In TARAgyan,s we believe that education is a two-way process. Learning happens at both ends—at the level of learners, who learn new skills and techniques and at the level of course developers and facilitators, who get relevant feedback to make their products more effective and productive. However, this approach to learning did not develop overnight.

When TARAgyan launched its first course, Basic Information Technology (BIT), in TARAkendras across Bundelkhand and Punjab in January 2001, we started off in a fairly conventional way. The courses were developed by experts and delivered on-site at TARAkendras by instructors trained by TARAgyan.

However, we soon realised that something elemental was missing. While our courses were good, and our customers were happy, this was not universal. Given that the educational backgrounds of students across the TARAkendras are similar, some TARAkendras produced better performing students and this had nothing to do with the learners’ capabilities or the hard work they had invested in.

The solution we hit upon was to design a training and monitoring system which would help us standardise the delivery of our courses as well as put in place an all-important feedback system to help us produce better programmes and study material. The approach we now follow is a combination of onsite blended learning led by local instructors and long distance support from expert mentors for both the learners and the instructors.

Over the past three years, we have developed a strong support structure in order to provide quality programmes to our learners. We have focused our efforts on building a powerful training and certification programme for our trainers and instructors, a strong monitoring and evaluation system for course delivery and an innovative assessment method for evaluating learners. We learnt the hard way that simply developing good courses and training instructors does not ensure success. It is also very important to keep a check on the entire process—from course development to its delivery to the end user. Therefore, we have developed a reporting system for the field. Reports are sent by the instructors to the TARAgyan coordinators in the field each week. These reports consist of student attendance, lesson plans, problems being faced by learners and instructors, etc. Feedback on the reports, as necessary, is sent by the TARAgyan field coordinator or the course coordinator (based at the HO in Delhi). These help the instructors grow and develop into better facilitators. It also ensures a greater involvement of the learners as well as the instructors in the entire process.

We are introducing a certification programme for TARAgyan trainers and instructors to maintain the highest standard of course delivery to keep our personnel up-to-date. Our monitoring and evaluation system has indicated that trainings and refresher trainings are useful in their own way, but more than that we have to keep our personnel motivated and challenged. Instructors and trainers would be certified annually under this programme and they would be evaluated at the end of each year for re-certification, based on performance in the past year as well as in the refresher training. To this end, we designed and implemented a three-day trainers’ workshop in January this year. The objectives of the workshop were to standardise trainings; sharing and learning from peers; and equipping trainers with tools to design and implement better trainings.

With this in mind, we graduated the Practical English Course (PEC) to the Practical English Learning Programme (PELP). We started out with one PEC course catering to multiple levels in 2001. Over the last two years, we felt the need for more than one course as we were not being able to address all our learners. The learners, with different socio-economic and educational backgrounds, have different comfort levels with the language. We, therefore, developed the PELP Foundation and the PELP Intermediate with plans for further courses based on learner needs.

The Master Effective Selling Course was developed keeping this very principle of application-based learning in mind. The course is facilitated instead of being taught and concepts are internalised through sharing of experiences, opinions, role plays and group discussions.