In the wake of COVID-19 lockdown, the govt has imposed a lockdown across the country. The nationwide lockdown has put India’s education system in uncertainty. Students in India are facing multiple issues including incomplete syllabus, delay in exams, unavailability of study materials, lack of guidance and many more. Due to social distancing, learning through a classroom setup will be hugely affected. The crisis has led to a communication gap between the students and the professors. The only potential option left to overcome this hurdle is through E-learning platforms.

An IIT Madras startup, Melvano, is helping students pursue their preparations for competitive entrance exams like JEE Main, JEE Advanced and NEET. Melvano is an artificial intelligence-based learning app that is radically transforming the face of learning by providing adaptive practice interface for millions of aspirants in this lockdown.

This app has student-centred approach that guides students, based on their individual learning needs. It uses artificial intelligence to identify the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, based on which learners are given a set of important questions, solved examples and the study material for effective learning and thorough practice. Users can appear for a mock test or the ‘daily live test’ to gain experience of the examination environment and can keep a track of their progress with the help of the performance report available on the app.

Melvano’s CEO, Taran Singh, an IIT Madras alumnus said “India has an enormous lower to middle-class student population. It pains me to see parents taking burdensome loans with heavy interest rates, just to provide coaching to their children. Melvano was curated to tackle this very problem and help students achieve their dreams. The app is completely free for all students so parents need not worry about financial issues.”

 

“This year, a large number of students have opted for E-learning as the JEE Main & JEE Advanced exams are now completely held online. Since the lockdown, we are experiencing a 2x surge in the questions practiced on our app. Students are now getting familiar and comfortable with technology-driven preparations. Our app provides aspirants with personalized tools to help track their daily performance. The added advantage of E-learning is that it gives students the freedom to learn at any time of the day as per their schedule”, Singh added.

 

Singh also said “E-learning platforms also make it easy for parents to keep a daily track of their child’s performance as opposed to traditional learning, where parents are clueless about the day to day developments. Currently, many E-learning platforms are opting for Gamification to increase the student’s interest in studies. As students are experiencing the benefits and comfort of E-learning, I believe it will be extremely hard for aspirants to go back to their old routines once the Coronavirus issues subdue. Currently, Indian engineering and medical aspirants are around 5 million out of which 2 million students opt for online learning. Melvano had already got a good chunk of 5% market share, and aims to cross 1 million students by the end of 2020’’

Melvano, born out of Nirmaan Labs, IIT Madras, was awarded with the prestigious Sri Chinmay Deodhar Award by IIT Madras for the ‘Most Innovative Project’. The startup has raised Angel funding and is currently looking to raise another round of investment to scale their user base.

This year two Melvano students were in the Top 1 percentile of JEE Main, with Sarthak Diwan scoring 99.968 percentile (around All India Rank 200).

Interested engineering and medical aspirants can download the Melvano app by clicking here

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melvanostudent&hl=en_IN