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Madan Padaki, CEO, MeritTrac, has brought the mobile assessment platform to India with plans to leverage the strengths of the mobile, to create a viable distance assessment alternative.

Could you elaborate on your tie-up with Learnosity?
MeritTrac, through its tie-up with Learnosity, is planning to bring the mobile assessment platform to India. This service will essentially target on leveraging the strengths of the mobile through convenience and reach. The service is distinctly different from coaching, as we are an independent assessment company and are not planning to involve ourselves in sourcing or training. The modules envisaged through this platform are to provide corporate companies with a recorded assessment option and to offer candidates a means to periodically evaluate their English communication skills on MeritTracs scientific English evaluation framework.

How do you plan to make the product accessible in remote locations?
The platform, in simple terms, is a combination of back-end servers and personal identification devices connected to users through cellular instruments. To use the product, candidates can use their mobile phones to dial a toll free number, identify themselves through PIN numbers or voice identification, and then take a pre-loaded assessment through a voice interaction. Further, these assessments are then stored on the server, and then independently evaluated. Candidates can then access their performance over the net or through SMS. This provides a lot of convenience to corporate companies or candidates in accessing assessments at remote locations in a fast and reliable manner at suitable times.

Madan Padaki, CEO, MeritTrac

Considering that a large percentage of Indians do not possess a high-end mobile phone, would the application be made accessible on any mobile?
The biggest advantage of this platform is that it uses only the core features of the mobile like voice communication and SMS, making it easily accessible. Its ability to be operable even with the lower end mobiles renders it beneficial for even tier-3 cities or for large-scale government sponsored talent upliftment programs in schools and colleges, which combine learning and assessment.

Mobile learning applications more often than not suffer from feedback issues. How do you plan to counter this?
Our objective has been to launch user-friendly technologies that solve a need in the market while ensuring a high level of reliability. Candidate convenience is the key to the success of any such platform and the mobile assessment platform in particular comes with a proven track record in this respect. Learnosity has successfully conducted assessments of this sort in Ireland in association with the Irish Education Service. Though it was implemented at a remote location with strained mobile accessibility, it met with huge success. This was also one of the drivers for MeritTrac to evaluate it for India. However, bugs are a fact of life with technology and we will be constantly working with Learnosity to mitigate problems.

What would be your business model? Will the services be offered free of charge or would you charge a nominal sum as revenue?
Corporates might be offered this as an assessment tool where applicants can access the test over mobile anytime, across the year. College students can get themselves assessed on a regular basis and find out their current level of competence in English for job-readiness. It can also be integrated into government programs as articulated above. The revenue models will depend on the mode of products and can include charges to user or enabler as the case may be.

With Aptech and other companies already in the mobile learning space, how do you plan to counter competition?
Since our offering is not related to learning but only addresses assessment, the above players are not our competitors. To our best knowledge we are the first assessment company to offer this solution.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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