Vlurn: The Online Training Platform with a Difference

Nov. 2, 2015 - PRLog -- Having worked for companies like Morgan Stanley, Edelweiss, IDFC, Citi, in the past, the founders of Vlurn quit their jobs to start a financial skills training company, Academy of Financial Training, in 2010 to answer their penchant for training. In this institute, they provided niche and advanced financial trainings for corporate clients through workshops. Since then, they have been constantly requested by their clients for online training programs, which eventually led to Vlurn in 2014.

India, which is the 2nd largest market for online learning after the US, will face a potential shortage of 250 million skilled workers by 2022. India’s online education market size is predicted to grow to $40 billion by 2017 from the present $20 billion. More than half of the country's 1 billion population falls in the target market for education and related services and has the highest growth rate in the world in self-paced e-learning.

Having understood the huge potential that this multi-dimensional country holds, Vlurn partnered with the best trainers and coaching institutes in India to offer a wide range of online courses including a lot of free courses to anyone who wants to learn. Within a short period of time since starting its operations, Vlurn, an educational learning portal, has become quite popular and is working with different companies to create a specialized training library for their employees from the existing courses available.

India, which has become the largest market for e-learning after the US, is also expecting a boost from the government’s budget of Rs 1.13 trillion set aside for the Digital India initiative, says a recent report by the UK-India Business Council. The country has more than 1.4 million schools with over 227 million students enrolled and more than 36,000 higher education institutes and has one of the largest higher education systems in the world. As of now the Indian education market is worth US$ 100 billion out of which, higher education contributes 59.7 % of the market size, school education 38.1 %, pre-school segment 1.6 %, and technology and multi-media the remaining 0.6 %. Vlurn is looking to contribute towards changing this statistics in the near future.

All the courses offered on the platform are categorized in the following buckets viz. Finance, Information Technology, Test Preparation for Entrance Exams, Art & Music, Languages, and other courses. Interestingly, finance courses have more registrations with Financial Modeling, Advanced Excel, Banking Exam Courses, Tally Courses, etc. being some of the more popular courses. So far, Vlurn has 1000+ registrations.

There are many types of courses that Vlurn offers which include the following:

·         Skill enhancement: Practical hands-on courses focused on enhancing professional skills in workplace

·         Entrance exam preparation: Preparatory courses for various entrance exams like banking, railway exams and so on

·         Hobby: Learning new languages, music, musical instruments etc.

·         Certification preparation: Preparatory courses for certification exams

Vlurn, though an online training portal, is radically different from others due to a number of reasons:

·         Firstly, Vlurn, unlike other websites, is completely focused on India based training programs. It has a lot of courses specifically for Indian markets in English and in vernacular languages. They already have a single course, Learn Tally ERP, in Hindi and Telugu that they are aiming to eventually offer in 6-7 regional languages

·         Secondly, India has few such platforms and most of them create their own programs. Whereas, Vlurn reaches out to offline trainers/coaches (who are renowned within their locality) and provides them the opportunity to create a solid online program that is offered on Vlurn and has a greater reach. The portal provides them with all the tools and resources required to create their course along with the best practices and analytics. It also reaches out to the target audience to promote and create awareness about the program. For example: There is a renowned trainer who teaches Vedic Mathematics in Hyderabad. On the other hand, there is a student in Indore who is interested in Vedic mathematics but cannot go to Hyderabad just for the classes. So, there is an opportunity here for the professor to create his online course and reach out to a larger audience. If the student from Indore enrolls in his course there is a win-win situation for both the student and the professor. Vlurn acts as the bridge between the two.

·         Thirdly, one of the main feature that most of the online training portals lack is social networking around courses, i.e. the ability to interact, discuss, network, etc. with fellow learners. This is one of the features that Vlurn is working on and plans to launch soon.

Founders of Vlurn have invested Rs 15 lakhs and have received seed funding of Rs 25 lakhs from an individual investor. It is now looking to raise Series-A funds (an undisclosed amount) in the near future for expansion of course, creation of infrastructure, and team expansion for product enhancement, digital marketing and corporate liaison.